Barry Barish

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

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

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. ”

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. ”

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

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