Barry C. Barish (Physics Nobel 2017)

Some Lesser Known Facts About Barry C. Barish

• After having completed his Ph.D. in 1962, Barish joined the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) to conduct experiments in particle physics using frontier particle accelerators.

• In 1994, he was appointed as the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Within 3 years, he became the director of the Observatory and held the position until 2005.

• Barish is credited with creating the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a joint effort of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves. Notably, it has over 1,000 collaborators worldwide.

• He even served as the President of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2011.

• Barish, along with fellow scientists Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne, was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for “decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”. While Weiss takes away one-half of the total prize money (£825,000), Barish and Thorne will share half of the remaining prize.