50 Fun Facts About Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to which detector?

He shared it with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for the observation of gravitational waves.

Thorne was a scientific consultant on which 2020 Christopher Nolan film about time inversion?

He later coached Cillian Murphy for Nolan's Oppenheimer as well.

Thorne advised which novelist on the physics for Contact?

Sagan wanted his heroine to cross the galaxy plausibly; Thorne's answer launched a whole research programme.

Thorne was born in 1940 in Logan, in which state?

His father was a professor of soil chemistry at Utah State University.

Thorne's mother Alison was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in which subject from Iowa State College?

Two of his four siblings also became professors.

Thorne was raised in which church, which he later left at his mother's urging?

She asked her children to leave over its treatment of women; he now identifies as an atheist but says science and religion are not incompatible.

As a high-school senior Thorne won recognition in which famous student competition?

He then took his bachelor's degree at Caltech in 1962.

Thorne's Princeton Ph.D. supervisor, who coined the term "black hole," was who?

The two later co-wrote the doorstop textbook Gravitation with a third author.

Thorne's doctoral dissertation concerned the geometrodynamics of what kind of systems?

Wheeler had asked him whether a cylindrical bundle of magnetic field lines could implode under its own gravity; it cannot.

Thorne became a full professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 1970 at what age?

That made him one of the youngest full professors in the institute's history.

From 1991 to 2009 Thorne held a Caltech chair named after which physicist?

He remains Feynman Professor emeritus.

Which physicist set Thorne up on a blind date with future film producer Lynda Obst?

They dated in 1979-80, stayed friends, and decades later developed Interstellar together.

Thorne's second wife, Carolee Winstein, is a USC professor of what?

They married in 1984.

Roughly how many physicists have received Caltech Ph.D.s under Thorne's personal mentorship?

Many became leaders in observational, experimental or astrophysical relativity.

Thorne co-founded the LIGO project in which year?

It became the largest project the National Science Foundation had ever funded.

What does the "L" in LIGO stand for?

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory: two L-shaped detectors about 3,000 km apart.

LIGO's two observatories are in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford in which state?

They are about 3,000 km apart, so a real gravitational wave hits them milliseconds apart.

How long is each arm of a LIGO interferometer?

The laser beams make about 280 round trips down the arms before recombining.

LIGO's first gravitational-wave detection, announced in February 2016, came from what event?

The signal, GW150914, arrived on 14 September 2015 from a distant galaxy.

The two black holes in LIGO's first detection collided roughly how far from Earth?

Each was around 30 solar masses; the merger was recorded on 14 September 2015.

With Carlton Caves, Thorne invented the back-action-evasion approach to what kind of measurement?

It applies to both gravitational-wave detection and quantum optics.

Thorne's hoop conjecture: an object becomes a black hole when a hoop of critical circumference fits around it and what?

The critical circumference is 4πGM/c², and it must fit in every direction, not just one.

Thorne and his students' approach to black hole theory is known by what name?

It treats the event horizon like a conducting membrane and helped clarify how black holes power quasars.

With Wojciech Zurek, Thorne showed that a black hole's entropy is the logarithm of what?

It is a statistical-mechanics reading of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

Thorne deduced accretion can spin a black hole up to what fraction of the maximum spin?

He worked it out with Igor Novikov and Don Page using thin accretion disk theory; it is probably nature's speed limit.

Thorne is best known to the public for his controversial theory that what could be used for time travel?

With Morris and Yurtsever he showed traversable ones need exotic matter with negative energy to stay open.

Thorne, Morris and Yurtsever showed traversable wormholes need fields violating which requirement?

In plain terms, they need negative energy spread over a large enough region.

With Sung-Won Kim, Thorne identified a mechanism that may always prevent what?

The explosive growth of vacuum polarisation could stop spacetime forming closed timelike curves.

Thorne-Żytkow objects, predicted by Thorne and Anna Żytkow, are red supergiants with what at their core?

A handful of candidates have been spotted, but none is confirmed.

The Hartle-Thorne metric describes the spacetime outside what kind of body?

It is an approximate solution for a stationary, rigidly and slowly rotating, axially symmetric body.

Thorne co-wrote the 1973 textbook Gravitation with John Wheeler and which other physicist?

Nicknamed "the phone book" for its size, it has been called one of the great scientific books of all time.

Thorne's 1994 popular book, subtitled Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, is called Black Holes and what?

It won that year's Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and has appeared in at least twelve languages.

In The Science of Interstellar, Thorne says black holes are made of warped space, warped time and what?

Nolan wrote the foreword to the book, which explains the film's science.

What is the name of the supermassive black hole in Interstellar?

Its rendering was based on Thorne's equations for light rays around a spinning black hole.

Interstellar was originally set to be directed by whom, before Christopher Nolan took over?

Spielberg later admitted it "was a much better movie in Chris Nolan's hands than it would have been in mine."

Thorne reportedly spent two weeks arguing Nolan out of including what in Interstellar?

His two rules were that nothing violate established physics and that all speculation spring from science, not a screenwriter.

Thorne's role on Interstellar included which producing credit?

The film grew from a treatment he wrote with Lynda Obst in 2006.

Thorne advised actor Cillian Murphy on his portrayal of which physicist?

Nolan's Oppenheimer won seven Academy Awards including Best Actor for Murphy.

In the 1997 information-paradox bet, Thorne and Hawking wagered against which physicist?

The stake was an encyclopedia "from which information can be retrieved at will."

When Hawking conceded the information-paradox bet in 2004, what did he give Preskill?

Hawking joked he should perhaps have handed over the ashes instead.

As of 2024, what is Thorne's position on the information-paradox bet?

He remained unconvinced by Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the prize.

Hawking's earlier 1991 wager with Thorne and Preskill concerned which conjecture?

Hawking bet naked singularities could not exist and conceded in 1997, then re-bet on refined terms.

Which actor portrayed Thorne in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything?

Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar for playing Hawking; Thorne later attended Hawking's funeral.

Thorne played himself in an episode of which sitcom?

"The Laureate Accumulation" also featured fellow Nobelists Frances Arnold and George Smoot.

Time travel in Larry Niven's novel Rainbow Mars is based on whose work?

In the novel, any trip to a time before Thorne's work lands the traveller in a fantasy version of reality.

Which word fills the gap in Thorne and Blandford's 2017 textbook title, Modern ... Physics?

It covers optics, fluids, plasmas, elasticity, relativity and statistical physics.

Thorne explored astrophysics through poetry and illustrations with artist Lia Halloran in which book?

He has published more than 150 scholarly articles as well.

Thorne received the 2018 Lewis Thomas Prize, which honours what?

Earlier winners include Oliver Sacks and E. O. Wilson.

With which two physicists did Kip Thorne share the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics?

Drever, the third LIGO co-founder, had died in March 2017 and Nobels are not awarded posthumously.

Thorne's father, D. Wynne Thorne, was a Utah State University professor of what?

His mother Alison was an economist, so Thorne grew up in an academic household in Logan, Utah.