Weiss taught at
Tufts University from 1960 to 1962, was a postdoctoral scholar at
Princeton University from 1962 to 1964, and then joined the faculty at MIT in 1964. When Weiss's students asked him about Weber's work, he was unable to explain it to them, as it seemed to contradict his understanding of general relativity. In 1967, to illustrate the principle of gravitational wave detection in a simpler way, Weiss devised a thought experiment involving
time of flight measurements of light between free masses in space, which in principle required "impossibly precise clocks". About a year later, as Weber's claims remained unconfirmed, Weiss started to realize that maybe Weber was wrong. He eventually revisited his idea and replaced the clocks with laser
interferometry and concluded that such an approach could realistically detect gravitational waves, at sensitivities beyond what
Weber's resonant bars could achieve.
Vietnam Era cuts to science grants In 1973, Weiss was forced to pivot with his work as the US military cut funding for any science that was not determined to be "directly relevant to its core mission." Weiss wrote a proposal to the NSF that described "a new way to measure gravitational waves." This was the work that would eventually lead to his 2017 Nobel Prize, though it was many years before the interferometers Weiss and his students built were sensitive enough to actually detect gravitational waves, making for numerous unpleasant doctoral thesis defenses where Weiss's graduate students were unable to present positive (in layman's terms: any) results. After the study of prototypes at MIT, Caltech, Garching, and Glasgow, and Weiss's estimates what it would take to build a full scale interferometer, Caltech and MIT signed an agreement about the design and construction of LIGO in 1984, with joint leadership by
Ronald Drever, Weiss, and Thorne. In a 2022 interview given to
Federal University of Pará in Brazil, Weiss talks about his life and career, the memories of his childhood and youth, his undergraduate and graduate studies at
MIT, and the future of
gravitational waves astronomy. == Achievements ==