Barry Barish

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.

Barry Clark Barish (born January 27, 1936) is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate.

He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.

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.

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.

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.

From 1984 to 1996, he was the principal investigator of Caltech High Energy Physics Group.

Firstly, Barish's experiments were performed at Fermilab using high-energy neutrino collisions to reveal the quark substructure of the nucleon.

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.

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.

Barish was GEM spokesperson.

From 1991 to 2005, he became Linde Professor of Physics, and after that Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus.

In 1991, Barish was named the Maxine and Ronald Linde Professor of Physics at Caltech.

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.

From 2001 to 2002, Barish served as co-chair of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel subpanel that developed a long-range plan 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".

In 2002, he received the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

From 2005 to 2013, Barish was director of the Global Design Effort for the International Linear Collider (ILC).

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.

Barish was honored by the University of Bologna (2006) and University of Florida ( 2007) where he received honorary doctorates.

In 2007, delivered the Van Vleck lectures at the University of Minnesota.

The University of Glasgow honored Barish with an honorary degree of science in 2013.

The first detection of the merger of two 30 solar mass black holes was made on September 14, 2015.

Barish delivered the first presentation on this discovery to a scientific audience at CERN on February 11, 2016, simultaneously with the public announcement.

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".

He said, "I didn't know if I would succeed. I was afraid I would fail, but because I tried, I had a breakthrough."

In 2018, he joined the faculty at University of California, Riverside, becoming the university's second Nobel Prize winner on the faculty.

In the fall of 2023, he joined Stony Brook University as the inaugural President’s Distinguished Endowed Chair in Physics.

In 2023, Barish was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Biden in a White House ceremony.

Barish was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Lee and Harold Barish.

His parents' families were Jewish immigrants from a part of Poland that is now in Belarus.

Just after World War II, the family moved to Los Feliz in Los Angeles.

He attended John Marshall High School and other schools.