- Person
- Barry Barish
- Lived
- b. 1936
- Field
- Experimental physics
- From
- American
The story
Barry Barish, a Caltech particle physicist born in Omaha to a family of Jewish immigrants, was asked in late 1993 to take over the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO. The Caltech and MIT project aimed to detect gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein, by measuring changes smaller than a ten-thousandth of the width of a proton in the length of 4-kilometre laser arms. The project was in trouble, and the National Science Foundation wanted new leadership before funding construction.
Barish accepted in 1994. He rewrote the proposal to strengthen the technical team, staff the observatories properly and invest in modern technologies, and with the theorist Kip Thorne presented the plan directly to the National Science Board, which approved construction. Between 1994 and 1999 LIGO built two observatories, in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. From the start Barish also secured support for research toward a more sensitive Advanced LIGO.
In 1997 he created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration as a separate organisation in which scientists from universities around the world could take part in LIGO science on an equal footing with the laboratory’s own staff. By the time of the discovery it had more than 1,000 members, and Barish wrote that by 2017 it had over 1,200 members from 18 countries. That same year he began the cooperation with Europe’s Virgo detector that led to shared data analysis.
On September 14, 2015, the upgraded detectors recorded gravitational waves from two black holes, about 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun, merging 1.3 billion years ago. The Nobel committee, which awarded Barish, Thorne and Rainer Weiss the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, described Barish as the scientist and leader who brought the project to completion. Gravitational-wave astronomy is now a shared, international science. The discovery was announced on February 11, 2016, when Barish gave the first scientific seminar on the result at CERN.
Why it matters
The collaboration Barish built opened gravitational-wave astronomy, a new way for scientists worldwide to study black holes, neutron stars and the universe.
About Barry Barish
Omaha-born physicist who rescued LIGO, built it and turned it into a worldwide collaboration that first detected gravitational waves in 2015. Nobel Prize in Physics 2017.
Sources
- Barry C. Barish, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 NobelPrize.org
- Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years After Einstein’s Prediction LIGO Caltech
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.