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"Big Science - Big
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Date: |
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Monday, 14. Oct. 2019 |
Video-Recording for any system with MP4-support
- Video.mp4 (ca.643 Mb) |
15:15 – 16:45 |
Barry C Barish
(California Institute of Technology)
Barry C. Barish,
is an American physicist who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics
for his work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational
Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the
first direct detection of gravity waves. He shared the
prize with American physicists
Rainer
Weiss and Kip Thorn.
Barish received his bachelor's and doctorate in physics at
the University of California,
Berkeley,
in 1957 and 1962, respectively. He
was a research fellow at Berkeley from
1962 to 1963 and then became
a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech),
where he spent the remainder of his career. He became professor emeritus in 2005.
Barish began his career in high-energy physics. He worked on
experiments at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center,
and in the 1980s he became involved in the search for magnetic
monopoles. He also headed a team to design an experiment for
the Superconducting Super
Collider (SSC), a giant
particle accelerator to be built in Texas, but the U.S. Congress
canceled that project in 1993.
After the cancellation of the
SSC, Barish became LIGO principal investigator in
1994.
The NSF in its 1992 and 1993
reviews of LIGO had expressed doubts about its feasibility
and management structure. Barish
instituted technical changes to LIGO's design, such
as
using solid-state lasers, which were more powerful than the
originally planned argon gas lasers.
LIGO was run mainly as a
small collaboration between Caltech and MIT.
Barish realized that LIGO would need permanent staff and
many more scientists to help in
what was an extremely technically demanding project. In
1997 he established the LIGO
Scientific Collaboration
(LSC), a team of hundreds of scientists from around the world.
That same year Barish became LIGO director. Barish's
changes pleased the NSF, which
funded LIGO at a much higher level, and were credited with
doing much to make LIGO
a success.
Construction began on LIGO's two interferometers at Livingston, Louisiana, and
Hanford,
Washington, in 1994, and
observations began in 2002. Although LIGO had not detected any
gravity waves in its early years, Barish
pushed through plans for an upgraded version,
Advanced LIGO, that would. Advanced
LIGO was approved by the NSF in 2004, and it was
completely installed in 2014. On September 14, 2015, Advanced
LIGO made the first
detection of gravity waves from a pair of black holes that
spiraled into each other 1.3 billion
light-years away.
Barish stepped down as LIGO principal investigator and was
director from 2005 to 2013
of the Global Design Effort of the International Linear
Collider, a proposed 31-kilometre-
(19-mile-) long linear
particle accelerator.
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Established in 2009, Brahe
Educational Foundation is a Swedish nonprofit foundation
that arranges lectures and seminars by prominent academics
in the physical and behavioral
sciences to faculty and students at Swedish educational
institutions with the public invited.