Barry Barish

Origins and early life

Barry Clark Barish was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on 27 January 1936, the son of Lee and Harold Barish; both his parents' families were Jewish immigrants from a part of Poland that now lies in Belarus. Just after the Second World War the family moved to Los Angeles. He took his degree in physics at Berkeley in 1957 and a doctorate in experimental high-energy physics there in 1962, and joined Caltech in 1963, where he has been ever since.

Work and career

He came to gravitational waves late and by invitation. LIGO — two four-kilometre arms of vacuum meant to register a change in length smaller than a fraction of a proton — was in trouble in the early 1990s, a beautiful idea that could not be built by a small group. Barish took it over in 1994 and turned it into something else: an international collaboration of hundreds of people, with a staged plan that admitted the first detector would probably see nothing and built the second one anyway.

On 14 September 2015 the upgraded instrument recorded two black holes merging a billion light years away, confirming a prediction Einstein had made a century earlier. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne, and received the National Medal of Science in 2023.