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50 free Kip Thorne trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Kip Thorne is the physicist Hollywood calls. He worked out wormhole physics for Carl Sagan's Contact, dreamed up Interstellar with producer Lynda Obst (whom Sagan had set him up with on a blind date), spent two weeks talking Christopher Nolan out of faster-than-light travel, and coached Cillian Murphy on playing Oppenheimer. In between he co-founded LIGO, the largest project the NSF ever funded, and shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics when it finally heard two black holes collide. This Kip Thorne trivia quiz runs 50 questions across his life and work: Logan, Utah and his economist mother, John Wheeler at Princeton, full professor at Caltech aged 30, the hoop conjecture and the membrane paradigm, Thorne-Żytkow objects, traversable wormholes and the averaged null energy condition, LIGO's founding and first detection, the cosmic censorship and information-paradox bets with Stephen Hawking, Gravitation and Black Holes and Time Warps, and the films from Contact to Tenet. Easy questions come first; the final third is for people who know their Blandford-Znajek from their Hartle-Thorne. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's articles on Thorne, LIGO, Interstellar, Stephen Hawking and the Thorne-Hawking-Preskill bet, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. If you enjoy this quiz, try our black holes and Stephen Hawking quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kip Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions to which detector?
LIGO
He shared it with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for the observation of gravitational waves.
Q 02Thorne was a scientific consultant on which 2020 Christopher Nolan film about time inversion?
Tenet
He later coached Cillian Murphy for Nolan's Oppenheimer as well.
Q 03Thorne advised which novelist on the physics for Contact?
Carl Sagan
Sagan wanted his heroine to cross the galaxy plausibly; Thorne's answer launched a whole research programme.
Q 04Thorne was born in 1940 in Logan, in which state?
Utah
His father was a professor of soil chemistry at Utah State University.
Q 05Thorne's mother Alison was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in which subject from Iowa State College?
Economics
Two of his four siblings also became professors.
Q 06Thorne was raised in which church, which he later left at his mother's urging?
Latter-day Saints (Mormon)
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.
Q 07As a high-school senior Thorne won recognition in which famous student competition?
Westinghouse Science Talent Search
He then took his bachelor's degree at Caltech in 1962.
Q 08Thorne's Princeton Ph.D. supervisor, who coined the term "black hole," was who?
John Archibald Wheeler
The two later co-wrote the doorstop textbook Gravitation with a third author.
Q 09Thorne's doctoral dissertation concerned the geometrodynamics of what kind of systems?
Cylindrical
Wheeler had asked him whether a cylindrical bundle of magnetic field lines could implode under its own gravity; it cannot.
Q 10Thorne became a full professor of theoretical physics at Caltech in 1970 at what age?
30
That made him one of the youngest full professors in the institute's history.
Q 11From 1991 to 2009 Thorne held a Caltech chair named after which physicist?
Richard Feynman
He remains Feynman Professor emeritus.
Q 12Which physicist set Thorne up on a blind date with future film producer Lynda Obst?
Carl Sagan
They dated in 1979-80, stayed friends, and decades later developed Interstellar together.
Q 13Thorne's second wife, Carolee Winstein, is a USC professor of what?
Biokinesiology and physical therapy
They married in 1984.
Q 21With Carlton Caves, Thorne invented the back-action-evasion approach to what kind of measurement?
Quantum nondemolition
It applies to both gravitational-wave detection and quantum optics.
Q 22Thorne's hoop conjecture: an object becomes a black hole when a hoop of critical circumference fits around it and what?
Set into rotation
The critical circumference is 4πGM/c², and it must fit in every direction, not just one.
Q 23Thorne and his students' approach to black hole theory is known by what name?
The membrane paradigm
Q 14Roughly how many physicists have received Caltech Ph.D.s under Thorne's personal mentorship?
50
Many became leaders in observational, experimental or astrophysical relativity.
Q 15Thorne co-founded the LIGO project in which year?
1984
It became the largest project the National Science Foundation had ever funded.
Q 16What does the "L" in LIGO stand for?
Laser
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory: two L-shaped detectors about 3,000 km apart.
Q 17LIGO's two observatories are in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford in which state?
Washington
They are about 3,000 km apart, so a real gravitational wave hits them milliseconds apart.
Q 18How long is each arm of a LIGO interferometer?
4 km
The laser beams make about 280 round trips down the arms before recombining.
Q 19LIGO's first gravitational-wave detection, announced in February 2016, came from what event?
Two black holes colliding
The signal, GW150914, arrived on 14 September 2015 from a distant galaxy.
Q 20The two black holes in LIGO's first detection collided roughly how far from Earth?
1.3 billion light-years
Each was around 30 solar masses; the merger was recorded on 14 September 2015.
It treats the event horizon like a conducting membrane and helped clarify how black holes power quasars.
Q 24With Wojciech Zurek, Thorne showed that a black hole's entropy is the logarithm of what?
The number of ways it could have been made
It is a statistical-mechanics reading of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.
Q 25Thorne deduced accretion can spin a black hole up to what fraction of the maximum spin?
0.998
He worked it out with Igor Novikov and Don Page using thin accretion disk theory; it is probably nature's speed limit.
Q 26Thorne is best known to the public for his controversial theory that what could be used for time travel?
Wormholes
With Morris and Yurtsever he showed traversable ones need exotic matter with negative energy to stay open.
Q 27Thorne, Morris and Yurtsever showed traversable wormholes need fields violating which requirement?
The averaged null energy condition
In plain terms, they need negative energy spread over a large enough region.
Q 28With Sung-Won Kim, Thorne identified a mechanism that may always prevent what?
Backward time travel
The explosive growth of vacuum polarisation could stop spacetime forming closed timelike curves.
Q 29Thorne-Żytkow objects, predicted by Thorne and Anna Żytkow, are red supergiants with what at their core?
A neutron star
A handful of candidates have been spotted, but none is confirmed.
Q 30The Hartle-Thorne metric describes the spacetime outside what kind of body?
A slowly rotating one
It is an approximate solution for a stationary, rigidly and slowly rotating, axially symmetric body.