🇺🇸Kip
Thorne

On September 14, 2015, at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, two L-shaped detectors — one in Livingston, Louisiana, and one in Hanford, Washington — simultaneously recorded a signal lasting less than two seconds. The signal was a tiny distortion in the fabric of spacetime: a gravitational wave, produced by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away, arriving at Earth 1.3 billion years after the event that created it. Albert Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 from his general theory of relativity. He did not believe they would ever be detectable. The man who spent five decades building the instrument that proved Einstein wrong about that, and right about everything else, was Kip Thorne — a physicist from Utah who had entered Caltech at seventeen and who had made the detection of gravitational waves the organizing purpose of his scientific life.

Kip Stephen Thorne was born on June 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah, the son of D. Wynne Thorne, a soil chemist, and Alison C. Thorne, an economist. Both parents held doctorates, and the household was one in which scientific curiosity was ordinary rather than exceptional. He has described falling in love with science as a young child through his mother, who took him to lectures by scientists at Utah State University and answered his questions with the same rigor she applied to her own research. By his early teens he was already reading graduate-level physics texts. He enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in 1957, at seventeen, and received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1962. He went to Princeton for graduate work, studying under John Archibald Wheeler — the physicist who coined the term "black hole" — and received his doctorate in 1965 at the age of twenty-four.

He returned to Caltech as a faculty member and spent the next five decades building what became the most productive research group in gravitational physics in the world. He made foundational contributions to the theory of black holes, neutron stars, wormholes, and the physics of warped spacetime. He became the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics — the chair once held by Richard Feynman himself — and was a close friend and scientific sparring partner of Stephen Hawking, with whom he wagered on multiple physics questions over the years. His textbook Gravitation, co-authored with Charles Misner and John Wheeler in 1973, became and remains the standard graduate reference on general relativity. His popular book Black Holes and Time Warps (1994) brought the physics of extreme gravity to general readers.

In 1984, Thorne co-founded LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — with Rainer Weiss of MIT and Ronald Drever of Caltech. The project aimed to build instruments sensitive enough to detect the tiny distortions in spacetime produced by violent cosmic events like colliding black holes and neutron stars. The distortions in question are almost incomprehensibly small: the first detected gravitational wave changed the length of LIGO's four-kilometer arms by roughly one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. Building an instrument that could measure this required more than three decades of engineering development, multiple iterations of the detector, and sustained federal funding through periods of scientific doubt and budget pressure. Thorne was the project's principal scientific champion throughout. The investment totaled approximately $1.1 billion.

On February 11, 2016, LIGO announced the first detection of gravitational waves — the September 14, 2015 signal, designated GW150914. The announcement was made simultaneously at press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Geneva, and the scientific community received it as one of the great experimental confirmations in the history of physics: the direct detection of a phenomenon Einstein had predicted but doubted was measurable, carrying information about a collision between two black holes — objects that had been theoretical when Thorne began his career. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017, shared with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish. He was seventy-seven years old. In 2014, he had also served as science advisor and executive producer on Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar, which depicted black holes, wormholes, and relativistic time dilation with more scientific accuracy than any major Hollywood film had previously achieved, and spawned a scientific paper on the visual appearance of black holes that was published in a peer-reviewed journal.