Barry Barish

"As a kid, I had two loves: one was reading and the other was tennis. I read everything, mostly fiction. I liked stories and storytelling, I liked writing, I was the editor of the school magazine. I played tennis until college, competitively. All of this told me that I would either be a professional tennis player or a novelist. My dream as a kid, rather than winning the Nobel prize was to win the Wimbledon. "

Barry Barish is the Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration was founded in 1997 under his leadership and has now flourished to include the 1200+ 'humans' being profiled in this blog. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne for LIGO's direct detection of Gravitational Waves.