Barry Barish Quotes

"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."

"If we are going to build an ambitious machine, then it's got to be a global machine."

"I actually spent a lot of time reading about how professional managers work. And how people build bridges."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments."

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

"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."

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

"The fact that people can predict gravity wave sources that are within shouting distance makes me feel incredibly confident. Compared to monopoles, these sources are not just optimistic thinking."

"The first instrument is not the final instrument."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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