Top 15 Kip S. Thorne Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important. I hope this book contributes to that understanding.

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.

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