He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors, known as Weber bars.

Thus, Joe Weber had little proof of either his family or his given name, which gave him some trouble in obtaining a passport at the height of the red scare.

[6][7] He began his undergraduate education at Cooper Union, but to save his family the expense of his room and board he won admittance to the United States Naval Academy through a competitive exam.

Weber was the Officer of the Deck on the USS Lexington when the ship received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He completed his PhD, with a thesis entitled Microwave Technique in Chemical Kinetics, from The Catholic University of America in 1951.

[9] He submitted a paper in 1951 for the June 1952 Electron Tube Research Conference held in Ottawa,[10] which was the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser.

"[14] His interest in general relativity led Weber to use a 1955–1956 sabbatical, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, to study gravitational radiation with John Archibald Wheeler at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

"[20] In 1972, Heinz Billing and colleagues at Max Planck Institute for Physics built a detector similar to Weber's in an attempt to verify his claim but found no results.

[24][25][26] During the announcement, Weber was credited by numerous speakers as the founder of the field, including by Kip Thorne, who co-founded LIGO and also devoted much of his career to the search for gravitational waves.

"[27] Weber's second wife, astronomer Virginia Trimble, was seated in the front row of the audience during the LIGO press conference.

His experimental results contradicted previous and subsequent findings from other experiments, but Weber's neutrino theories continue to be tested.

His notebooks contained ideas for laser interferometers; later such a detector was first constructed by his former student Robert Forward at Hughes Research Laboratories.

Said yes, they should be there but they can't be measured, so stop thinking about it.Before Weber, I don't think anyone had ever spent more than 10 minutes trying to understand how to detect gravitational waves in the lab...(LIGO) was such a difficult thing to get built, that if it had started 10 years later, it would have hit a political wall...It might have been another century before anyone discovered gravitational waves.The Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation was named in his honor.

Joseph Weber died on 30 September 2000 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during treatment for lymphoma that had been diagnosed about three years earlier.