For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.
This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.
My parents were singularly uninterested in me. 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.
If the wave is getting bigger, it causes the time to grow a little bit. If the wave is trying to contract, it reduces it a little bit. So, you can see this oscillation in time on the clock.
I prefer really often to talk to high school students, mostly because I think they're the future for us.
All at once, funding was gone due to the Mansfield Amendment, which was a reaction to the Vietnam War. In the minds of the local RLE administrators, research in gravitation and cosmology was not in the military's interest, and support was given to solid-state physics, which was deemed more relevant.
