Quotes from Kip S. Thorne

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth

Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.

An explosion in space makes no sound, as there is no air to transmit the sound waves.

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.

At our meeting, I suggested to Steven and Lynda two guidelines for the science of Interstellar: 1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe. 2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some "respectable" scientists regard as possible.

Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.

No matter how hard we may try, we can only travel forward. The relativistic laws guarantee it.

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

Revolutions that upend established scientific truth are exceedingly rare. But when they happen, they can have profound effects on science and technology.

We don't know what triggered the big bang, nor what, if anything, existed before it. But somehow the universe emerged as a vast sea of ultrahot gas, expanding fast in all directions like the fireball ignited by a nuclear bomb blast or by the explosion of a gas pipeline. Except that the big bang was not destructive (so far as we know). Instead, it created everything in our universe, or rather the seeds for everything.

But ours is not a dystopia. Life is still tolerable and in some ways pleasant, with little amenities such as baseball continuing. However, we no longer think big. We no longer aspire to great things. We aspire to little more than just keeping life going.

In 2014, the Earth's gravity is weakest in southern India (blue spot) and strongest in Iceland and Indonesia (red spots).

By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes.

How could human civilization decline so far, yet seem so normal in many respects? And is it scientifically possible that a blight could wipe out all edible

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

Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein's relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It's somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself.

The first planet that Cooper and his crew visit is Miller's. The most impressive things about this planet are the extreme slowing of time there, gigantic water waves, and huge tidal gravity. All three are related, and arise from the planet's closeness to Gargantua.

Don't trust everything I say.

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

tres números, su masa, su momento angular y su carga eléctrica. El

We humans are confined to our brane.

La violación es solamente una peculiaridad minúscula en las leyes de la física, una que presumiblemente soportan las leyes con gusto.

If we begin with the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity and then discard the fluctuations, we must obtain Einstein's well-understood relativistic laws of physics. The fluctuations we discard are, for example, a froth of fluctuating, exquisitely tiny wormholes ("quantum foam" that pervades all of space; Figure 26.3 and Chapter 14).

The environment near Gargantua will become more dangerous for individual life forms, including humans, promoting faster evolution if enough individuals survive.