Barry Clark Barish
active c. 1936, Omaha, Nebraska, USA
American physicist, the project director who turned LIGO from prototype into a working observatory.
Barish began as a high-energy physicist running neutrino experiments at Caltech. In 1994 he took over LIGO when the project was near cancellation; he reorganized it on the big-collaboration model of particle physics — the LIGO Scientific Collaboration — and led the Hanford & Livingston sites to completion in 1999–2002, ready for the 2015 discovery.
Nobel-winning work
Barish's contribution was organizational-scientific: he designed the Advanced LIGO upgrade plan (2010–2015) boosting sensitivity tenfold, enabling measurements of spacetime strain smaller than a proton diameter by a factor of 10^3. The GW150914 detection (14 Sept 2015) — and dozens of later black-hole/neutron-star mergers — proved gravitational waves a new window on the universe.
Workplaces: Caltech, LIGO
United States