Barry Barish Quotes
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It seems kind of nutty to send up something new when there's something already there that can do the job.
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In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.
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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.
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The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The ILC will go forward, but the U.S. will fall behind.
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It's very difficult to tell when you're successful, because it's so hard to make measurements.