Joseph Weber

ethnicity = Jewish
fields = Physicist
workplaces = University of Maryland College Park
nowrap|Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
US Navy Bureau of Ships
alma_mater = United States Naval Academy The Catholic University of America
doctoral_advisor = Keith J. Laidler
academic_advisors =
doctoral_students = Robert L. Forward
known_for = Weber bars
Quantum electronics
Gravitational wave detection
Maser
Laser
author_abbrev_bot =
author_abbrev_zoo =
influences =
influenced =
awards = Guggenheim Fellowship (1955, 1962)
National Research Council Fellowship (1955)
Scientific Achievement Award from the Washington Academy of Sciences (1958)
Babson Award of the Gravity Research Foundation (1959)
Fulbright Scholarship (1963)
Sigma Xi (1970)
Boris Pregel Prize of the New York Academy of Sciences (1973)
Maryland engineering hall of fame (1988)
religion =


footnotes =

Joseph Weber (May 17, 1919 – September 30, 2000) was an American physicist. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors (Weber bars).

Early education

Joe Weber graduated from Paterson High SchoolFact|date=August 2008 (and the Paterson Talmud Torah) in Paterson, New Jersey in the midst of the Depression. He began his undergraduate education at Cooper Union, but to save his family the expense of his room and board he won admittance to the US Naval Academy through a competitive exam. He told his children that after taking the exam, his US Senator paid a surprise visit to his family home, "to make sure he wasn't Black," before nominating him to the Academy. He graduated from the Academy in 1940. [http://www.usna.com/NetCommunity/NC/History/ClassOf1940/W.htm#7]

Naval career

He served aboard US Navy ships during WWII, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. A memorable experience was his service on the "Lady Lex" USS Lexington (CV-2). Weber was the Officer of the Deck on the Lexington when the ship received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the Battle of the Coral Sea his carrier sank the Japanese aircraft carrier Shōhō and was in turn fatally damaged on May 8, 1942. Weber often regaled his students with the story of how the Lexington glowed incandescent as she slipped beneath the waves.

Later, he commanded the sub-chaser SC-690, first in the Caribbean, and later in the Mediterranean Sea. In that role, he took part in the invasion of Sicily at Gela Beach, in July, 1943. [http://www.usna.com/NetCommunity/NC/History/ClassOf1940/OnTheSea.htm] [http://www.usna.com/NetCommunity/NC/History/ClassOf1940/Wagenhals_Worley.htm]

He studied electronics at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1943, and from 1945-1948, he headed electronic countermeasures design for the Navy's Bureau of Ships, in Washington, DC. [http://www.usna.com/NetCommunity/NC/History/ClassOf1940/W.htm#7] He resigned from the Navy in 1948 to become a professor of engineering.

Early Post-Naval Career; Development of the MASER

In 1948, he joined the engineering faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park. A condition of his appointment was that he should quickly attain a PhD. Thus, he did his PhD studies, on microwave spectroscopy, at night, while already a faculty member. He completed his PhD, with a thesis entitled "Microwave Technique in Chemical Kinetics", from The Catholic University of America in 1951. During the course of his doctoral research, he worked out the idea of coherent microwave emissions, and gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser at the Electron Tube Research Conference held in Ottawa in 1952. [ [http://www.engr.umd.edu/ihof/inductees/weber.html Innovation Hall of Fame ] ] These ideas were developed simultaneously by Charles Townes [ [http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1964/townes-lecture.pdf Charles H. Townes - Nobel Lecture ] ] , Nikolay Basov, and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who built working prototypes of these devices, and received the Nobel Prize for this work in 1964.

Detection of gravitational waves

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. [http://www.usna.com/NetCommunity/NC/History/ClassOf1940/Wagenhals_Worley.htm] At the time, the existence of gravitational waves was not widely accepted. Weber was the first to make a real attempt to detect these waves. After he began publishing papers on the detection of gravitational waves, he moved from the Engineering department to the Physics department at Maryland.

He developed the first gravitational wave detectors (Weber bars) in the 1960s, and began publishing papers with evidence that he had detected these waves. 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. [ [http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/HumanExplore/Exploration/EXlibrary/docs/ApolloCat/Part1/LSG.htm Lunar Surface Gravimeter ] ]

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. [ [http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/contactsandpeople/harrycollins/early-days.html Early days in the Sociology of Gravitational Waves ] ] The process of how physicists and the general public came to reject Weber's claims that he had found gravitational waves is described in several articles and the book "Gravity's Shadow," by sociologist Harry Collins.

Legacy

Although his attempts to find gravitational waves are now considered to have failed, Weber is generally regarded as the father of gravitational wave detection efforts, including LIGO, MiniGrail, and several HFGW research programs around the world.

A satellite of the Naval Academy's Small Satellite Program has been named WeberSat-LARES [http://web.usna.navy.mil/~webersat/amos2.pdf] in his honor [ [http://cadigweb.ew.usna.edu/~webersat/ MidSTAR Homepage ] ] .

The Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation was named in his honor.

Personal life

Weber was the youngest of four children born in Paterson, New Jersey, to Yiddish-speaking parents. His name was "Yonah" until he entered grammar school. He had no birth certificate, and his father had taken the last name of "Weber" to match an available passport in order to emigrate to the US. Thus, Joe Weber had little proof of either his family or his given name, which gave him some trouble in obtaining a passport at the height of the red scare.

His first marriage, to his high school classmate Anita Straus, ended with her death in 1971. His second marriage was to astronomer Virginia Trimble. He had 4 sons (from his first marriage), and six grandchildren.

References

External links

*cite journal | author=Yodh and Wallis | title=Obituaries: Joseph Weber | journal=Physics Today | year=2001 | volume=54 | issue=7 | url=http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-7/p74.html | doi=10.1063/1.1397401 | pages=74 (Obituary)
*cite journal | author=Trimble | title=Obituary: Joseph Weber, 1919-2000 | journal=Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society | year=2000 | volume=32 | no=4 | url=http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2000BAAS...32.1691T (Obituary)
*cite web | title=Faces and Places: Joe Weber 1919-2000 | work=CERN Courier | url=http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/40/10/23 | accessdate=2006-02-26 (Obituary)
*cite journal | author=Glanz | title= Joseph Weber Dies at 81; A Pioneer in Laser Theory | journal = The New York Times | year=2000 | url=http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E5D6133CF93AA35753C1A9669C8B63 (Obituary)
*cite book | title=Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves
url = http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=HdP3Tscyr3AC&dq=Gravity's+Shadow | author= Harry Collins | accessdate=2008-08-01
*cite book | title=Einstein's Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time | url = http://books.google.com/books?id=7Fvwe6abGRQC&dq=Einstein's+Unfinished+Symphony | accessdate= 2008-08-01 | author = Marcia Bartusiak
* [http://www.usna.com/NetCommunity/NC/History/ClassOf1940/W.htm#7 Weber's US Naval profile]
* [http://www.geo600.uni-hannover.de/~aufmuth/JoeWeber.pdf Joseph Weber: An Officer and a Gentleman (in German)]
* [http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2768 Physics World obituary]