Kip Thorne Quotes

Our universe – it’s three-dimensional, but we can pretend it’s two-dimensional so it’s like this sheet of paper – and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it’s thousands of miles from Pasadena to London.

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That’s not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

If you have a wormhole, then you can turn them into time machines for going backward in time.

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes – maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we’re dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

I got a lot of notoriety early on. Much of my career I was just trying to prove I was as good as the world thought I was.

I do hope that ‘Interstellar’ and this kind of science in film will catch the public fancy and help to reignite an interest in science – and a respect for the power of science in dealing with the problems that society has to deal with.

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity. We are several decades away from a definitive understanding, 20 or 30 years, but it could be sooner than that.

Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool.

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.

The jury is not in, so we just don’t know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That’s sad, that’s unfortunate, but that’s the direction in which things are pointing.

We’re born with a curiosity about the universe. Those people who don’t have a curiosity don’t have it because it’s gotten beaten out of them in some way.

We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.

When I ask myself what are the great things we got from the Renaissance, it’s the great art, the great music, the science insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Two hundred years from now, when you ask what are the great things that came from this era, I think it’s going to be an understanding of the universe around us.

As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a snowplow driver. When you grow up in the Rocky Mountains, like I did, you see the snow drifts piled up six feet high, and you’re two feet, so it’s impressive.

If you have somebody who’s brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.

I’m a real klutz computationally, so Mathematica is just ideal for me.

I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.

The essential point is that, although coordinates are a powerful, and sometimes essential, tool in many calculations, the fundamental laws of physics can be expressed without the aid of coordinates; and, indeed, their coordinate-free expressions are generally elegant and exceedingly powerful.

As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I’m very humble.

The human race has a yearning to explore. That’s part of our biological and psychological makeup.

A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.

We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age.

It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.

I can’t imagine not being in a phase where I’m trying to understand something or create something. That’s the essence of life.

I can enjoy ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Star Trek,’ but I really appreciate hard science fiction.

I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.

Sending people into space is very important culturally. That’s really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.

I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that’s the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked.

We’ll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We’ll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called ‘inflationary era’ of the universe. We’ll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.

We’re going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory – it’s the main missing piece.

‘Closed timelike curve’ is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough to make your brain mushy and go to sleep.

Closed timelike curve is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful.

If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably… is being, like, from New York to Australia… what we’ve achieved so far, in going to the moon, that’s about two-and-a-half inches. So that’s the challenge.

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes – maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what were dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.