Presenters

Kip S. Thorne

Caltech’s Kip Thorne is one of the world’s foremost experts on the consequences of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Thorne has done pioneering research on black holes and gravitational physics and laid the foundations for the theory of pulsations of relativistic stars and the gravitational waves they emit. He is a co-founder of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Project, whose goal is to detect gravitational waves emitting from black holes, a search that could ultimately provide a view of one of the universe’s most mysterious objects.

Born in Logan, Utah, in 1940, Thorne earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1962. Entering the graduate program in physics at Princeton University, where he was mentored by John Archibald Wheeler, he was awarded an M.A. in 1963 and a Ph.D. two years later. After two years of postdoctoral study, Thorne returned to Caltech as an associate professor and is now in his 38th year teaching there. He was named William F. Kenan Jr. Professor in 1981 and Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. In the 1999–2000 year, the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology presented him their 24th annual Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Thorne was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, and the Russian Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1999. In 1996 he was awarded both the Julian Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society and the Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomical Society. His book for nonscientists, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (Norton, 1994), earned him his second American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award as well as the Phi Beta Kappa Science Writing Award. Thorne is also the co-author (with Wheeler and Charles Misner) of Gravitation (Freeman, 1973), from which most of the present generation of scientists have learned general relativity theory.