Barry Barish

The fact that people can predict gravity wave sources that are within shouting distance makes me feel incredibly confident. Compared to monopoles, these sources are not just optimistic thinking.

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.

The waves are subtle, altering spacetime and the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and the Moon by much less than the width of an atom. As such, gravitational radiation has not been directly detected yet. We hope to change that soon.

It's crazy that we happen to have a country where it depends on what political party you are in whether you believe in climate change or not.

Anything that makes us take more seriously scientists - or economists or chemists or physicists or biologists - I think is helpful in times when things get distorted because of people not paying attention to all the facts.

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.

I always wanted to be an experimental physicist and was attracted to the idea of using continuing advances in technology to carry out fundamental science experiments that could not be done otherwise.

The problem for large scientific projects is to do something that is being done for the first time, balanced against cost, schedule. and promises to the government. That is a hard balancing act.

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.