50 Fun Facts About Kip Thorne

The gravitational waves Kip Thorne helped detect in 2015 were predicted a century earlier by which physicist?

Albert Einstein. He was convinced the waves were too faint ever to be measured; catching one took twin detectors able to sense a change thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus.

Besides Interstellar, Thorne advised Christopher Nolan on the physics of which of these films?

Tenet. Nolan had Thorne read the script and help with its ideas about time, while admitting that the film makes no claim to be scientifically accurate.

Thorne won a famous bet with Stephen Hawking over whether which cosmic object was a black hole?

Cygnus X-1. Hawking bet against the black holes he had spent years studying, calling the wager an insurance policy in case they proved not to exist, and conceded in 1990.

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

Utah. At 13 he discovered George Gamow's popular-science classic One, Two, Three... Infinity, and by his own account the book made him decide to become a theoretical physicist.

The gravitational waves behind Thorne's Nobel Prize are ripples in what?

Spacetime. Modern physics treats gravity as the bending of space and time, so a violent enough cosmic collision sends waves out through them like ripples spreading across a pond.

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

Latter-day Saints (Mormon). His mother, an activist whom the local paper called an 'Old Radical', urged her children to leave over the church's discrimination against women, and all of them did.

With which film composer has Thorne staged multimedia concerts about black holes and gravitational waves?

Hans Zimmer. The Interstellar composer's music plays over physicists' simulations of the warped universe, part of Thorne's effort to inspire people who would never open a physics book.

Which physicist, who popularised the term 'black hole', supervised Thorne's Ph.D.?

John Archibald Wheeler. By his own account the name was shouted out by someone in a lecture audience, after he had spent months hunting for something snappier than 'gravitationally completely collapsed object'.

Interstellar, which Thorne helped conceive, won its only Academy Award in which category?

Best Visual Effects. The artists rendered the film's black hole from Thorne's own equations, and what the images revealed about the bending of light was new enough to publish as physics papers.

At which university did Thorne become a full professor of theoretical physics at just 30?

Caltech. From 1968 he built a research group there to predict what gravitational waves from space should look like, decades before any detector could catch one.

From 1991 to 2009 Thorne held a chair of theoretical physics named after which Nobel laureate?

Richard Feynman. Thorne gave the chair up in 2009 to begin a second career in books and film, a move that soon produced Interstellar.

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

Carl Sagan. Obst was Thorne's date to the premiere of Sagan's own television series Cosmos; the romance faded, but the friendship lasted and eventually produced Interstellar.

LIGO, which Thorne co-founded, caught two dead stars colliding in 2017, a crash seen forging which element?

Gold. Telescopes that swung to the spot saw the glow of freshly made heavy elements, platinum among them, settling a decades-old puzzle over where such metals come from.

The gravitational waves Thorne spent his career chasing cross space at what speed?

The speed of light. A 2017 collision proved it: a burst of gamma rays reached Earth about two seconds after the waves, at the end of a journey of 130 million years.

Which US agency funded LIGO as its biggest-ever investment?

NSF. The National Science Foundation's director later called the 1992 decision a big risk, and the first detectors then listened from 2002 to 2010 without hearing a thing.

What does the "L" in LIGO stand for?

Laser. Thorne at first wrote the method off: his 1973 textbook set students an exercise meant to show it was impractical, a verdict he soon reversed and spent decades disproving.

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

Washington. The first signal reached the Louisiana detector seven milliseconds before it reached Hanford, a gap that told the team which half of the sky it had come from.

LIGO can sense changes one ten-thousandth the width of what?

A proton. To manage it, mirrors bounce each beam along its 4 km arm about 300 times, stretching the light's path to more than 1,000 km before the two beams are compared.

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

Two black holes colliding. In a fraction of a second the merger turned about three Suns' worth of mass into gravitational waves, briefly out-powering every star in the visible universe put together.

Played as sound, the first signal LIGO detected is famously described as what?

A chirp. It was so clean that many on the team took it for a drill, one of the fake signals secretly planted in the data to keep them on their toes.

During the Cold War, Thorne and his research partners shuttled almost yearly between California and which capital?

Moscow. Thorne and Vladimir Braginsky's group there kept trading visits through the Cold War, and together devised quantum measurement tricks later built into gravitational-wave detectors.

Thorne's hoop conjecture says a collapsing object becomes a black hole only if it is squeezed how?

In every direction. The imaginary hoop must fit however it is turned; Thorne left the wording deliberately loose in 1972, and mathematicians were still proving versions of it half a century later.

Which approach of Thorne's treats a black hole's surface as if it conducted electricity?

The membrane paradigm. Giving the hole an imaginary skin with electrical resistance lets astrophysicists reason about it like a circuit, and helped explain how spinning black holes may power quasars.

Which real phenomenon did Nolan leave out of Interstellar's black hole because it made the glowing disc look lopsided?

The Doppler effect. In Thorne's accurate version the side of the disc sweeping towards the camera blazed bright while the far side all but vanished, which the film-makers feared would baffle audiences.

Thorne said Interstellar's black hole must spin very fast to justify which story effect?

Time dilation. For a few hours near the hole to cost decades back on Earth, Thorne worked out that it must be enormous and whirling at very nearly the fastest rate that nature allows.

In 1988 Thorne showed that which hypothetical objects could, in principle, be turned into time machines?

Wormholes. The work began as a favour to a novelist friend who wanted to send his heroine across the galaxy through a black hole; Thorne told him it would not work and offered a tunnel through space instead.

Thorne's high-school debate partner, Merlin Olsen, went on to the Hall of Fame in which sport?

American football. Olsen made 14 Pro Bowls in 15 seasons as a Los Angeles Rams defensive tackle, though the old debater kept up his studies and earned a master's degree in economics between seasons.

The beams in each arm of Thorne's LIGO detectors travel through one of the world's largest what?

Vacuum chambers. Pumping the air out of the 4 km tubes took 40 days, and steel walls just 3 mm thick have held the atmosphere back ever since.

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

A neutron star. Such a hybrid would form when a neutron star collides with a giant star and sinks to its centre; in 2014 astronomers named the star HV 2112 as a candidate, a claim others have since disputed.

Seen from above, each LIGO observatory that Thorne helped found forms which letter?

L. The two arms meet at a right angle because a passing wave stretches space one way while squeezing it the other, so one arm grows as its partner shrinks.

Gravitation, the hefty 1973 textbook Thorne co-wrote, is a classic guide to which theory?

General relativity. The book proved so influential that physicists still cite it simply as MTW, after the initials of its three authors.

Thorne's award-winning 1994 book for general readers is titled Black Holes and what?

Time Warps. When the book appeared, the gravitational waves it describes had never been caught; two decades later Thorne's own observatory found them.

Thorne's 'weird claim' in The Science of Interstellar is that black holes contain none of what?

Matter. He writes that black holes are made from warped space and warped time and nothing else, yet each still has a mass and a spin, almost the only traits it shows the outside world.

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

Gargantua. Thorne was ecstatic at the first clips: before any other scientist, he was seeing in ultra-high definition what a fast-spinning black hole would really look like.

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

Steven Spielberg. He signed on after reading Thorne and Lynda Obst's eight-page outline, and years later admitted that it 'was a much better movie in Chris Nolan's hands than it would have been in mine'.

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

A character travelling faster than light. It broke the first of the two rules Thorne had set at the outset, that nothing in the film would violate established physical laws, and Nolan finally backed down.

Besides advising on the science, Thorne holds which credit on Interstellar?

Executive producer. The credit marks where the film began: with a short outline that he and producer Lynda Obst wrote years before Christopher Nolan came aboard.

Thorne coached an actor on his portrayal of which physicist?

J. Robert Oppenheimer. Thorne had long admired the way Oppenheimer led a room of young physicists, modelling his own research group on it, and passed that picture on to Cillian Murphy.

In the chalk solar system the eight-year-old Thorne drew with his mother, which body landed at the edge of town?

Pluto. With the Sun chalked four and a half feet wide on the pavement outside their house, Pluto was a fingertip-sized dot miles away, and the boy was hooked on astronomy.

When Hawking conceded the information-paradox bet he and Thorne had made, what did he give the winner?

A baseball encyclopedia. The stake was any encyclopedia, a book that gives its information back at will; the winner, a fan of the game's statistics, joked that his choice was fittingly heavy, like a black hole.

As of 2024, where did Thorne stand on the information-paradox bet Hawking conceded in 2004?

He still has not conceded. Asked twenty years on, Thorne called himself 'still a holdout', because one alternative way of formulating quantum mechanics would let black holes destroy information after all.

Hawking lost a 1991 bet with Thorne after wagering that which things could never exist 'naked'?

Singularities. When a computer simulation produced one, Hawking paid up with clothing 'to cover the winner's nakedness', insisted he had lost only on a technicality and promptly made the bet again.

Enzo Cilenti plays Thorne in which Oscar-winning film of 2014?

The Theory of Everything. The Stephen Hawking biopic restages the two friends' wager over a black hole, magazine subscription and all, and reached cinemas in the same season as Thorne's own Interstellar.

Thorne played himself in an episode of which sitcom?

The Big Bang Theory. In a 2019 episode Sheldon, campaigning for a Nobel Prize, tries to win over the real laureates he has offended by sending them cookies; Thorne, like the others, turns them down.

Thorne finished his doctorate in 1965 at which Ivy League university?

Princeton. Fresh from defending his thesis there, he went to a conference in London, fell into conversation in a corridor with a student named Stephen Hawking and made a friend for life.

Which word completes the title of Thorne and Blandford's 2017 textbook on optics, fluids and plasmas, Modern ___ Physics?

Classical. The book grew out of a year-long course the two taught for almost three decades, built to give young physicists the broad grounding that, they argue, many now miss.

In The Warped Side of Our Universe, his 2023 book with painter Lia Halloran, Thorne explains black holes in what form?

Poetry. Thorne's verse sits beside Halloran's ink paintings, and he says the aim is to convey the feeling of the ideas rather than the technical detail of his other life.

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

Science writing. Named after the physician-essayist who first won it, the prize went to Thorne for drawing ordinary readers into mind-bending physics through his books, talks and films.

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

Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish. Ronald Drever, who founded the project with Thorne and Weiss, had died that March, and a Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously.

Growing up amid the deep mountain winters of Logan, what did the young Thorne first want to be?

A snowplough driver. He thought it the most wonderful and powerful job in the world, until his mother took the eight-year-old to a lecture on the solar system.