Friday, October 6, 2017

Will Nobel Prize overlook master builder of gravitational wave detectors?

4:19 AM    


Barish, a particle physicist at Caltech, didn’t

invent LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. But he made it happen. The hardware at LIGO’s two observatories in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana; the structure of the collaboration; even the big-science character of gravitational wave research—all were molded by Barish, who is now 80. “Without him there would have been no discovery,” says Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize–winning theorist at Boston University, who has written to some members of the Nobel Committee arguing the case for Barish. “It would be an enormous injustice” if he didn’t share in the Nobel, Glashow says.

When Barish took over as the second director of LIGO in 1994, he inherited a project that was “dead in the water,” says Richard Isaacson, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) program director for gravitational physics from 1973 to 2002. LIGO had hatched a decade earlier, when NSF began funding Weiss and Drever to marry their work on using interferometers—L-shaped assemblages of lasers and mirrors—to detect the stretching of space set off by, say, two massive black holes spiraling together. But with Weiss, Drever, and Thorne, a theorist, tripping over one another, the project remained larval. By 1987, NSF wanted a single director for the project, and Caltech appointed Rochus “Robbie” Vogt.