Kip Thorne

Logan, Utah, in the 1940s: his father taught soil chemistry at Utah State, his mother had been the first woman to take a doctorate in economics from Iowa State College, and two of his four siblings became professors as well. The family was Mormon. Shortly before she died, his mother told her children to leave the church over its discrimination against women, and all of them did — Thorne calls himself an atheist and says there is no fundamental incompatibility between science and religion, he simply does not believe in God. Caltech gave him a bachelor's degree in 1962. Princeton gave him a doctorate three years later, under John Archibald Wheeler, on the geometrodynamics of cylindrical systems. He was back at Caltech as a full professor at 30.

With Charles Misner and Wheeler he wrote Gravitation in 1973, the doorstop that trained two generations in general relativity. He worked out the membrane paradigm for treating a black hole's horizon as a surface, proposed the hoop conjecture on when an imploding object must become a black hole, and predicted with Anna Żytkow a kind of red supergiant with a neutron star inside it. He advised Carl Sagan on how to move a character across the galaxy in Contact, and showed with two students that a traversable wormhole would need matter violating the averaged null energy condition. In 1984 he cofounded LIGO, which became the largest single enterprise the National Science Foundation had ever undertaken, and spent three decades working out what it should be listening for.

Nothing came back for a very long time. LIGO cost nearly 300 million dollars to build and more than 30 million a year to run, and it was 31 years from the founding of the project to the morning in September 2015 when the instruments in Louisiana and Washington both registered two black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years away. Thorne had left the Feynman chair in 2009, six years before that, to write and work on films. The credit for the detection also did not divide cleanly. The Shaw, Kavli and Harvey prizes of 2016 all went to Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever, the three who had started it. The Nobel Prize in Physics a year later went to Thorne, Weiss and Barry Barish.

He is 86 and still working. The instrument he argued for has stopped being an experiment and become an observatory — gravitational-wave astronomy is now a field with a catalogue, and the sound of two black holes hitting each other is a routine measurement. He wrote Black Holes and Time Warps in 1994 and it has been published in a dozen languages, wrote The Science of Interstellar in 2014 to explain a film he had helped build, and put out a graduate textbook covering six fields of physics in 2017 and a book of poems and paintings about warped spacetime after that. Cambridge gave him an honorary doctorate in 2024 and the Rochester Institute of Technology another in 2026.

Kip Thorne's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Gravitation book
  Written with Charles Misner and John Archibald Wheeler 1973
• LIGO company
  Cofounded with Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever — the largest project the NSF has undertaken 1984
• Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy book
  Published in at least a dozen languages 1994
• The first direct detection of gravitational waves discovery
  Two black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years away, announced on February 11, 2016 2015
• The Science of Interstellar book
  The physics behind the film, with a foreword by Christopher Nolan 2014
• Modern Classical Physics book
  A graduate textbook written with Roger D. Blandford 2017

• 1962 aged ~22 Takes a bachelor's degree in physics at Caltech
• 1965 aged ~25 Finishes a Princeton doctorate under John Archibald Wheeler The dissertation was on the geometrodynamics of cylindrical systems.
• 1970 aged ~30 Becomes a full professor at Caltech at 30 One of the youngest in the institute's history.
• 1973 aged ~33 Publishes Gravitation with Charles Misner and Wheeler
• 1984 aged ~44 Cofounds the LIGO project with Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever It became the largest single enterprise the National Science Foundation had undertaken.
• 2009 aged ~69 Steps down from the Feynman chair to write and make films He stayed on as Feynman Professor emeritus.
• 2014 aged ~74 Interstellar is released, with Thorne as scientific consultant He published The Science of Interstellar alongside it.
• February 11, 2016 aged 75 LIGO announces the first direct detection of gravitational waves The signal had been recorded the previous September, from two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away.
• 2017 aged ~77 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish

• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. advised on Contact
• Richard Feynman 1918–1988
  Theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and his accessible teaching style. holder of the chair he took
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. tested his prediction
• Murray Gell-Mann 1929–2019
  Theoretical physicist who discovered quarks and won the Nobel Prize for his standard model of particle physics. Caltech colleague
• Edwin Hubble 1889–1953
  Astronomer whose discovery of expanding galaxies provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory. earlier at the same observatory
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. earlier Caltech physicist