Towards detecting gravitational waves: A contribution by Richard Feynman

An account of Richard Feynman’s work on gravitational waves is given. Feynman’s involvement with this subject can be traced back to 1957, when he attended the famous Chapel Hill conference on the Role of Gravitation in Physics. At that conference, he presented in particular the celebrated sticky bead argument, which was devised to intuitively argue that gravitational waves must carry energy, if they exist at all. While giving a simple argument in favor of the existence of gravitational waves, Feynman’s thought experiment paved the way for their detection and stimulated subsequent efforts in building a practical detecting device. Feynman’s contributions were systematically developed in a letter to Victor Weisskopf, completed in February 1961, as well as in his Caltech Lectures on Gravitation, delivered in 1962-63. There, a detailed calculation of the power radiated as gravitational radiation was performed, using both classical and quantum field theoretical tools, leading to a derivation of the quadrupole formula and its application to gravitational radiation by a binary star system. A comparison between the attitudes of Feynman and of the general relativity community to the problems of gravitational wave physics is drawn as well.