Barry Barish

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The first instrument is not the final instrument.”

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

“After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Einstein had two new predictions from general relativity. One was that light would bend. That was tested in 1919, and basically, he was proven right. The second prediction was gravitational waves, which took us 100 years to prove. The theory itself, which is thought by most to be rather obscure, you use every day, probably.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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