Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne is an American astrophysicist and author who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the LIGO detector and its observation of gravitational waves. Born in Logan, Utah, and raised in an academic household, he earned his doctorate at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler, then returned to Caltech, where he became a professor of theoretical physics and eventually the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus. He co-wrote the general relativity textbook Gravitation in 1973, and in 1994 published the popular science book Black Holes and Time Warps. His talks on black holes, wormholes and time travel have appeared on PBS and the BBC. He advised Carl Sagan on wormhole physics for the novel Contact, helped develop the concept for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, and consulted on Nolan's Tenet. He received the Lewis Thomas Prize in 2018.