Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne
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Full Name and Common Aliases
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Kip Stephen Thorne was born on June 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah.
Birth and Death Dates
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Born: June 1, 1940
Still living as of 2022
Nationality and Profession(s)
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Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of black holes and the behavior of matter in extreme environments.
Early Life and Background
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Growing up in a small town in Utah, Thorne developed an interest in physics at an early age. He was particularly drawn to the works of Albert Einstein, which sparked his passion for exploring the mysteries of the universe. Thorne earned his Bachelor's degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and later received his Ph.D. in 1962.
Major Accomplishments
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Thorne's work on black holes has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of these enigmatic objects. He is known for developing the "membrane paradigm," which describes the behavior of matter at the event horizon, the point of no return around a black hole. Thorne has also made significant contributions to our knowledge of gravitational waves and their detection.
Notable Works or Actions
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Thorne's work on gravitational waves led to the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which was instrumental in detecting these ripples in spacetime. He is also a prominent advocate for the importance of theoretical physics in understanding the universe.
Impact and Legacy
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Thorne's research has had a profound impact on our understanding of black holes, gravitational waves, and the behavior of matter in extreme environments. His work has inspired new areas of research and paved the way for advancements in fields such as cosmology and general relativity.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
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Thorne's groundbreaking research has earned him numerous accolades, including the Nobel Prize in Physics (2017) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016). His work continues to inspire new generations of physicists and scientists, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential minds of our time.
Quotes by Kip Thorne
Wormholes - if you don't have something threading through them to hold them open, the walls will basically collapse so fast that nothing can go through them.
The jury is not in, so we just don't know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That's sad, that's unfortunate, but that's the direction in which things are pointing.
My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.
We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.
If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably... is being, like, from New York to Australia... what we've achieved so far, in going to the moon, that's about two-and-a-half inches. So that's the challenge.
The essential point is that, although coordinates are a powerful, and sometimes essential, tool in many calculations, the fundamental laws of physics can be expressed without the aid of coordinates; and, indeed, their coordinate-free expressions are generally elegant and exceedingly powerful.
I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.
I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that's the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked.
I got a lot of notoriety early on. Much of my career I was just trying to prove I was as good as the world thought I was.