Barry Barish

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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 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. ”