Kip Thorne

Born on 1 June 1940 in Logan, Utah, Kip Thorne is a theoretical physicist who earned a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that led to the first direct detection of gravitational radiation. Thorne received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Caltech and attained master’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton. Since 1966 he has worked at Caltech, where he has focused largely on studying the implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In 1973 he cowrote the textbook Gravitation, a detailed treatise for graduate students in general relativity. On page 1014 the authors wrote that using laser-based detectors to spot gravitational waves was of “little experimental interest” due to their lack of sensitivity. Nonetheless, Thorne pursued the idea, and in 1984 he cofounded, along with Ronald Drever and Rainer Weiss, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project. The project faced numerous technical and funding challenges, and there were plenty of quarrels within the leadership team. But in 2016 Thorne joined his LIGO colleagues to announce that the observatory had finally detected gravitational waves , which were emitted by a pair of black holes more than a billion light-years away. Less than two years later, Thorne was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Weiss and longtime LIGO director Barry Barish. (Drever died in March 2017, and Nobels are not awarded posthumously.) Thorne’s theory work has also covered wild concepts including wormholes and time travel, so it was fitting that Thorne went on to produce the sci-fi movie Interstellar. He served as the film’s science advisor and ensured that the look of the black hole Gargantua was consistent with the laws of physics. (Photo credit: Keenan Pepper, CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Date in History: 1 June 1940