Book Barry Barish

Nobel-winning American physicist Barry Barish helped open a new window on the universe. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne for his decisive role in building the LIGO detector and the first observation of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime that Albert Einstein predicted a century earlier. Born in Omaha and raised in Los Angeles, Barish earned his bachelor's degree in physics in 1957 and his doctorate in experimental high energy physics in 1962, both at UC Berkeley. He joined Caltech in 1963, rising to the Linde Professor of Physics, now emeritus, working on frontier particle accelerator experiments before leading the LIGO effort. He later joined the University of California, Riverside, and in 2023 took up a newly created endowed physics chair at Stony Brook University. His many honors include the National Medal of Science, presented at the White House, the Enrico Fermi Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Henry Draper Medal and the Cocconi Prize, and he is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He speaks memorably about curiosity, persistence and the courage to risk failure.