Josh Barrow

I’ve always enjoyed listening to and singing opera, ever since I was a kid. There’s a trial and tribulation to it, and it connects to something more visceral than other kinds of vocalization. I occasionally like to sing that way for karaoke – the first time I did karaoke was in Los Alamos, surrounded by other students from the lab. It was ‘I Will Always Love You,’ which has that same quality. It was a good time, to be able to get out with people, surrounded by good and bad alike, and nevertheless enjoy them all. It’s so enriching to realize that the people who are coming from all these different places to work on experiments generally share the same kind of love for hobbies, music, and problems that you do, and in some respect that all of that supersedes a lot of our own national borders. For DUNE, I predominantly work on nucleon decay and high-energy physics—looking for things that are rare or speculative, but may undergird the foundational structures of the universe. I work with other experts on how we can recognize those rare signals and maybe finally observe something truly beyond the Standard Model. You have to appreciate a lot of different physics at different scales, and it requires a kind of overarching synthesis. It’s absolutely fascinating to play with, theoretically and experimentally.