"The remarkable gamble the National Science Foundation took with LIGO"

Rainer Weiss, MIT

Despite the fact that no one had ever measured motions as small as 1/1000 of a nuclear radius or that there was certain evidence for gravitational radiation let alone hard knowledge of gravitational wave sources, in the 1970’s the NSF began to support a new program in gravitational wave astrophysics. The visionary responsible for this was Richard Isaacson then Program Director for Gravity at the NSF. The talk is about how he organized and guided the process to make LIGO a reality - in short it is the history of LIGO.