Words matter. These are the best Barry Barish Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The waves are subtle, altering spacetime and the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and the Moon by much less than the width of an atom. As such, gravitational radiation has not been directly detected yet. We hope to change that soon.
It’s very difficult to tell when you’re successful, because it’s so hard to make measurements.
The size of the effect that we measured from the first event, the merging of two black holes, the actual size of the signal was about one thousandth the size of a proton, what it did to our apparatus.
The ILC will go forward, but the U.S. will fall behind.
We said that with initial LIGO, detections would be possible, and with Advanced LIGO, detections would be probable.
Anything that makes us take more seriously scientists – or economists or chemists or physicists or biologists – I think is helpful in times when things get distorted because of people not paying attention to all the facts.
I can’t imagine that, now that we have another way to look at the universe, that there isn’t going to be some enormous surprises. Things that have nothing to do with what we already know.
I think the scientific goals and the technical challenges were the two things that equally motivated me.
The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.
I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.
I think there’s a bit of truth that LIGO wouldn’t be here if I didn’t do it, so I don’t think I’m undeserving.
A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies – all this kind of stuff. It’s very democratic.
The first instrument is not the final instrument.
When I was really young, my ambition wasn’t to do science. I didn’t really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.
There’s some aura about a Nobel Prize, there’s a prestige, that gives me a responsibility that I didn’t have before, that goes beyond my own work, as a spokesman for science.
The technical challenges were technical challenges that were not unbeatable; it was just that we had to learn how to do things and how to build a sensitive enough device. That took us 20 years after we built the first version of the LIGO detector.
I actually spent a lot of time reading about how professional managers work. And how people build bridges.
In a small lab, if you make a mistake, you can go in the next day and fix it. But here, when you are committed to spending a hundred thousand or a million dollars, you can’t fix it later. You need to have a system of checks and balances internally. In particle physics, that’s just part of the structure.
I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the recognition of individuals when so much of this was a team effort.
In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.
