MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, a renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose groundbreaking work confirmed a longstanding prediction about the nature of the universe, passed away on Aug. 25. He was 92.Weiss conceived of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) for detecting ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, and was later a leader of the team that built LIGO and achieved the first-ever detection of gravitational waves. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 2017. Together with international collaborators, he and his…
