In 2017, Barish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".[1][2][3][4] He said, "I didn't know if I would succeed. I was afraid I would fail, but because I tried, I had a breakthrough."[5]
He earned a B.A. degree in physics (1957) and a Ph.D. degree in experimental high energy physics (1962) at the University of California, Berkeley.[13] He joined Caltech in 1963 as part of a new experimental effort in particle physics using frontier particle accelerators at the national laboratories. From 1963 to 1966, he was a research fellow, and from 1966 to 1991 an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor of physics. From 1991 to 2005, he became Linde Professor of Physics, and after that Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus.[14] From 1984 to 1996, he was the principal investigator of Caltech High Energy Physics Group.
Research
Firstly, Barish's experiments were performed at Fermilab using high-energy neutrino collisions to reveal the quark substructure of the nucleon.[15] Among others, these experiments were the first to observe a current that was weak and neutral, a linchpin of the electroweak unification theories of Salam, Glashow, and Weinberg.[16]
In the 1980s, he directed MACRO, an experiment in a cave in Gran Sasso, Italy, that searched for exotic particles called magnetic monopoles and also studied penetrating cosmic rays, including neutrino measurements that provided important confirmatory evidence that neutrinos have mass and oscillate.[17]
In 1991, Barish was named the Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor of Physics at Caltech.
In the early 1990s, he spearheaded GEM (Gammas, Electrons, Muons), an experiment that would have run at the Superconducting Super Collider which was approved after the former project L* led by Samuel Ting (and Barish as chairman of collaboration board) was rejected by SSC director Roy Schwitters.[17][18] Barish was GEM spokesperson.
Barish became the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 1994 and director in 1997. He led the effort through the approval of funding by the NSF National Science Board in 1994, the construction and commissioning of the LIGO interferometers in Livingston, LA and Hanford, WA in 1997. He created the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which now numbers more than 1000 collaborators worldwide to carry out the science.
The initial LIGO detectors reached design sensitivity and set many limits on astrophysical sources. The Advanced LIGO proposal was developed while Barish was director, and he has continued to play a leading role in LIGO and Advanced LIGO. The first detection of the merger of two 30 solar mass black holes was made on September 14, 2015.[19] This represented the first direct detection of gravitational waves since they were predicted by Einstein in 1916 and the first ever observation of the merger of a pair of black holes. Barish delivered the first presentation on this discovery to a scientific audience at CERN on February 11, 2016,[20] simultaneously with the public announcement.[21]
From 2001 to 2002, Barish served as co-chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel that developed a long-range plan[22] for U.S. high energy physics. He has chaired the Commission of Particles and Fields and the U.S. Liaison committee to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). In 2002, he chaired the NRC Board of Physics and Astronomy Neutrino Facilities Assessment Committee Report, "Neutrinos and Beyond".
From 2005 to 2013, Barish was director of the Global Design Effort[23] for the International Linear Collider (ILC).[24] The ILC is the highest priority future project for particle physics worldwide, as it promises to complement the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in exploring the TeV energy scale. This ambitious effort is being uniquely coordinated worldwide, representing a major step in international collaborations going from conception to design to implementation for large scale projects in physics.
In 2016, Barish received the Enrico Fermi Prize "for his fundamental contributions to the formation of the LIGO and LIGO-Virgo scientific collaborations and for his role in addressing challenging technological and scientific aspects whose solution led to the first detection of gravitational waves".[29]
Barish was a recipient of the 2016 Smithsonian magazine's American Ingenuity Award in the Physical Science category.[30]
Barish was awarded the 2017 Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences "for his visionary and pivotal leadership role, scientific guidance, and novel instrument design during the development of LIGO that were crucial for LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, thus directly validating Einstein's 100-year-old prediction of gravitational waves and ushering a new field of gravitational wave astronomy."[31]
Barish was a recipient of the 2017 Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize[32] of the European Physical Society for his "pioneering and leading role in the LIGO observatory that led to the direct detection of gravitational waves, opening a new window to the Universe."
Barish was a recipient of the 2017 Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award[34] for his leadership in the construction and initial operations of LIGO, the creation of the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and for the successful conversion of LIGO from small science executed by a few research groups into big science that involved large collaborations and major infrastructures, which eventually enabled gravitational-wave detection" (jointly with Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss).[35]
In 2018, he was conferred the Honorary Degree Doctor Honoris Causa of Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski [38]
In 2023, he was awarded the inaugural the Copernicus Prize, bestowed by the government of Poland on “those who made exceptional contributions to the development of world science.”[39]
In 2023, he was awarded the National Medal of Science[8] for “exemplary service to science, including groundbreaking research on sub-atomic particles. His leadership of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory led to the first detection of gravitational waves from merging black holes, confirming a key part of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He has broadened our understanding of the universe and our Nation's sense of wonder and discovery.”[40]
Barish has been elected to and held fellowship at the following organizations:
Barry Barish is married to Samoan Barish. They have two children, Stephanie Barish and Kenneth Barish, professor and chair of Physics & Astronomy at University of California, Riverside,[42] and three grandchildren, Milo Barish Chamberlin, Thea Chamberlin, and Ariel Barish.[43]
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Two large observatories were built in the United States with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry. These observatories use mirrors spaced four kilometers apart which are capable of detecting a change of less than one ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton.
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. Along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish, he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.
Rainer "Rai" Weiss is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
Joseph Weber was an American physicist. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors.
Bruce Allen is an American physicist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover Germany and leader of the Einstein@Home project for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. He is also a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the initiator / project leader of smartmontools hard disk utility.
Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.
Gravitational waves are waves of the intensity of gravity that are generated by the accelerated masses of binary stars and other motions of gravitating masses, and propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by Henri Poincaré in 1905 as the gravitational equivalent of electromagnetic waves. Gravitational waves are sometimes called gravity waves, but gravity waves typically refer to displacement waves in fluids. In 1916 Albert Einstein demonstrated that gravitational waves result from his general theory of relativity as ripples in spacetime.
Gravitational-wave astronomy is a subfield of astronomy concerned with the detection and study of gravitational waves emitted by astrophysical sources.
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) is a scientific collaboration of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves.
Alessandra Buonanno is an Italian-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam. She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. She holds a research professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015.
Takaaki Kajita is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamioka Observatory – Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald. On 1 October 2020, he became the president of the Science Council of Japan.
The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made on 14 September 2015 and was announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016. Previously, gravitational waves had been inferred only indirectly, via their effect on the timing of pulsars in binary star systems. The waveform, detected by both LIGO observatories, matched the predictions of general relativity for a gravitational wave emanating from the inward spiral and merger of a pair of black holes of around 36 and 29 solar masses and the subsequent "ringdown" of the single resulting black hole. The signal was named GW150914. It was also the first observation of a binary black hole merger, demonstrating both the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems and the fact that such mergers could occur within the current age of the universe.
The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project is a collaboration formed in the summer of 2015 among Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director Les Guthman to make the definitive documentary about the Advanced LIGO project's search for, and expected first detection of, gravitational waves; and to record a longitudinal video archive of the project for future researchers and historians. The feature documentary, "LIGO," was released in the spring of 2019. Mr. Guthman also wrote, produced and directed an eight-part video series on YouTube, LIGO: A DISCOVERY THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, which was released over three years, 2017-2020. The video series remains in production with three more episodes covering the LIGO project's third science run 2019-2020.
Sydney Meshkov was a Theoretical Physicist who worked in gravitational wave, atomic, nuclear and particle physics.
Samaya Michiko Nissanke is an astrophysicist, associate professor in gravitational wave and multi-messenger astrophysics and the spokesperson for the GRAPPA Centre for Excellence in Gravitation and Astroparticle Physics at the University of Amsterdam. She works on gravitational-wave astrophysics and has played a founding role in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy. She played a leading role in the discovery paper of the first binary neutron star merger, GW170817, seen in gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation.
LIGO is a 2019 American documentary film that tells the inside account of the discovery by the international LIGO Scientific Collaboration of the first observation of gravitational waves in September 2015, a discovery that led two years later to the Nobel Prize in Physics for LIGO physicists Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish. In December 2019, National Geographic named the LIGO detections at the top of its list of "The 20 Top Scientific Discoveries of the Decade".
Peter Shawhan is an American physicist. He is currently professor of physics at the University of Maryland and was a co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and the Bruno Rossi Prize for his work on LIGO.
Stanley Ernest Whitcomb is an American physicist and was the chief scientist at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project when the first direct detection of gravitational waves was made in September 2015.
Peter Reed Saulson is an American physicist and professor at Syracuse University. He is best known as a former spokesperson for the LIGO collaboration serving from 2003 to 2007 and research on gravitational wave detectors.
Rana X. Adhikari is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (ICTS-TIFR).
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