Barry Barish Quotes

What is not a risk with a parts-per-billion test can always be exposed to a parts-per-trillion examination. If rats cope with .the heaviest dose of a chemical that can be soaked into their food and water, you can always gavage them. Or try mice or rabbits. Again, the only stopping rule is discovery of the sought-for effect, or exhaustion of the investigator (or his funds). Many of the risk assessment procedures used today are logically indistinguishable from those used by the Inquisition.

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success.

An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

Experiment is the mother of knowledge.

Tax dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental.

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.

It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.

As marvelous as the stars is the mind of the person who studies them.

It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.

I am strictly against making cuts in the current budgetary period for things such as research funding and investments as a reaction to Brexit. I think that we can do an excellent job of explaining this to the German people.

The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers; it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing, or very little, the shock can kill a man.

The most tragic moment of my life was the first show I ever designed for. I had been asked to make shoes for Ossie Clark's show in the early '70s. I was so inexperienced that I didn't put the steel in the heels of the shoes, which is required to support the shoe and the wearer. So the girls came out walking very strangely in these rubber, bendy high-heeled shoes I had made. I thought 'Oh dear god! This is the end of me.' But after the show, even David Hockney and Cecil Beaton said to me 'It was so interesting that the girls were moving in such a different way.'

The invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked. If it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that.

Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.

A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.

US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn't be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory.

Of all tools, an observatory is the most sublime. . . . What is so good in a college as an observatory? The sublime attaches to the door and to the first stair you ascent, that this is the road to the stars.

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

To the extent that the scientist's capacity for pursuing the truth depends upon costly apparatus, institutional collaboration and heavy capital investment by government or industry he is no longer his own master.

It's not like you're closing the old doors and that investigators working away in a laboratories on a unique hypothesis are no longer needed. My gosh, they are indeed. But this becomes a real engine for hypothesis generation and even for proof if you have interventions that you can carry out in this kind of large scale and conduct them in a rigorous way. I guess, yeah, it's different. But it's different in a good way.