Quotes from Kip S. Thorne

Caltech is a wonderful place. Named the top university in the world by the Times of London in each of the last three years, it is small enough—just 300 professors, 1000 undergrads, and 1200 graduate students—that I know Caltech experts in all branches of science. It was

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.

If the imprint is really due to gravitational waves from the big bang, then this is the type of cosmological discovery that comes along perhaps once every fifty years.

The science of Interstellar lies in all four domains: Newtonian, relativistic, quantum, and quantum gravity. Correspondingly, some of the science is known to be true, some is an educated guess, and some is speculation.

As the Ranger carries Cooper deeper and deeper into the bowels of Gargantua, he continues to see the universe above himself. Chasing the light that brings him that image is an infalling singularity. The singularity is weak at first, but it grows stronger rapidly, as more and more stuff falls into Gargantua and piles up in a thin sheet (Chapter 27). Einstein's laws dictate this.

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?

Cooper, entering the tesseract, falls down a channel between beams, dazed and confused

There is a maximum spin rate that any black hole can have. If it spins faster than that maximum, its horizon disappears, leaving the singularity inside it wide open for all the universe to see; that is, making it naked—which is probably forbidden by the laws of physics

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.

Einstein's law of time warps says that Everyting likes to live where it is going to age more slowly, and gravity pulls it there.

The nuclear force holds neutrons and protons together more tightly when they form iron nuclei than when they form any other kind of atomic nucleus.

The giant black holes in the cores of galaxies, a million to 20 billion times heavier than the Sun, therefore, cannot have been born in the death of a star. They must have formed in some other way, perhaps by the agglomeration of many smaller black holes; perhaps by the collapse of massive clouds of gas.

quizá incluso tenía miedo— a especular.

De todas las ideas concebidas por la mente humana, desde los unicornios y las gárgolas a la bomba de hidrógeno, la más fantástica es, quizá, la del agujero negro:

y hemos contagiado a la comunidad física mundial nuestros niveles matemáticos escandalosamente bajos.

En ello residía la belleza de la especulación. Era

El cálculo, la teoría de variable compleja, la teoría cualitativa de ecuaciones diferenciales, la teoría de grupos y la geometría diferencial estaban cubiertas;

Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else—no matter whatsoever.

Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (Wheeler, 1990).

Pronto aprendimos a llevar varios problemas a la vez: un problema difícil que deba ser visitado y revisitado una vez tras otra a lo largo de muchos meses o años antes de que se abra la cáscara, con la esperanza de una gran ganancia; y otros problemas mucho más fáciles, con ganancias más inmediatas.

I cofounded the LIGO Project in 1983 (together with Rainer Weiss at MIT and Ronald Drever at Caltech). I formulated LIGO's scientific vision, and I spent two decades working hard to help make it a reality. And LIGO today is nearing maturity, with the first detection of gravitational waves expected in this decade.

cuando un cálculo confirma las propias expectativas, uno simplemente se reafirma un poco en su comprensión intuitiva de las leyes de la física. Pero cuando un cálculo contradice las expectativas, uno está en el camino hacia una nueva intuición.

singularities (places where space and time are infinitely warped)

La independencia nutre a la fuerza.