Quotes from Barry Barish

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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 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.

The first instrument is not the final instrument.

The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.

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.

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.

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

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.