Weber, Joseph

▪ 2001

      American physicist (b. May 17, 1919, Paterson, N.J.—d. Sept. 30, 2000, Pittsburgh, Pa.), pioneered research that led to the development of lasers and the detection of gravitational waves. Weber was the first to articulate the possibility of molecules, in an energetic state, amplifying coherent light—the basic principle behind the operation of a laser. He gave the first known public address on lasers in 1952. Those who built the first lasers, however, were credited with the discovery and were awarded a 1964 Nobel Prize. The son of Eastern European immigrants, Weber originally spoke Yiddish but lost his ability to speak after being hit by a bus at the age of five. Upon regaining his speech, he had adopted his speech therapist's middle-American accent, leading Weber's family to nickname him “Yankee.” He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1940 and served in the navy, surviving a 1942 Japanese attack that sank the aircraft carrier Lexington in the Coral Sea. He left the navy in 1948 to serve as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he remained until his retirement in 1989. In 1951 he earned his doctorate from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and two years later wrote his first scientific paper, on microwaves. His work led to the development of the maser (microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation) and later of the laser. Weber went on to try to uncover a way to detect gravitational waves, which Albert Einstein described in his theory of relativity. The waves, said to result from disturbances in the cosmos, could alter the size of space and matter. He built a device that consisted of aluminum bars, weighing more than a ton, insulated against vibration and equipped with special sensors. Though he claimed that his device detected gravitational waves, creating a stir in the scientific community in the late 1960s, Weber was never able to provide conclusive proof of his findings. His early work in the field, however, has been credited as a direct catalyst for all subsequent efforts to detect the waves, including the creation of a $300 million observatory.

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