Nobel winner key to world’s first gravitational wave discovery in WA dies

The renowned experimental physicist and Nobel laureate whose brainchild resulted in the LIGO observatory at Hanford in Eastern Washington has died.

Rainer Weiss, 92, died Aug. 25 in Massachusetts, according to MIT News. Weiss was a Massacusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus.

Weiss was born in Berlin in 1932, but his family fled Nazi Germany to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then emigrated to New York City, where he grew up.

He came up with the idea for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, which resulted in twin observatories being built on unused land at the Hanford nuclear site near Richland and in Livingston, La., according to MIT News.

The LIGO observatories confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity when they made the first-ever physical detecti