Barry Barish Quotes

When black holes collide, the only thing we can detect is gravitational waves, everything else is swallowed inside. But neutron stars are relatively lighter than black holes, so when they collide and merge, a small part of their mass and radiation does escape and can be detected along with gravitational waves. [We can see that] every atom of iodine on Earth, including the iodine you put on your wound, had arrived here in the distant past from a merger of neutron stars,

I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge.

What was done is measure directly, with exquisitely sensitive instruments, gravitational waves predicted about 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. These waves are a new way to study the universe and are expected to have significant impact on astronomy and astrophysics in the years ahead.

Einstein got most of the things right about black holes. I'm not an expert, I must admit.

I would like to uncover the secrets of the universe.

I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.

I wanted to become a mathematician, physicist or astronomer.

We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller.

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

My first popular book, 'A Brief History of Time,' aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.

I would love to photograph Stephen Hawking. I am just fascinated by science, I really am.

This impels me ... to set forth briefly my opinion on the question, whether the world was made by chance.... I therefore say, as I have said already, that the world is a necessary effect of the divine nature, and that it has not been made by chance.

As a physicist, I've always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.

I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.

It's very, very exciting that it worked out in the end that we are actually detecting things and actually adding to the knowledge, through gravitational waves, of what goes on in the universe.

I was already studying physics, but Sputnik steered me toward space, cosmology, the Big Bang, and elementary particles.

We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.

The fact that people can predict gravity wave sources that are within shouting distance makes me feel incredibly confident. Compared to monopoles, these sources are not just optimistic thinking.

I've been working in cosmology since 1964.

Deep down inside, I'm a science geek.

We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.