Here is Joe Weber in his lab as I remember him
My personal feeling is that the false positives were from the deuteron accelerator next door. Or some other power spike from experiments in nearby labs. I was looking at that accelerator because it was for sale. I thought it could be used to make directed and precisely timed gravitational signals to excite the modes in any gravitational sensor. The response characteristics of the Weber bar are very very precise. The timings and sensitivity clear. So it is just a matter of shaping and directing pulses.
When he told me about his piezoelectric sensors I knew they were not good enough for what he wanted to do, and he was looking for signals at the wrong frequencies. His particular image, though, or 3D waves from his cylinder as a gravitational source locked in my mind forever. It was a clear vision that is achievable. But first, just a Weber bar – hanging, rotating and bobbling – used as a reference source for calibrating low cost, high sampling rate gravimeters. Then when the sensitivity is higher, to show the density waves and their associated gravitational potential changes and acceleration field. But by then the relation to magnetic and electric fields will be sorted out, and we won’t call them gravitational fields any more.
He was not wrong, just needed better tools. The media should be ashamed of themselves. Maybe in a hundred years it will be better.
