Thorne, Kip

Kip is The Feymann Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. He is one of the leading experts on Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the warping of spacetime, particularly in and around black holes. He is a pioneer in the search for gravitational waves. In popular culture, he is known for his work on the deep physics of time travel and wormholes. Here is how Kip describes black holes: “A black hole is the ultimate in spacetime warpage, according to Einstein’s equations: It is made wholly and solely from that warpage. Its enormous warpage is produced by an enormous amount of highly compacted energy — energy that resides not in matter, but in the warpage itself. Warpage begets warpage without the aid of matter. That is the essence of a black hole. If I had a black hole the size of the world’s largest pumpkin, about 10 meters in circumference, then knowing Euclid’s laws of geometry, you might expect its diameter to be 10 meters divided by ? = 3.14159..., or about 3 meters. But the hole’s diameter is far larger than 3 meters, perhaps more like 300 meters. How can this be? Quite simply: Euclid’s laws fail in the hole’s highly warped space.” Looking to the future, Kip believes that Sometime between 2008 and 2030, gravitational waves from the Big Bang singularity will be discovered. There will ensue an era, lasting at least until 2050, in which great efforts are made to measure the spectrum of the primordial gravitational waves and to map out the waves’ intensity pattern on the sky. These efforts will reveal intimate details of the big-bang singularity, and will thereby verify that some version of string theory is the correct quantum theory of gravity, and they will also reveal a great richness of phenomena in the first second of the universe’s life.”