Kip S. Thorne Quotes

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.

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

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.

First, a weird claim: Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else — no matter whatsoever.

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.

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.

If we know the mass of a black hole and how fast it spins, then from Einstein’s relativistic laws we can deduce all the hole’s other properties: its size, the strength of its gravitational pull, how much its event horizon is stretched outward near the equator by centrifugal forces, the details of the gravitational lensing of objects behind it. Everything. This is amazing. So different from everyday experience. It is as though knowing my weight and how fast I can run, you could deduce everything about me: the color of my eyes, the length of my nose, my IQ, . . .

quizá incluso tenía miedo — a especular.

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.

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:

Isidore I. Rabi, a close friend and admirer of Oppenheimer, has described this in a much deeper way: “[I]t seems to me that in some respects Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the Universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and novel ‘than there actually was. He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone.

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

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.

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.