Book Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and author who helped open an entirely new window on the universe. He was a driving force behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and in 2017 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for their work on the LIGO detector and the first observation of gravitational waves. Thorne served as Caltech's Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics from 1991 to 2009, after time at Princeton. With John Wheeler and Charles Misner he co-wrote Gravitation (1973), a landmark relativity textbook, and he reached general readers with Black Holes and Time Warps (1994), which won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and The Science of Interstellar (2014). A longtime colleague of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, he guided Sagan on the science of wormholes for the novel Contact and served as scientific consultant on Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Tenet. His honors include the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, the Shaw Prize, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the Harvey Prize, the Albert Einstein Medal and the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing.