Space is much stiffer than you imagine; it's stiffer than a gigantic piece of iron. That's why it's taken so damned long to detect gravitational waves: to deform space takes an enormous amount of energy, and there are only so many things that have enough.

The students on my course were fascinated by the idea that gravitational waves might exist. I didn't know much about them at all, and for the life of me, I could not understand how a bar interacts with a gravitational wave.

Many of us on the project were thinking if we ever saw a gravitational wave, it'd be an itsy bitsy little tiny thing; we'd never see it. This thing was so big that you didn't have to do much to see it.

Rainer Weiss Quotes