His interest in
general relativity led Weber to use a 1955–1956 sabbatical, funded by a
Guggenheim Fellowship, to study
gravitational radiation with
John Archibald Wheeler at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, NJ and the
Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at the
University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Weber then published his first paper on how to build a gravity wave detector in 1959, followed by a second paper the year after, and in 1961 he joined the physics department at the University of Maryland as a full professor, where he the same year set about developing a gravitational wave detector. His first detector (
Weber bar) became operational in 1965, and he began reporting experimental results in 1966. In 1972, he sent a gravitational wave detection apparatus to the Moon (the "Lunar Surface Gravimeter," part of the
Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package) on the
Apollo 17 lunar mission.
Claims of gravitational wave detection discredited In the 1970s, the results of these gravitational wave experiments were largely discredited, although Weber continued to argue that he had detected gravitational waves. In order to test Weber's results,
IBM Physicist
Richard Garwin built a detector that was similar to Joseph Weber's. In six months, it detected only one pulse, which was most likely noise.
David Douglass, another physicist, had discovered an error in Weber's computer program that, he claimed, produced the daily gravitational wave signals that Weber claimed to have detected. Dr. Weber had allowed for noise with random amplitude, but he had not allowed for random phase. Because of the error, a signal seemed to appear out of noise. Garwin aggressively confronted Weber with this information at the Fifth Cambridge Conference on Relativity at
MIT in June 1974. A series of letters was then exchanged in
Physics Today. Garwin asserted that Weber's model was "insane, because the universe would convert all of its energy into gravitational radiation in 50 million years or so, if one were really detecting what Joe Weber was detecting." "Weber," Garwin declared, "is just such a character that he has not said, 'No, I never did see a gravity wave.' And the
National Science Foundation, unfortunately, which funded that work, is not man enough to clean the record, which they should." In 1972,
Heinz Billing and colleagues at
Max Planck Institute for Physics built a detector similar to Weber's in an attempt to verify his claim but found no results. In 1987, Weber lost his primary funding after Garwin wrote letters to the
National Science Foundation where he suggested they should stop funding the project. For the rest of his life, he continued his research by raising funds on his own.
Discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO On February 11, 2016, the
LIGO Scientific Collaboration and
Virgo Collaboration teams held a press conference to announce that they had
directly detected gravitational waves from a
pair of black holes
merging, on
Rosh Hashanah 2015, (Weber's
yahrtzeit), using the Advanced LIGO detectors. During the announcement, Weber was credited by numerous speakers as the founder of the field, including by
Kip Thorne, who co-founded LIGO and also devoted much of his career to the search for gravitational waves. Later, Thorne told the
Washington Post, "He really is the founding father of this field." Weber's second wife, astronomer
Virginia Trimble, was seated in the front row of the audience during the LIGO press conference. In an interview with
Science afterwards, Trimble was asked if Weber really saw gravitational waves, to which she replied: "I don't know. But I think if there had been two technologies going forward they would have pushed each other, as collaborators not as competitors, and it might have led to an observation sooner." ==Work on neutrino detection==