Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
Date of admittance: 17/07/2018
(Omaha, Nebraska, January 27, 1936). American physicist. He obtained the Nobel Prize in Physics for the detection of gravitational waves that had been anticipated by Albert Einstein and that are a fundamental consequence of his General Theory of Relativity.
Barry C. Barish
Barry Clark Barish (Omaha, United States, 1936) is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California, USA). In 2017, he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research and the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, for his role in the detection of gravitational waves. Throughout his scientific career, he has led major experimental projects, most notably contributing to the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015.
Graduated and holding a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Barish served as the principal investigator of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) from 1994 to 2005 and was the director of the LIGO laboratory at Caltech from 1997 to 2006.
His scientific research has spanned several areas of fundamental physics. In the 1960s, he participated in the creation of the first high-intensity antiproton beam at Brookhaven. Alongside Nobel laureates Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall, and Richard Taylor, he developed the first spectrometer at Stanford for studying high-energy electron collisions. In the 1970s, he worked on the development of an accelerator capable of producing a narrow-band neutrino beam. His research was instrumental in establishing the theory of the unification of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions, developed by Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam, which forms the basis of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics.
By presidential appointment, he was a member of the United States National Science Board from 2003 to 2009 and has served on numerous scientific commissions and committees.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society, where he served as president in 2011.
Throughout his career, he has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Henry Draper Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, recognition as a “Titan of Physics”, the American Ingenuity Award from Smithsonian Magazine, the Enrico Fermi Prize, the Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize from the European Physical Society, and the Fundamental Science Zhongzhi Prize. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Bologna, the University of Florida, the University of Glasgow, Southern Methodist University, and Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski.
