{"id":1095,"date":"2017-10-04T10:09:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T23:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/10\/04\/another-nobel-prize-winner-with-the-knack\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T10:50:48","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T00:50:48","slug":"another-nobel-prize-winner-with-the-knack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2017\/10\/04\/another-nobel-prize-winner-with-the-knack\/","title":{"rendered":"ANOTHER Nobel Prize Winner with THE KNACK"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/div>\n

When I heard that the guys who ran the LIGO gravitation wave experiment won this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, something told me that at least one of those involved in this historic detection of weak distant signals would have THE KNACK. It did not take me long to confirm this. Rainer Weiss (above) definitely has had the THE KNACK all his life. And what an interesting life it is. Check it out:<\/b>
http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/news\/2016\/08\/meet-college-dropout-who-invented-gravitational-wave-detector<\/b><\/a>

<\/b> Knackish excerpts: <\/b>

<\/b> The family soon had to flee again, when U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed an accord ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany. They heard the news on the night of 30 September 1938, while on vacation in the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia. As Chamberlain\u2019s address blared from the hotel\u2019s massive radio, 6-year-old Rainer stared in fascination at the glowing array of vacuum tubes inside the cabinet. The hotel emptied overnight as people fled to Prague.<\/b><\/i><\/span>

<\/b><\/i><\/span> As a teenager, Weiss developed two passions: classical music and electronics. Snapping up army surplus parts, he repaired radios out of his bedroom. He even made a deal with the local toughs: If they left him alone as he lugged radios to and from the subway, he\u2019d fix theirs for free. \u201cThey would steal things and I would have to fix them,\u201d he says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a good deal.\u201d<\/b><\/i><\/span>

<\/b><\/i><\/span> Weiss was drawn to tinkering partly as a reaction to his family\u2019s cerebral atmosphere. \u201cThis is a German-refugee kid with very self-consciously cultured parents, and he\u2019s rebelling against them by doing things with his hands,\u201d Benjamin says. \u201cBut he\u2019s surely not rejecting doing things with his head.\u201d<\/b><\/i><\/span>

<\/b><\/i><\/span> He applied to MIT to study electrical engineering so that he could solve a problem in hi-fi\u2014how to suppress the hiss made by the shellac records of the day. But electrical engineering courses disappointed him, as they focused more on power plants than on hi-fi. So Weiss switched to physics\u2014the major that had, he says, the fewest requirements.<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I heard that the guys who ran the LIGO gravitation wave experiment won this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, something told me that at least one of those involved in this historic detection of weak distant signals would have THE KNACK. It did not take me long to confirm this. Rainer Weiss (above) definitely … Continue reading “ANOTHER Nobel Prize Winner with THE KNACK”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,103,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-astronomy","category-knack-stories","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1097,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions\/1097"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}