17 Quotes by Kip S. Thorne

Why are black holes so different from all other objects in the macroscopic Universe? Why are they, and they alone, so elegantly simple? If I knew the answer, it would probably tell me something very deep about the nature of physical laws. But I don’t know.

The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second.

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?

We humans are confined to our brane.

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.

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.

Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.

The French translation of ‘a black hole has no hair’ is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail.

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