Episode 10: Barry Barish discusses gravitational waves, LIGO, and the scientists who made it happen

STEM-Talk

Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford

Natural Sciences, Alternative Health, Science, Health & Fitness, Nutrition

4.7 • 706 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2016

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In many respects, Barry Barish is the quintessential scientist: soft-spoken and modest, he is also completely dedicated to the pursuit of pure science. Barish is currently the Linde professor of physics at Caltech. He’s a leading expert on gravitational waves, and his leadership and advocacy to the National Science Foundation about the need for LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) played a key role in convincing the NSF to fund it. Barish was the principal investigator of LIGO in 1994, before becoming its director in 1997. The pay-off of Barish’s effort and the NSF decision was huge: Last February, Barish and other scientists announced to the world that they had detected gravitational waves four months before, marking the first ever direct detection since Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916. The proof came via a chirping sound—played below in this interview—which was the sound-wave translation of the merger of two black holes more than a billion light years away. Barish talks to STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host and IHMC Director Ken Ford about the history of Einstein’s theory and the science that later ensued to set up this significant discovery. He also talks about the scientists who made it happen. Barish gave an IHMC lecture in 2009 entitled “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Sounds from the Distant Universe:” http://tinyurl.com/gt9qpb9. Here is a link to the LIGO press conference on the gravitational waves detection: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2131411

Transcript

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0:00.0	I don't always listen to podcasts, but when I do, I listen to STEM talk, interviewing the most interesting people in the world of science and technology.
0:14.5	Stay curious, my friends.
0:19.8	Welcome to STEM Talk. Stem Talk, STEM Talk, STEM Talk, STEM Talk.
0:21.1	Stem Talk.
0:21.6	Stem Talk.
0:22.6	Stem Talk.
0:23.6	Stem Talk.
0:24.6	Welcome to STEM Talk, where we introduce you to fascinating people who passionately
0:29.6	inhabit the scientific and technical frontiers of our society.
0:33.6	I'm your host, Don Cornegis, and I'm here today with IHMC's director, Dr. Ken Ford.
0:38.8	Hello, Don.
0:39.7	Good to be here with you.
0:41.2	Today we have a terrific interview with Dr. Barry Barish, who played an absolutely key role in the effort to fund and build the LIGO instrument that detected a gravity wave on September 15, 2015. This represents the first direct detection of
0:58.7	gravity waves since they were predicted by Einstein back in 1916, and the first ever observation
1:05.5	of the merger of a pair of black holes. The announcement of the detection in February made worldwide news.
1:13.4	So this will actually be our second STEM Talk episode on the detection of gravity waves.
1:17.6	Episode number six featured an interview with Michael Turner on this topic, and I urge the
1:22.3	interested listener to go back and enjoy that interview as well.
1:25.6	Let's hear the chirp, signaling the detection of a gravity wave emanating from two black holes merging one billion light years away.
1:39.3	Gravity waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by a cataclysmic event.
1:51.0	Like the ripples in a pond caused by a rock dropped into it.
1:55.0	Of course, this is only an analogy.
	...

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