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Person

Rainer Weiss

A man with gray hair and glasses, wearing a light blue shirt and dark blazer, stands against a neutral background.

American physicist born in Berlin in 1932, who fled Nazi Germany as a child. In 1972, while teaching a general relativity course at MIT, Weiss wrote up the laser-interferometer detector concept as an internal report. He spent the next four decades shepherding LIGO from idea to working instrument and shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the first detection.

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