Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne is a theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics.

Thorne is among the most influential scientists or our era, and a lucid communicator of scientific concepts to a mass audience. Through his work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Carl Sagan’s Contact, he introduced us to wormholes, black holes, the theory of time travel, and so much more. And through his talks, he looks at how scientific breakthroughs may shape our future.

In his decades-long career, Kip Thorne personally trained many of today's world leaders in research on black holes and other relativistic phenomena. Thorne is the co-founder of the billion-dollar LIGO project, which stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Today, LIGO is on the verge of opening up a radically new window onto the universe, based on ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves. Thorne and his students invented quantum nondemolition technology to control the quantum behavior of human-sized objects, and they pioneered the modern theory of wormholes and time travel.

Thorne provided the scientific vision for Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar and served as its science advisor and executive producer. He also introduced wormholes into modern science fiction and movies through his work on Carl Sagan’s novel and film Contact. He is the author of the bestselling book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. To accompany Nolan's film, he has written The Science of Interstellar, which reveals that the movie’s jaw-dropping events and never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science.

Thorne was elected to both the US National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences, and for his science accomplishments, he has been awarded the Swiss Albert Einstein Medal and the UNESCO Niels Bohr Gold Medal. He is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at Caltech.