From the shtetl to Omaha
Barry Clark Barish was born on January 27, 1936, in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Lee and Harold Barish. Both of his parents’ families had come to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century from small shtetls in Eastern Europe, in the region of today’s Ukraine and Belarus. His mother’s family, the Shameses, settled first in St. Joseph, Missouri, and then in Omaha, where her father, Max, opened a car body and fender shop; their social life, Barish recalled, centred on Omaha’s small but tight-knit Jewish community.
His father’s family had a remarkable American journey of its own. His paternal grandfather, great-grandfather and two great-uncles arrived in 1901 and spent eighteen months as homesteaders in North Dakota before moving to Sioux City, Iowa, where they ran a Ford dealership until they fell out with Henry Ford over his antisemitic attitudes. Neither of Barry’s parents had the chance to go to college: his mother won a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but her father would not let her go, a disappointment she spoke of all her life.
A shy boy who wanted to write
During the Second World War Barish’s father ran an assembly line at a factory near Omaha that built military bombers. After the war the family, now including a younger brother, moved to the Los Feliz neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Barry was a quiet, bookish child who devoured mysteries, science fiction and then the classics, and when asked what he wanted to be, he answered: a novelist. He spent most of his free time playing sports, especially tennis, and was a member of his high school tennis team.
He was always near the top of his class, but nobody guided him toward a career, and his parents, though devoted to education, could not advise him what to study. He chose engineering because he was good at mathematics, and entered the University of California, Berkeley. There he took his first physics course and, as he put it, began his love affair with physics immediately, while the drafting and surveying of engineering bored him. He switched to physics and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1957.
Building the Standard Model
Barish stayed at Berkeley for his doctorate in experimental particle physics, completed in 1962 using the laboratory’s great accelerators. There he also met his wife, Samoan, who became a psychoanalyst; they married in 1960 and have two children, Stephanie and Kenneth, now a physics professor. In 1963 he joined the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow, and Caltech remained his professional home for the rest of his career.
In the following decades he led a series of front-line experiments. At Fermilab in the 1970s, with Frank Sciulli, he used high-energy neutrino beams to probe the inside of the proton, and the experiment provided definitive proof of the weak neutral current, which he called the linchpin that established the Standard Model of particle physics. In the 1980s he led MACRO, an experiment deep under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, which searched for exotic magnetic monopoles and confirmed that neutrinos change from one type to another. He also admitted a famous miss: at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center he chose not to join an experiment that went on to reveal quarks inside the proton and win its leaders a Nobel Prize. “How wrong I was!” he later wrote.
Rescuing LIGO
In the early 1990s Barish co-led the design of a huge detector called GEM for the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. When Congress cancelled the collider in 1993, his first concern was finding jobs for the talented people he had hired. Two months later a Caltech colleague, Charles Peck, asked to take a walk with him on the beach near his home in Santa Monica and put an unexpected question: would he take over the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO?
LIGO was an audacious Caltech and MIT project to detect gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein in 1916, by detecting changes in the length of its 4-kilometre arms smaller than a ten-thousandth of the width of a proton. It was in trouble, and the National Science Foundation wanted new leadership before it would fund construction. Barish spent a month studying the problem and, unable to convince himself either that he would succeed or that he would fail, said yes. He became principal investigator in 1994 and director in 1997.
Turning a small project into big science
Barish rewrote the LIGO proposal in 1994, raising the cost to strengthen the technical team, staff the two observatory sites properly and invest in modern technologies such as solid-state lasers and digital controls. That summer he and the theorist Kip Thorne made an unprecedented direct presentation to the National Science Board, which approved construction. He recruited experienced managers and engineers from large physics projects, and between 1994 and 1999 LIGO built its two observatories, at Hanford in Washington State and Livingston in Louisiana. From the start he also secured support to develop the much more sensitive Advanced LIGO that would eventually succeed.
Just as important was the way he organised the science. In 1997 he created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a separate organisation in which researchers from universities around the world could work on equal footing with the laboratory staff. By 2017 it had more than 1,200 members from 18 countries. He also began the cooperation with Europe’s Virgo detector that led to joint analysis of the data. The Fudan-Zhongzhi prize committee later praised him for converting LIGO from small science run by a few groups into big science that made the discovery possible.
Hearing black holes collide
Initial LIGO ran from about 2000 and steadily improved its sensitivity, without detecting a signal. Advanced LIGO, with new seismic isolation and other technology developed in the research programme Barish had insisted on, began observing in September 2015. On September 14, 2015, the two detectors recorded the same signal about 7 thousandths of a second apart: the merger of two black holes, about 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun, whose signal had travelled for 1.3 billion years. After weeks of checks, including a special team that ruled out a faked signal, the collaboration announced the discovery on February 11, 2016. Barish gave the first scientific seminar on the result at CERN that day.
Barish’s first reaction, he wrote, was worry that the team might be fooling itself or being fooled. Advanced LIGO was essentially a new instrument, switched on only days earlier. The collaboration ran the detectors for about a month to measure how often such a signal could arise by chance, and found the probability infinitesimal. A “tiger team” of experts led by Matt Evans of MIT then traced the signal back through each detector to rule out the possibility that someone had injected a fake event. Only then did the team write its discovery paper. While it waited for publication over the Christmas holidays, a second signal from merging black holes arrived on December 26, 2015, setting any lingering doubts to rest.
The discovery confirmed a key prediction of Einstein’s general relativity and gave humanity a new sense with which to study the universe. Further detections followed, including in 2017 the collision of two neutron stars that was also seen by telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum, opening what Barish calls multimessenger astronomy. In 2017 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”
Jewish roots and public service
Barish describes his family’s background as poorly documented: Jewish immigrants from shtetls whose names and trades have largely been lost, whose children worked from a young age and never went to college. Their story, from homesteading in North Dakota to a quarrel with Henry Ford over antisemitism to the Jewish community of Omaha, is a small piece of the American Jewish experience, and it gave him, he wrote, no obvious reason to become a physicist.
He has given back through public service. Appointed by President George W. Bush, he served on the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, from 2002 to 2008, working on issues such as diversity in science education and the danger that funding systems discourage risky research. From 2005 to 2013 he directed the international design effort for the proposed International Linear Collider.
Legacy
Barish later joined the University of California, Riverside, and in 2023 Stony Brook University. That year President Joe Biden awarded him the National Medal of Science, citing groundbreaking research on subatomic particles and leadership of LIGO that broadened “our Nation’s sense of wonder and discovery.” His other honours include the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society in 2016, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and the Princess of Asturias Award in 2017, and in 2023 the first Copernicus Prize, awarded by Poland for exceptional contributions to world science.
Barry Barish’s great contribution was to take one of the most difficult measurements ever attempted and make it achievable, by building the machine, the team and the worldwide collaboration around it. Gravitational-wave observatories now detect cosmic collisions regularly, and scientists across the world share their data to learn how black holes and neutron stars form and behave. A whole new branch of astronomy exists because a shy boy from Omaha agreed, after a walk on the beach, to try.
Sources & further reading
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 · Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in Physics, JINFO.ORG · Barry Barish, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.