Joseph Weber

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).

Joseph Weber was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on 17 May 1919, the last of four children born to Yiddish-speaking immigrant 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.

Weber attended Paterson public schools (and the Paterson Talmud Torah), graduating at sixteen from the "Mechanic Arts Course" of Paterson Eastside High School in June 1935.

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 United States Naval Academy through a competitive exam.

He graduated from the Academy in 1940.

He served aboard US Navy ships during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.

Weber was the Officer of the Deck on the USS 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 mortally 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.

He studied electronics at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1943-45, and from 1945 to 1948, he headed electronic countermeasures design for the Navy's Bureau of Ships, in Washington, DC.

He resigned from the navy as a lieutenant commander in 1948 to become a professor of engineering.

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.

Building on his naval expertise in tube microwave engineering, he worked out the idea of coherent microwave emissions.

He submitted a paper in 1951 for the June 1952 Electron Tube Research Conference held in Ottawa, which was the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser.

After this presentation, RCA asked Weber to give a seminar on this idea, and Charles Hard Townes asked him for a copy of the paper.

Townes was working along similar lines, as were Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov.

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.

At the time, the existence of gravitational waves was not widely accepted.

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.

Although Weber was jointly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962 and 1963 for his contributions to the development of the laser, it was Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov, who received the 1964 Nobel Prize, "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser–laser principle."

In the 1970s, the results of these gravitational wave experiments were largely discredited, although Weber continued to argue that he had detected gravitational waves.

In order to test Weber's results, IBM Physicist Richard Garwin built a detector that was similar to Joseph Weber's. In six months, it detected only one pulse, which was most likely noise.

David Douglass, another physicist, had discovered an error in Weber's computer program that, he claimed, produced the daily gravitational wave signals that Weber claimed to have detected.

Because of the error, a signal seemed to appear out of noise.

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.

In 1972, Heinz Billing and colleagues at Max Planck Institute for Physics built a detector similar to Weber's in an attempt to verify his claim but found no results.

Weber himself continued to maintain his gravitational wave detection equipment until his death.

Garwin aggressively confronted Weber with this information at the Fifth Cambridge Conference on Relativity at MIT in June 1974.

A series of letters was then exchanged in Physics Today.

Garwin asserted that Weber's model was "insane, because the universe would convert all of its energy into gravitational radiation in 50 million years or so, if one were really detecting what Joe Weber was detecting."

"Weber," Garwin declared, "is just such a character that he has not said, 'No, I never did see a gravity wave.' And the National Science Foundation, unfortunately, which funded that work, is not man enough to clean the record, which they should."