Nobel Laureate Rainer Weiss -- my kind of guy! :-)

On the beginnings of his scientific career

"I was probably 12 or so, and the war was over, and the streets of New York, especially downtown New York, were loaded with stuff coming back as war surplus. And you'd go down to Cortland Street in New York, which no longer exists, it was near the World Trade Center. What would happen is you'd go here and you'd find a whole box full of transformers, another box full of capacitors, vacuum tubes, anything you could ever want — radar sets half disassembled. As a kid that was mind-boggling. You bought stuff for nothing at all. If you could lug it on the subway home, you got it. I started making all sorts of stuff, radio, hi-fi sets which didn't exist. And I was very lucky there was a movie theater in Brooklyn that had a fire behind the screen. If you went down there and unscrewed the loud speakers that were behind the screen you could have them. So I took them home, I got six or seven of them home, they were heavy, big loud speakers."


On his earliest audio creations

"I had a wonderful setup because three things were happening simultaneously: FM radio was coming in, good amplifier circuits were around, I mean I copied other people's circuits — what did I know. I built something and I would invite some of the emigres, because they were very interested in music, to come over and listen. We would hear the New York Philharmonic, and these people were just blown away. Imagine, they said '[music] like in the concert hall!' And so they wanted one. And so little by little this thing grew into a business. If I had not gone to college, I probably could have made some money.

But what got me to go to college was the problem that you raised: Everything was wonderful if you had an FM set, but vinyl wasn't there yet. It was shellac records that made that horrible [scratching], 78s. All you heard was that [gosh-darned] record scratch! So the thing was, how do you get rid of that? And that was a puzzle that was just beyond me. I couldn't do it. I didn't know enough math, I didn't know enough real electrical engineering, and effectively that drove me to college. Let's face it, I wanted to solve that problem."