Kip S. Thorne > Quotes

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,”
― Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

“Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“An explosion in space makes no sound, as there is no air to transmit the sound waves.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Some segments of this book may be rough going. That's the nature of real science. It requires thought. Sometimes deep thought. But thinking can be rewarding. You can just skip the rough parts, or you can struggle to understand.”
― Kip S. Thorne

“Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“At our meeting, I suggested to Steven and Lynda two guidelines for the science of Interstellar: 1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe. 2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some “respectable” scientists regard as possible.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“No matter how hard we may try, we can only travel forward. The relativistic laws guarantee it.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Revolutions that upend established scientific truth are exceedingly rare. But when they happen, they can have profound effects on science and technology.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Yes, that’s what I meant to say. If this seems a bit circular to you, well, it is, but it has deep meaning.”
― Kip S. Thorne

“But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important. I hope this book contributes to that understanding.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“In 2014, the Earth’s gravity is weakest in southern India (blue spot) and strongest in Iceland and Indonesia (red spots).”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“But ours is not a dystopia. Life is still tolerable and in some ways pleasant, with little amenities such as baseball continuing. However, we no longer think big. We no longer aspire to great things. We aspire to little more than just keeping life going.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“The French translation of ‘a black hole has no hair’ is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“We don’t know what triggered the big bang, nor what, if anything, existed before it. But somehow the universe emerged as a vast sea of ultrahot gas, expanding fast in all directions like the fireball ignited by a nuclear bomb blast or by the explosion of a gas pipeline. Except that the big bang was not destructive (so far as we know). Instead, it created everything in our universe, or rather the seeds for everything.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein’s relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It’s somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“How could human civilization decline so far, yet seem so normal in many respects? And is it scientifically possible that a blight could wipe out all edible”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Can you identify in your own life speculations that became educated guesses and then truth? Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life?”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity (Figure 26.7). Fig. 26.6. Our bet about naked singularities. Fig. 26.7. Left: Matthew Choptuik. Middle: An imploding gravitational wave. Right: The boiling produced by the wave, and the naked singularity at the center of the magnifying glass. Now, such a singularity can never occur in nature. The required tuning is not a natural thing. But an exceedingly advanced civilization could produce such a singularity artificially by precisely tuning a wave’s implosion, and then could try to extract the laws of quantum gravity from the singularity’s behavior.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“The resulting, stable singularities now carry the name BKL in honor of Belinsky, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz. A BKL singularity is chaotic. Highly chaotic. And lethal. Highly lethal.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“There is a maximum spin rate that any black hole can have. If it spins faster than that maximum, its horizon disappears, leaving the singularity inside it wide open for all the universe to see; that is, making it naked—which is probably forbidden by the laws of physics”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“singularities, he asserted, “are a place in which the fiery marriage of Einstein’s relativistic laws with the quantum laws is consummated.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“so matter as we know it gets stretched and squeezed out of existence.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“El cálculo, la teoría de variable compleja, la teoría cualitativa de ecuaciones diferenciales, la teoría de grupos y la geometría diferencial estaban cubiertas;”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“(Caltech is a wonderful place. Named the top university in the world by the Times of London in each of the last three years, it is small enough—just 300 professors, 1000 undergrads, and 1200 graduate students—that I know Caltech experts in all branches of science. It was”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“La independencia nutre a la fuerza.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“The detector consists of four huge mirrors (40 kilograms, 34 centimeters in diameter) that hang from overhead supports at the ends of two perpendicular arms. The waves’ tendex lines stretch one arm while squeezing the other, and then squeeze the first while stretching the second, over and over and over again. The oscillating separation between mirrors is monitored with laser beams, by a technique called interferometry. Hence LIGO’s name: Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“En ello residía la belleza de la especulación. Era”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else—no matter whatsoever.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar