24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar

24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar

I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to where they needed to get to in terms of sensitivity, the mumblings in the audience after the talk were clear: "They'll never make it." Of course we now know that they did, and the 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves led to a 2017 Nobel Prize for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish. So it's a great pleasure to have Kip Thorne himself as a guest on the podcast. Kip tells us a bit about he LIGO story, and offers some strong opinions about the Nobel Prize. But he's had a long and colorful career, so we also talk about whether it's possible to travel backward in time through a wormhole, and what his future movie plans are in the wake of the success of Interstellar. Kip Thorne received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University, and is now the Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics (Emeritus) at Caltech. Recognized as one of the world's leading researchers in general relativity, he has done important work on gravitational waves, black holes, wormholes, and relativistic stars. His role in helping found and guide the LIGO experiment was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2017. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including a famously weighty textbook, Gravitation. He was executive producer of the 2014 film Interstellar, which was based on an initial concept by him and Lynda Obst. He's been awarded too many prizes to list here, and has also been involved in a number of famous bets. Caltech page Wikipedia page Nobel Prize citation Nobel Lecture Amazon.com author page Internet Movie Database page

Jaksot(418)

AMA | February 2023

AMA | February 2023

Welcome to the February 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

6 Helmi 20233h 7min

225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency

225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency

Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and decide on a course of action based on those delibe...

30 Tammi 20231h 22min

224 | Edward Tufte on Data, Design, and Truth

224 | Edward Tufte on Data, Design, and Truth

So you have some information — how are you going to share it with and present it to the rest of the world? There has been a long history of organizing and displaying information without putting too mu...

23 Tammi 20231h 16min

223 | Tania Lombrozo on What Explanations Are

223 | Tania Lombrozo on What Explanations Are

There are few human impulses more primal than the desire for explanations. We have expectations concerning what happens, and when what we experience differs from those expectations, we want to know th...

16 Tammi 20231h 10min

222 | Andrew Strominger on Quantum Gravity and the Real World

222 | Andrew Strominger on Quantum Gravity and the Real World

Quantum gravity research is inspired by experiment — all of the experimental data that supports quantum mechanics, and supports general relativity — but it's only inspiration, not detailed guidance. S...

9 Tammi 20231h 24min

221 | Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human

221 | Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that ...

2 Tammi 20231h 20min

Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly

Holiday Message 2022: Thinking Really Slowly

Welcome to that beloved Mindscape annual tradition, the Holiday Message. An opportunity for a quicker and less-well-thought-out solo episode to round off another year. Ironically, this year the theme ...

19 Joulu 202247min

220 | Lara Buchak on Risk and Rationality

220 | Lara Buchak on Risk and Rationality

Life is rich with moments of uncertainty, where we're not exactly sure what's going to happen next. We often find ourselves in situations where we have to choose between different kinds of uncertainty...

12 Joulu 20221h 16min

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