Kip Thorne

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

— Kip Thorne

I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that's the most glorious…

— Kip Thorne

Black holes do not emit light, so you visualize them through gravitational lensing - how they bend light from other objects.

— Kip Thorne

We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll…

— Kip Thorne

I can enjoy 'Harry Potter' and 'Star Trek,' but I really appreciate hard science fiction.

— Kip Thorne

I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough…

— Kip Thorne

I got a lot of notoriety early on. Much of my career I was just trying to prove I was as good…

— Kip Thorne

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal…

— Kip Thorne

If you have a wormhole, then you can turn them into time machines for going backward in time.

— Kip Thorne

Wormholes - if you don't have something threading through them to hold them open, the walls will basically collapse so fast that…

— Kip Thorne

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size.…

— Kip Thorne

We're born with a curiosity about the universe. Those people who don't have a curiosity don't have it because it's gotten beaten…

— Kip Thorne

A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans,…

— Kip Thorne

It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future…

— Kip Thorne

Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes…

— Kip Thorne

We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes…

— Kip Thorne

I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we…

— Kip Thorne

When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small…

— Kip Thorne

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity. We are several decades…

— Kip Thorne

Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the…

— Kip Thorne

When Galileo first trained his optic telescope on the heavens and opened up modern optical astronomy, that was the first of the…

— Kip Thorne

As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.

— Kip Thorne

As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a snowplow driver. When you grow up in the Rocky Mountains, like…

— Kip Thorne

The jury is not in, so we just don't know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could…

— Kip Thorne

The essential point is that, although coordinates are a powerful, and sometimes essential, tool in many calculations, the fundamental laws of physics…

— Kip Thorne