The technical challenges were technical challenges that were not unbeatable; it was just that we had to learn how to do things and how to build a sensitive enough device. That took us 20 years after we built the first version of the LIGO detector.

Anything that makes us take more seriously scientists - or economists or chemists or physicists or biologists - I think is helpful in times when things get distorted because of people not paying attention to all the facts.

The size of the effect that we measured from the first event, the merging of two black holes, the actual size of the signal was about one thousandth the size of a proton, what it did to our apparatus.

Barry Barish Quotes