Nearly 50 years ago, Rainer Weiss dreamed up a way to detect gravitational waves—infinitesimal ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity. Last September, that dream came true as 1000 physicists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), two huge detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, sensed a pulse of waves radiated by two massive black holes as they spiraled into each other a billion light-years away.
大约50年前，雷纳·韦斯就想到了探测引力波的办法。引力波是爱因斯坦广义相对论引力理论中所预测的无限小的时空涟漪。去年9月，关于引力波的预测终于梦想成真，1000名物理学家通过激光干涉引力波天文台（LIGO）分别位于路易斯安那州利文斯顿和华盛顿州汉福德的两个巨大的探测器，终于在2015年9月检测到了引力波：十亿光年外两个巨大黑洞碰撞时产生的脉冲波辐射。
The discovery makes Weiss, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, a sure bet to win a Nobel Prize, his peers say. Weiss, 83, acknowledges the prospect with some apprehension. “It will fuck me up for a year,” he predicts as he nimbly steers his silver Volkswagen Beetle ragtop through Cambridge traffic. “That’s what it did to John Mather.” The line is vintage “Rai,” his friends will tell you: blunt, irreverent, funny, and impatient with anything that gets in the way of his work.
当时周围同事们说，麻省理工学院物理学家韦斯有很大可能因这一发现而获诺贝尔奖。如今83岁的韦斯，一边敏捷地开着他的银色大众甲壳虫敞篷汽车，穿行在坎布里奇的交通车流中，一边表示对此并不乐观。关于韦斯，他的朋友们会告诉你他是怎样的一个人：性情直率、风趣幽默，最重要的是，任何妨碍到他工作的人和事都会让他感到焦躁心烦。
By any measure, Weiss has led an extraordinary life. Born in 1932 in Berlin, he and his family fled the Nazis. He grew up in New York City, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a street-smart kid with a gift for tinkering who built and sold his own high fidelity (hi-fi) systems.
无论从哪个方面衡量，韦斯的人生经历都是极不平凡的。他于1932年出生在柏林，后与他的家人一起逃离纳粹统治来到美国。他在纽约曼哈顿上西区长大，作为一个拥有极强底层生活能力，还拥有鼓捣一些机械电气玩意的天赋能力的孩子，他成功组装了自己的高保真音响系统并售出卖钱。
As an MIT undergrad, Weiss flunked out, and he later struggled to get tenure there. Still, he established himself as a leading physicist and worked for more than 40 years on LIGO, one of the most audacious experiments ever attempted. He works on it even now. “He’s the best person I know with a soldering iron,” says David Shoemaker, a LIGO physicist at MIT.
他曾在麻省理工学院就读本科，但中途辍学，后来经过自己的努力在这个学校获得了终身教职，成为一名优秀的物理学家，并为有史以来最大胆的实验尝试——激光干涉引力波天文台一直奋斗了40多年，并一直工作到现在。“他是我所知道的电烙铁用得最好的人。”麻省理工学院LIGO物理学家戴维·休梅克说。
Shoemaker adds that Weiss’s foremost quality is empathy. A college dropout, Shoemaker credits Weiss with getting him into graduate school at MIT without an undergraduate degree. “He sought ways to bring out the best in me,” Shoemaker says. “He also took a rather irregular path, and I think because of that and just his nature, he is really interested in helping people.”
休梅克还说，韦斯最大的优点就善解人意。在休梅克的推荐下，韦斯作为一名没有获得本科学位的大学辍学生，顺利进入麻省理工学院研究生院学习。“他不走常规路，我想这就是他的天性，而且他是一个非常愿意帮助别人的人。”
Weiss is also known for speaking his mind. “He is absolutely 100% committed to honesty both in his physics and in life,” says Peter Saulson, a LIGO physicist at Syracuse University in New York, who worked with Weiss at MIT in the 1980s. Dirk Muehlner, a retired physicist in Alamo, California, and one of Weiss’s early graduate students, shares that sentiment. “He’s totally honest. There’s no bullshitting for Rai. There’s no performance.”
韦斯也以性格直率而出名。“他将百分之百的精力都投入了物理学研究。”纽约锡拉丘兹大学的一位LIGO物理学家彼得·索尔森说。二十世纪八十年代他与韦斯同在麻省理工学院共事。加州阿拉莫的退休物理学家、韦斯早期的一位研究生德克·穆尔纳深表同感，“他是一个诚实坦率的人，他不胡说八道，也不作秀。”他说。
Yet getting a fix on Weiss isn’t easy. An inveterate storyteller, he has clearly told his tales many times, smoothing the edges and burnishing the details. As he conjures up his past, little clues—loose threads, differing versions—suggest he’s not quite an open book. In fact, for Weiss, storytelling itself seems to serve some more subtle purpose.
可对韦斯来说，扭转命运并非是一帆风顺。韦斯是一个擅长讲故事的人，他会声情并茂地讲述他的人生故事。他将过去的种种细节，一些看似不相干的小事，贯穿在一起，松散的情节、不同的版本，表明他的人生并不是一本开放的书。事实上，韦斯的故事本身似乎含有一些更微妙的意义。
In his modest office at MIT, on the second floor of a brick building resembling an old warehouse, Weiss settles behind a small wooden desk with a gaping hole in the top. Before the advent of flat-panel displays, Weiss took a saw to the desk so that he could tilt back bulky computer monitors. In a staccato New York accent, he tells his tale.
麻省理工学院里，他简朴的办公室在砖瓦结构建筑的二楼，韦斯就坐在一个小木桌子后面，桌子上有一个大洞。在平板显示器出现之前，韦斯带着工具以调整笨重的电脑显示器。带着断断续续的纽约口音，韦斯对记者讲述着他的人生故事。
Rainer Weiss was born of a tryst between Frederick Weiss, a neurologist and scion of a wealthy German-Jewish family, and Gertrude Loesner, a stage and radio actress. While Gertrude was pregnant, Frederick, an ardent Communist, got into trouble by testifying in court against an incompetent Nazi doctor. The Nazis abducted him, and Gertrude’s family had to pull strings to get him released. The couple, who wed in 1933, soon fled to Prague, then in Czechoslovakia, where Weiss’s sister was born in 1937. Weiss says he was a happy, headstrong child. “I was probably an egotistical little bastard,” he says.
雷纳·韦斯的父亲弗雷德里克·韦斯出身于一个富裕的德国犹太人家庭，是一位神经学家，母亲格特鲁德·洛斯纳是一位女演员。格特鲁德怀孕时，弗雷德里克（热忱的共产党员）因在法庭上指证一名纳粹医生而招来了麻烦。纳粹分子绑架了他，格特鲁德的家人运用关系救他脱险。韦斯的父母于1933年结婚后很快逃亡到了捷克斯洛伐克首都布拉格，韦斯的妹妹于1937年出生在布拉格。韦斯说自己是一个快乐而鲁莽的孩子，“我小时是一个很任性的小捣蛋。”他说。
The family soon had to flee again, when U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed an accord ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany. They heard the news on the night of 30 September 1938, while on vacation in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. As Chamberlain’s address blared from the hotel’s massive radio, 6-year-old Rainer stared in fascination at the glowing array of vacuum tubes inside the cabinet. The hotel emptied overnight as people fled to Prague.
不久，英国首相张伯伦签署了一项协议，将捷克斯洛伐克地区割让给德国，这一家人又再次走上逃亡之路。他们于1938年9月30日晚听到这个消息时，正在捷克北部的度假胜地塔特拉山度假，当旅馆的收音机里响起张伯伦宣布的协议时，6岁的雷纳饶有兴致地盯着收音机里的真空管看。一夜之间旅馆里人去楼空，所有的人都逃到布拉格去了。
The family immigrated to New York City in January 1939, 2 months before Hitler’s Weh rmacht rolled into Prague. “It was a miracle,” Weiss says. Unable to pass the medical board exams because of the language barrier, Frederick set up a practice as a counselor and eventually became a noted psychoanalyst. Gertrude worked in department stores, as a housekeeper, and at odd jobs. It was an unhappy household. “My father was a dictator in the true German sense,” Weiss says. “He suppressed my mother.” Both parents blamed Hitler for their marriage, he says.
1939年1月，希特勒的军队攻占布拉格两个月前，韦斯全家移民到了纽约。“这是个奇迹。”韦斯说道。因为语言障碍无法通过医疗委员会的考核，弗雷德里克做起了心理咨询的工作，最终成为著名的心理分析学家。格特鲁德在百货公司里打零工。这不是一个很幸福的家庭，“我的父亲在家中独断霸道，总是压母亲一头。”韦斯说。“他压迫我的母亲。”父母都怨希特勒毁了他们的生活，他说。
Weiss says he grew up in an environment of benign neglect. “My parents were singularly uninterested in me,” he says. “My father was too self-centered and too busy with his own practice to pay a lot of attention to me, and my mother was probably deflected more by my sister.” He attended the prestigious Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on a scholarship—“My mother went over and pleaded for them to take me,” Weiss says—but he sometimes cut classes, and teachers compared him unfavorably with his older schoolmate Murray Gell-Mann, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969.
韦斯说他在“善意忽略”的家庭环境中长大，“父母不怎么关心我的事，父亲一切以自我为中心，整天忙着自己的事情，没时间理我，母亲可能只顾着我妹妹了。”他说。他进入知名的哥伦比亚文法预科学校读书，“我妈妈过去求他们收下我，”韦斯说，但他有时逃课，老师总让他学学年长的同学默里·盖尔曼，盖尔曼1969年就获得诺贝尔物理学奖。
As a teenager, Weiss developed two passions: classical music and electronics. Snapping up army surplus parts, he repaired radios out of his bedroom. He even made a deal with the local toughs: If they left him alone as he lugged radios to and from the subway, he’d fix theirs for free. “They would steal things and I would have to fix them,” he says. “It wasn’t a good deal.”
青少年时期的韦斯对两件事产生了极大兴趣：古典音乐和电子器件。他开始用淘来的一些零部件修理收音机，他甚至与当地的混混做了个交易：拿着要修理的收音机在地铁里来回，如果他们不来干扰他，他可以免费为他们修理收音机。“他们会偷东西，我不得不给他们修收音机，这不是个好交易。”
Weiss’s sister, playwright Sybille Pearson, confirms that Weiss spent as much time as possible out of the unhappy home. But, as the only son, he was still something of a prince in his family, she says. For example, whenever the family moved to a new apartment, Weiss got the biggest bedroom to himself, she recalls. “He was adored.”
韦斯的妹妹、剧作家西比尔·皮尔森说道，韦斯尽可能的在外面混，而不愿回这个不快乐的家。但是，作为唯一的儿子，在家人眼中他仍然是家中的王子。例如，每次搬进新公寓时，韦斯分配到的总是最大的一间卧室，她回忆道：“他是家中的宠儿。”
Nor was he a laggard at school, Pearson says. “He was bright and interested in everything and very smart.” Michael Wallach, Weiss’s classmate at Columbia Grammar, agrees. “Rai’s scientific abilities were widely recognized at school,” says Wallach, a psychologist retired from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, although he adds that Weiss really was a street-smart kid and once broke his leg in some sort of a tangle.
在学校他也不落人后，皮尔森说。“他聪明阳光，对一切都感兴趣。”韦斯在哥伦比亚语法学校的同学迈克尔·瓦拉赫也认同这一点。“雷纳的科学能力在学校被广泛认可的。”如今已是杜克大学退休心理学家的瓦拉赫说道，虽然他还说，韦斯少年时也常在街头惹事捣蛋，有一次在街头混战中弄折了一条腿。
If Weiss did cut classes, it wasn’t to hang out on the corner, says his son, Benjamin Weiss, a historian and curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “He was going to piano recitals at Town Hall.” At the same time, Benjamin speculates, Weiss was drawn to tinkering partly as a reaction to his family’s cerebral atmosphere. “This is a German-refugee kid with very self-consciously cultured parents, and he’s rebelling against them by doing things with his hands,” Benjamin says. “But he’s surely not rejecting doing things with his head.”
如果韦斯旷了课，他并非在外面瞎逛，他的儿子本杰明·韦斯说，本杰明是一位历史学家，波士顿美术博物馆的馆长。“他去参加市政厅的钢琴独奏会。”本杰明推测：部分原因可能是对家庭气氛的一种逆反反应。“这是一个德国逃亡者家庭的孩子，父母很有文化，他通过自己的一些行为反叛父母，但他肯定不排斥自己动脑子做事。”
If Weiss skipped cheerfully through his youth, he stumbled in early adulthood. He applied to MIT to study electrical engineering so that he could solve a problem in hi-fi—how to suppress the hiss made by the shellac records of the day. But electrical engineering courses disappointed him, as they focused more on power plants than on hi-fi. So Weiss switched to physics—the major that had, he says, the fewest requirements.
如果说韦斯快乐地度过了他的青少年时期，初成年时则挫折不少。他申请就读麻省理工学院学习电气工程，希望可以解决高保真度音响设备的问题，但电气工程的课程却让他失望，课程重点都是关于发电厂的，与高保真音响没有什么关系。因此韦斯改学物理学专业，他说物理专业要求最少。
Then, in his junior year, Weiss flunked out of school entirely. He fell for a woman he met on a ferry from Nantucket to Boston. “She taught me about folk dancing and playing the piano,” he says. Weiss followed her when she moved to Evanston, Illinois, abandoning his classes in midterm. But the affair fizzled. “I fell in love and went crazy,” he says, “and of course she couldn’t stand to be around a crazy man.” Weiss returned to MIT hoping to take his finals only to find he’d flunked out.
然后大三时，韦斯退学了。在楠塔基特岛到波士顿的渡轮上，他结识并爱上了一名女子，她教会了他民间舞蹈和弹钢琴。韦斯追着她到了伊利诺斯州的埃文斯顿。但他最后还是失恋了。“我坠入了爱河，完全疯了。”他说，“当然，她不会继续和一个疯狂的人交往。”韦斯回到麻省理工学院想参加期末考试，却发现自己已被学校开除了。
Weiss says he was unfazed. “People say, ‘I failed out of college! My life is over!’ Well, it’s not over. It depends on what you do with it.” He took a job as a technician in MIT’s legendary Building 20, a temporary structure erected during the war, working for Jerrold Zacharias, who studied beams of atoms and molecules with light and microwaves and developed the first commercial atomic clock. Under Zacharias’s tutelage, Weiss finished his bachelor’s degree in 1955 and earned his Ph.D. in 1962.
对此韦斯倒不是特别担心。“人们会说，‘大学没有毕业，我的人生就完了！’哦，不，这并不代表人生就此完结。这要取决于我们如何去对待它。”他在麻省理工学院的20号楼里找到了一份工作，这是战争期间杰罗尔德·扎卡里亚斯开展研究的一幢临时建筑，他在这里研究原子束、分子束和微波，并在这里研发了第一个商业化的原子钟。在扎卡里亚斯的指导下，韦斯于1955年读完了学士学位，并于1962年获得博士学位。
Other physicists say Zacharias’s approach to research—using high-precision measurements to probe fundamental physics— inspired Weiss’s. But Weiss says he owes Zacharias a larger personal debt. “He got me back into school, then he got me into graduate school, all with a very bad record,” he says. “I think that extends all the way up to tenure.” A photograph of Zacharias hangs on Weiss’s office wall.
其他一些物理学家说，扎卡里亚斯利用高精度的测量方法来探测基础物理的原理，这种研究方法给了韦斯很大的启发。但韦斯认为：他欠扎卡里亚斯一个更大的人情。“在我学业成绩非常糟糕的情况下，是他让我得以重返学校，并安排我进入研究生院学习。正是在他的帮助和支持下，我才能够一路走来，直到在大学获得终身教职。”他说。韦斯办公室的墙上一直挂着他的恩师扎卡里亚斯的照片。
After a postdoc at Princeton University developing experimental tests of gravity under physicist Robert Dicke, Weiss returned to MIT in 1964. As a junior faculty member, he says, he published little and didn’t worry about advancing his career. MIT’s Shoemaker says Weiss probably got tenure only for his teaching—and wouldn’t get it today. Bernard Burke, an emeritus physicist at MIT, agrees that early on Weiss was a “happy gadgeteer” who “wasn’t likely to get tenure unless he did something that did something.” But, Burke says, Weiss soon turned things around.
在普林斯顿大学的博士后期间，在物理学家罗伯特·迪克的指导下，韦斯进行了引力测试实验。1964年，韦斯回到麻省理工学院。当时作为初级教职人员，他很少发表论文，也没有过多考虑自己的事业前景。麻省理工学院的休梅克说道，韦斯能获得终身教职可能是由于他的教学能力。麻省理工学院名誉退休物理学家伯纳德·伯克也认同，韦斯在早期是一位“喜爱设计小玩意的人”，一个不太可能获得终身教职的人，但他很快就扭转了局面。
Burke suggested that Weiss turn his attention from gravity to measurements of so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, an all-pervading fuzz of radio waves that had been discovered in 1965 and that had been tentatively identified as the afterglow of the big bang, stretched to longer, cooler wavelengths by the unrelenting expansion of the universe.
不久韦斯就转移了兴趣，把注意力从引力转移到测量所谓的宇宙微波背景（CMB）辐射，CBM是于1965年发现的一种在宇宙间普遍传播的无线电波，当时已初步确定为宇宙大爆炸的余辉，随着宇宙的不断膨胀，其波长会拉长，其温度会变冷。
In the late 1960s that connection remained tenuous, however. Radiation from the big bang should have a “thermal spectrum” with a lopsided peak indicating the radiation’s temperature. At long wavelengths, several groups had observed a climbing spectrum consistent with a temperature of 3°C above absolute zero. But in 1968, rocket measurements found high amounts of shorter wavelength radiation that clashed with a thermal spectrum and threatened the big bang hypothesis.
然而，直到六十年代末，科学家对于这两者之间的关系仍然所知甚少。源自于大爆炸的辐射应该有一个“热谱”，不平衡的峰值可表明辐射温度的变化。几组研究人员在较长的波长观察到逐渐升高的“热谱”，与绝对零度以上的3°C相一致。但在1968年，火箭测量发现大量与热谱相冲突的较短波长的辐射光波，与宇宙大爆炸假说有矛盾。
To probe the matter, Weiss and his graduate student Muehlner built a device that would fly on a weather balloon and measure the microwave spectrum to shorter wavelengths. In 1973, after three flights and a rebuild, they had solid data that fit a thermal spectrum and for the first time revealed the telltale peak. “It completely destroyed the rocket result,” Burke says. “Among those interested in the microwave background, [Weiss] was suddenly one of their stars.”
为探索这一现象，韦斯和他的研究生穆尔纳制造了一种仪器设备，可安置在气象气球上飞上天空，测量波长较短的微波频谱。1973年，通过3次飞行实验和一次重新组装后的实验，他们获得了与热谱相符合的可靠数据，并首次显示出现峰值的线索。“这完全推翻了火箭测量的结果，在对微波背景感兴趣的科学家群体中，韦斯突然成了明星之一。”伯克说道。
Robert Birgeneau, chancellor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who was at MIT from 1975 to 2000, says that Weiss’s work won respect within the MIT physics department, too. “He liked to have the affectation of going to a working-class bar and stuff like that,” Birgeneau says. But “people looked up to him broadly at MIT. They respected his passion and his courage in going after really important physics.”
加州大学伯克利分校名誉校长罗伯特·贝格诺称，韦斯在麻省理工学院物理系的工作赢得了尊重，贝格诺于1975年至2000年期间曾在麻省理工学院工作。“在麻省理工学院，他受到人们的普遍尊敬，人们尊敬他对科研的激情，以及在真正重要的物理学领域内进行探索的勇气。”
The CMB study not only secured tenure for Weiss, but also propelled him to a leading role in the broader scientific community. In 1976, NASA began work on its Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, and the project’s scientific working group elected Weiss chair.
对宇宙微波背景研究的成就不仅让韦维斯获得了大学终身教职，也促使他在科学界更广泛的领域内起到主导作用。1976年，美国国家航空航天局计划开展宇宙背景探测器（COBE）卫星的项目，这一项目的科学工作小组推举韦斯为带头人。
Launched in 1989, COBE measured the spectrum of the microwaves with exquisite precision, proving beyond doubt that the CMB has a thermal spectrum. It also sensed tiny 1-part-in-100,000 variations in the CMB’s temperature from point to point on the sky—traces of infinitesimal quantum fluctuations in the newborn universe that are essential to the standard model of cosmology. In 2006, Americans John Mather and George Smoot shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for, respectively, measuring the spectrum and detecting the fluctuations.
该项目于1989年正式启动，COBE精确测量了微波频谱，确切证明宇宙微波背景（CMB）是有热谱的，探测到天空中从某个点到某个点CMB的十万分之一的微小温度变化，即新生的宇宙中微小量子波动的痕迹，这是宇宙学标准模型的基本。2006年，美国人约翰·马瑟和乔治·斯穆特分别因测量宇宙微波背景的黑体形式和各向异性而分享了诺贝尔物理学奖。
Some physicists say Weiss should have shared that award. “It was a near miss,” Syracuse’s Saulson says. Nevertheless, Weiss’s contributions to COBE show he excelled in a role for which he says he’s badly suited: leader of a large scientific effort. “He’s a good collaborator,” says Mather, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “He’s also good at deciding who should do what and making sure that people get the credit they deserve.”
一些物理学家认为韦斯应该共享这个奖项。“他与诺奖擦肩而过。”锡拉丘兹大学的索尔森说。但韦斯自己认为，他虽然在自己擅长的领域内对COBE做出一些贡献，但并不适合于领导一个大的科学项目。“他是一个很好的合作者。他还是一个知人善任的人，知道如何发挥每个人的特长。”在马里兰州美国宇航局戈达德太空中心工作的马瑟说。
Long before COBE, during his wayward untenured days, Weiss hatched the idea that would become LIGO. In the late 1960s, the MIT physics department asked him to teach a graduate course on general relativity. “I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t know any general relativity,” he says. So, striving to stay one step ahead of his students, Weiss focused on experimental tests of gravity.
在宇宙背景探测器（COBE）出现很久之前，在他担任非终身职位期间，韦斯就已经开始酝酿建立激光干涉引力波天文台（LIGO）的想法。1960年代末，麻省理工学院物理系想请他教授关于广义相对论的研究生课程时，“我不能对他们说，我对于广义相对论一无所知。” 他说。因此，他努力比他的学生领先一步，专注于引力的实验测试。
Weiss’s students asked him to discuss experiments in which Joseph Weber, an engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park, was trying to detect gravitational waves using aluminum cylinders the size of a footlocker. General relativity states that massive objects—such as two black holes—spiraling together should radiate ripples in spacetime. Weber argued that those ripples— gravitational waves—would stretch his cylinders and make them vibrate like tuning forks. In 1969, he would claim a discovery of the waves, which others couldn’t reproduce.
马里兰大学帕克分校的工程师约瑟夫·韦伯试图用一个军用提箱大小的铝棒来探测引力波，韦斯的学生就这个实验向韦斯请教。广义相对论指出：较大的天体，例如两个黑洞，在旋转碰撞时会产生时空涟漪。韦伯认为，这些时空涟漪，即引力波会拉伸他的圆棒，令它们像音叉一样产生振动。1969年，他声称发现了引力波，但别人无法复制他的实验。
Weiss couldn’t grasp Weber’s method, so he invented his own, based on an L-shaped device called an interferometer. It splits a laser beam and sends the two beams down perpendicular “arms.” The beams reflect off mirrors and race back to the beam splitter. If the arms are precisely the same length, the light waves return in sync and recombine so that light flows back toward the laser. But if the arms differ by a sliver of the light’s wavelength, then the out-of-kilter overlap sends some light leaking out a perpendicular “dark port.”
韦斯也无法掌握韦伯的方法，因此他发明了自己的方法，一个称为干涉仪的L型装置，它将一束激光分别发送到干涉仪的垂直两臂，激光束从反射镜同步反射回激光束分裂器。如果两臂长度完全相同，光波同步返回，两束光是相消的，光子探测器上不会有光信号。但当有引力波从垂直方向进入之后，会拉伸其中一臂，压缩另一臂，从而导致两束光的光程差发生变化，原先相干相消的条件被破坏，探测器端的光强就会有变化，由此获得引力波信号。
Weiss realized that output could reveal a passing gravitational wave, which generally would stretch the arms by different amounts. He let the class chew on the idea in homework and wrote a 23-page report in the quarterly newsletter of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. LIGO sprouted from that document.
韦斯意识到：如果信号输出揭示有引力波经过，将会导致两臂长度出现差异。他让他班上的学生以这个想法为作业题，发挥他们的想象力。韦斯为此写了一份长达23页的报告，发表在麻省理工学院电子研究实验室的季刊上，激光干涉引力波天文台的设想就从这篇报告开始萌芽。
Weiss insists the concept of an interferometric detector was already “floating around.” But others say he was the first to spell out that the detector would have to be kilometers long and to describe how to deal with the various types of noise—from seismic vibrations to the pinging of individual photons on the mirrors—that could drown out the elusive waves.
韦斯坚称，当时干涉仪探测器的理念已经“普遍流传”。但其他人认为，韦斯是第一个提出探测器可以长达数公里，也是第一个描述如何处理各种类型噪音的人，例如，地震和单个光子对镜子的撞击声等，都有可能淹没难以捉摸的引力波信号。
Making the experiment a reality required mind-boggling technological feats. The twin LIGO interferometers have arms 4 kilometers long. To detect a gravitational wave, physicists must compare the arms’ lengths to within 1/10,000 the width of a proton. Approval to build the $300 million project did not come until 1994, 22 years later.
要将实验付之于实现需要的各种技术的难度令人难以置信。LIGO干涉仪的双臂长达4千米，以探测引力波，物理学家还必须将臂长与质子直径的1/10000进行比较。另外，这个达3亿美元的项目直到22年后的1994年才正式获得批准。
In the meantime, Weiss became a fixture in Building 20, identifiable by the corncob pipes he smoked until he suffered a mild heart attack in 1995. He would work until 2 a.m., says Nergis Mavalvala, a LIGO physicist at MIT who was Weiss’s graduate student from 1990 to 1997, and would stay even later to help a student. When Mavalvala failed her qualifying exams, Weiss had her attend “reform school” in his office every Saturday for weeks. “He didn’t give a damn about the exams,” Mavalvala says. “But he knew that I had to get past them.”
这段时间里，韦斯一直坚守在20号楼里搞研究，直到1995，他出现轻微心脏病。他经常工作到凌晨两点，麻省理工学院的一位LIGO物理学家内加尔·玛瓦尔瓦拉说道。从1990年到1997年，她一直是韦斯手下的一名研究生，并得到了韦斯的极大帮助。当玛瓦尔瓦拉未通过资格考试时，韦斯每个周六都在他的办公室里为她“开小灶”补课，坚持了几个星期。“他并不怎么在乎考试成绩，但他知道我必须通过考试。”玛瓦尔瓦拉说。
Weiss earned a reputation for lending nontraditional students a helping hand. In 1983, Lyman Page, who had been out of school for 5 years and had spent 2 years sailing around the world, walked into Weiss’s lab and asked whether he could work for him. “He said ‘I can’t pay you, but you can work in the lab,’” Page says. “So I worked as a carpenter during the day and in the lab at night.” Page, now a cosmologist at Princ eton, credits Weiss for giving him a chance that others did not.
韦斯为非传统意义上的好学生伸出援助之手，这为他赢得了良好的声誉。1983年，离开学校已经5年、并花了两年时间环游世界的莱曼·佩奇走进了韦斯的实验室，问是否可以为他工作。他说，“你可以在实验室工作，但我不会付你工资。”佩奇说道，“于是我白天做木匠活维持生计，晚上在实验室里工作。”佩奇如今已成为一名宇宙学家，他非常感谢韦斯当年给予他的机会，一个其他人不可能给他的机会。
A functioning workaholic, Weiss enjoyed a full life outside the lab, too. In 1959, he married Rebecca Young, a recently graduated biology student working at the Harvard University Herbaria. The two frequented the same diner, says Rebecca, a retired children’s librarian. “One evening he asked me to pass the salt and we started having this big conversation about photosynthesis,” she says. “After we had been married for years it occurred to me that he never puts salt on anything.”
韦斯在实验室里是一个工作狂，走出实验室也拥有一份完整的人生。1959年，他与不久前毕业的生物学系学生、在哈佛大学植物标本室工作的丽贝卡·扬结婚。如今已退休的儿童图书馆管理员丽贝卡回忆说，当年他们两个经常出现在同一家餐厅里，“一天晚上，他请我帮他递一下盐，然后我们开始了关于光合作用的长谈。”她说，“但在我们结婚多年后，我发现他从来没有在任何食物里再加盐的习惯。”
Rebecca says she was often a “physics widow,” especially in the 1960s and 70s, when Weiss would travel to Palestine, Texas, to launch his balloon experiments. Still, she says, he was a devoted husband and father. Even when he was away “there was always a lifeline,” she says. On Sundays Weiss would take his children to the lab, says Sarah Weiss, the couple’s daughter, now an ethnomusicologist at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. “I never felt that I didn’t have the access that I needed or hoped for,” she says.
丽贝卡说韦斯经常不在家，尤其是在二十世纪六十年代和七十年代，韦斯经常离家去德克萨斯州的帕勒斯坦搞他的气球实验。不过她说，韦斯仍然不失为一个称职的丈夫和父亲。即使他不常在家，他还是与家里“有一条血脉相连的线。”她说。韦斯星期天会带着孩子去实验室，他们的女儿莎拉·韦斯说道，她如今是耶鲁-新加坡国立大学学院的一位民族音乐学家，“我从来没有觉得我缺少我需要和渴望的父爱。”她说。
Through it all, Weiss has had music. “Music is a big factor in his life,” Rebecca says. Weiss says he started playing the piano at 20, when the woman he failed to win started teaching him. He plays for an hour every evening, favoring classical composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, on a Steinway baby grand in the living room of the couple’s two-story Victorian in Newton, Massachusetts. “He goes in there at 8 o’clock and he shuts all the doors,” Rebecca says. “He thinks I can’t hear him.”
音乐伴随着韦斯一路走来。“音乐是他人生的一个重要组成部分。”丽贝卡说。韦斯说他从20岁就开始学弹钢琴，在夫妇俩居住的马萨诸塞州的一幢两层楼房里，每天晚上他都会在客厅的一架小型钢琴上练习一个小时，他特别喜欢一些古典作曲家，如莫扎特、贝多芬、舒伯特等。“他八点钟进到那里，然后关上所有的门。”丽贝卡说，“他还以为我听不到他的钢琴声呢。”
Weiss insists that even after 63 years of practice, he isn’t very good. “My technique sucks,” he says. “You will recognize the piece I play, but you won’t be satisfied.”
韦斯说，即使练了63年的钢琴，他的琴技却不怎么样。“我的琴技是很差劲的。”他说，“你可以分辨得出我演奏的是哪首曲子，但对我的琴技你一定不会恭维。”
Now, Weiss’s tranquil life seems sure to be upended, as physicists expect him to share the Nobel Prize, if not this year, then the next. Since the LIGO team announced their discovery in February, he and LIGO cofounders Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and Ronald Drever, retired from Caltech, have already won several prizes: the Special Breakthrough Award, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. “To tell you the truth, these prizes give me the willies,” says Weiss, who adds that he plans to use 90% of the award money to help graduate students.
如今看来，韦斯的宁静生活注定会被打破，物理学家预计他有分享诺贝尔奖的希望，如果今年不行，那么会是下一年。自从LIGO团队于2月份宣布了发现引力波的消息以来，韦斯和LIGO的共同创建者、加州理工学院的基普·索恩和已从加州理工学院退休的罗纳德·德雷佛，都已经获得了多个奖项：特别科学突破奖、格鲁伯宇宙学奖、邵逸夫天文学奖、科维理天体物理学奖。“说真的，这么多奖项让我心里很不安。”韦斯说道，他打算将所得奖金的90%用于帮助研究生。
Weiss’s humility, expressed in the many stories in which he is never the hero, is striking. “He’s a very modest person,” his friend Wallach says. “That’s part of his charm.” But Weiss’s compulsive storytelling also seems to serve some deeper purpose, as becomes clear in what he calls “this famous story”: how he fell in love and flunked out of college.
关于韦斯的许多故事都体现了他的谦逊态度，给人留下了深刻的印象。“他是一个非常谦虚的人，这是他人格魅力的一部分。”他的朋友瓦拉赫说道。但韦斯自己讲述的故事，关于他的爱情生活，关于他在大学辍学的经历，似乎也给人们带来了一些更深层次的思索。
The conversation circles back to the incident a couple times. At first, it seems simple enough. Weiss falls in love, comes on too strong, and scares the girl away. On the second pass, however, Weiss says that he wasn’t more of a lover than the woman could handle, but less than she wanted. “I had made a goddess out of her, and you don’t touch a goddess,” he says. “She wanted something more.” But that version soon fades, too. Asked whether he was popular as a young man, Weiss responds, “I wasn’t unpopular. I didn’t have any trouble getting girls.” When it came to love, Weiss says, “I had the experience.”
话题又回到韦斯的爱情生活。起初，一些似乎都很简单。韦斯坠入了爱河，但他猛烈的爱情攻势却把女孩给吓跑了。第二次恋爱韦斯吸取了教训，“我将她视为女神，而一个女神是不容触犯的，但她索求更多的东西。”因此，这次恋爱很快也无疾而终。当问及他那时是不是一个有魅力的年轻人时，韦斯回答说，“我没有那么大的魅力，但我也不会为情感所困。”
Wallach remembers it all differently. When Weiss was in his early 20s he fell in love with his piano teacher, a woman in her 30s. Wallach recalls that Weiss spent most of his time at his teacher’s house. “She was, not surprisingly, very taken with him and wanted to marry him,” Wallach says. Too young to marry, Weiss broke it off, he says.
但瓦拉赫所记得的与韦斯说的有些不同。韦斯在20多岁时爱上了他的钢琴老师，一个30岁的女子。瓦拉赫回忆说，韦斯大多数时间都呆在钢琴老师的屋子里，而她也很想嫁给他，但韦斯太年轻，不想那么早结婚，于是韦斯提出了分手。
Weiss’s sister questions how much any of it had to do with his failing out of college. “At that age that’s rebellion,” Pearson says. “And from the family we came from, what’s the way to do it? You drop out of school.”
他的妹妹质疑这次失败的恋爱对韦斯大学辍学事件有多大影响。“那个年龄的年轻人处于反叛期，像我们这样家庭出身的孩子，他会怎么做？那就是退学。”他的妹妹皮尔森说。
The specifics of the decades-old affair matter far less than the way Weiss tells the story. He revels in changing the details, revealing a little more each time. But he never explains exactly what happened, how he really felt, or why he tells the story in the first place. Perhaps that is the point.
当年的细节，在几十年后的今天都已渐渐淡去。有些细节会有出入，有的细节会多出一些东西来。但他从不解释究竟发生了什么，以及他真正的感受，或者为什么他会首先告诉我们这个故事。也许这才是关键。
LIGO, Weiss’s brainchild, proved beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of black holes, the intense gravitational fields left by stars that collapse to infinitesimal points. Within a certain distance of that point—beyond the event horizon—gravity grows so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. In telling his tales, Weiss seems to create his own personal event horizon, a charming screen of words and anecdotes behind which he conceals his deeper self. For all his storytelling, Weiss remains a deeply private person.
LIGO是韦斯的创意，它排除了合理怀疑，证明黑洞的存在，证实了恒星塌缩成无限小的点而留下的强引力场。在那个点的某个距离之内，即在事件视界之外，引力变得如此之强，任何东西都无法逃离，甚至是光也无法从中逃逸。在讲述他的故事时，韦斯似乎是在创建自己的个人视界，在引人入胜的话语和前尘往事的回首后面，隐藏着一个更深层次的自己。尽管他面对记者讲述了自己的故事，但韦斯仍然是一个非常自我的人。
At the couple’s house, Rebecca explains how, tinkering as always, Weiss has rigged a computer monitor to magnify his sheet music to compensate for his weakening sight. At her insistence, Weiss shows how the system works. In the living room stands his aging Steinway baby grand, the gloss finish worn to matte, the wood showing through at the corners, the top piled with sheet music. A flatpanel screen on makeshift gimbaled mount displays the enlarged music—a Beethoven sonata?—the 16th notes running up and down like staircases. The keyboard beckons.
在韦斯夫妇的家里，丽贝卡解释着韦斯是如何使用电脑显示器来放大他的乐谱，这可以弥补他逐渐衰退的视力。客厅的角落里放着一架年代久远的小型钢琴，表面光泽已被磨损，边角上已显露出木质材料，钢琴上堆满了乐谱。用支架固定的一个平面屏幕上显示着放大的乐章——贝多芬的一首奏鸣曲？上下翻飞的十六分音符就像楼梯。键盘等着他去弹奏。
“No,” Weiss says. “I won’t play.”
“不，我不弹钢琴了。”韦斯说。
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