Barry Barish

Physicist

1936-01-27

Quotes by Barry Barish

• 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.

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• When the signal reached LIGO from a collision of two stellar black holes that occurred 1.3 billion years ago, the 1,000-scientist-strong LIGO Scientific Collaboration was able to both identify the candidate event within minutes and perform the detailed analysis that convincingly demonstrated that gravitational waves exist.

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• It's hard to do large, expensive projects without some sort of hierarchical structure where somebody can tell you - maybe softly, but at least tell you - what to do, or you have some supervision over you. Physicists like to be completely independent of each other. So that's a constant struggle. And it's a place that sometimes we get in trouble.

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

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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