American - Physicist | January 27, 1936 -
The detection of gravitational waves is truly a triumph of modern large-scale experimental physics.
Barry Barish
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Scientists, especially physicists, we're presumptuous and think we can do everything better than everybody else. And one thing that I realized early is, I had some talent managing and organizing things - you know, some people are better organizers than others - but why should I reinvent the wheel?
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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.
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The most exciting science requires the most complex instruments.
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It isn't obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends.
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Einstein had two new predictions from general relativity. One was that light would bend. That was tested in 1919, and basically, he was proven right. The second prediction was gravitational waves, which took us 100 years to prove. The theory itself, which is thought by most to be rather obscure, you use every day, probably.
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I think the scientific goals and the technical challenges were the two things that equally motivated me.
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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 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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