Barry Barish Quotes

If we get to the design sensitivity and make no detections, then there are a lot of things that will have to go back to the drawing board theoretically. If we fail, we’re not expecting that the NSF will help bail it out somehow.

The 4th Concept is welcomed and encouraged. In the end, it’s my hope and belief that the best ideas are what will be used in these detectors.

I live on the Santa Monica Beach and bike up and down almost every day. I like exercise, and I like literature a lot and plays and things like that.

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.

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.

It isn’t obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends.

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.

It seems kind of nutty to send up something new when there’s something already there that can do the job.

The problem for large scientific projects is to do something that is being done for the first time, balanced against cost, schedule. and promises to the government. That is a hard balancing act.

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.

It’s crazy that we happen to have a country where it depends on what political party you are in whether you believe in climate change or not.

I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about the recognition of individuals when so much of this was a team effort.

We said that with initial LIGO, detections would be possible, and with Advanced LIGO, detections would be probable.

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 detection of gravitational waves is truly a triumph of modern large-scale experimental physics.

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 ILC will go forward, but the U.S. will fall behind.

Scientists, especially physicists, we’re presumptuous and think we can do everything better than everybody else. And one thing that I realized early is, I had some talent managing and organizing things – you know, some people are better organizers than others – but why should I reinvent the wheel?

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.

It’s very difficult to tell when you’re successful, because it’s so hard to make measurements.

The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.

I think the scientific goals and the technical challenges were the two things that equally motivated me.

In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.