36 Quotes by Barry Barish

If we get to the design sensitivity and make no detections, then there are a lot of things that will have to go back to the drawing board theoretically. If we fail, we're not expecting that the NSF will help bail it out somehow.

The first instrument is not the final instrument.

In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.

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.

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.

I live on the Santa Monica Beach and bike up and down almost every day. I like exercise, and I like literature a lot and plays and things like that.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

It's very difficult to tell when you're successful, because it's so hard to make measurements.

It isn't obvious and it took us a while to demonstrate that we could actually design a machine that bends.