Barry Barish

“The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Everything we know about the universe is studied by using telescopes or other instruments that look at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray - different wavelengths of electromagnetic interactions. Only 4 percent of what's in the universe gives off electromagnetic radiation, so we don't have any handle on the rest.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”