Ocean Park resident, physicist, Linde Professor of Physics at Cal Tech and President-Elect of the American Physical Society, the association of physicists, Barry Barish, in talking about his work, said, “I study matter. At the beginning there were equal particles and anti particles. When put together they annihilate each other and make energy. For a reason we don’t know, after the Big Bang, there were excess particles and those particles are why we exist.
“I believe the best science comes when we do science to learn science and not to create widgets. But you should know that the World Wide Web comes from the work of particle physicists and was invented at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) near Geneva and at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). The collaboration necessary between the two labs required transmitting huge amounts of data. In solving the problem of how to share the data, scientists created the World Wide Web, which has become part of, and changed, our daily lives.
“Stimulated emission was an idea postulated in 1917 by Einstein. The laser (light amplified stimulated emission radiation) was first demonstrated 50 years ago this month, at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu. The science of the laser has made possible laser printers, the DVD, bar codes, and, of course, many advances in medicine.
“Probably the biggest problem of our time is energy. The evidence for global warming is overwhelming but not irrefutable. Whatever you think of global warming as a problem, it’s a fact that we are putting a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere because of the use of fossil fuels. It’s a ‘one-time experiment’ we’re doing without knowing what the effects will be. What we do know is that we have no way to reverse global warming.
“We can’t afford a one-time experiment. We’ve never seen this much carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a scientific and technical problem but it’s a real problem and we need to improve the ways to go from research to practical applications. There can be no ‘one way’ now to meet our demand for energy, so all alternatives to fossil fuels should be used.
“It’s hard to spend money on pure science when there are so many problems in the world. But these problems can’t be solved with only slogans or only money. We need knowledge.”
Writing this article, I thought he might prefer if I used his “real’ name, which I didn’t know. Seems his first grade teacher, without any way of knowing he would one day be a physicist, also wanted to know his ‘real’ name. When she asked, he said, ‘Barry.’ Assuming he was just giving her a hard time, she told him she would call him ‘John’. That lasted until Parents Day when his parents confirmed his ‘real’ name was Barry.
As a young student, Barry was interested in how things worked and remembers, that at age 6, he puzzled over why ice floated in water since both were made of water. (If you also wonder why ice floats in water, try Google.)
At 13 his father gave Barry a job helping on wheel alignment and wheel balancing at his shop. Barry then went to the library to study and taught himself everything about car suspension, much more than he needed to know for the work he was supposed to do.
Barry said, “I didn’t have the objective of being a scientist. In high school what I wanted was to be a tennis player. And I was All City in LA. In college, still playing on the Berkeley tennis team, I studied engineering. I was soon cured of the idea of engineering by the drafting and survey classes. But the problem solving of physics appealed to me. My interest increased over time. I enjoyed physics and was good at it and the more I learned the better I got and the more I liked it.
“I have questions that can’t be answered and I look for answers. Being a physicist is a combination of having a high aptitude for math, a great curiosity and a willingness to be creative. I was always a scientist in attitude, but it took many years to develop the tools to be a real scientist.”
Barry often rides the beach bike path, enjoying the good weather and sunshine. He thinks about Santa Monica and offers this idea, “Our city could be a model energy efficiency city. The question would be how to stimulate energy efficiency in the city so that we achieve a meaningful result.” And he wonders if that’s a problem we want to solve.
