Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas26 Marras 2018

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

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330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information

A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose wi...

29 Syys 20251h 12min

329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge

Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what the rules are, but also that everyone else knows the rules, a...

22 Syys 20251h 16min

328 | Mary Roach on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies

Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple prosthetics for teeth, noses, and limbs, while modern medici...

15 Syys 20251h 7min

AMA | September 2025

Welcome to the September 2025 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 P...

8 Syys 20253h 30min

327 | Cass Sunstein on Liberalism

"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individual rights, liberties, and responsibilities, coupled with res...

1 Syys 20251h 10min

326 | Natalie Batalha on What We Know and Will Learn About Exoplanets

In a relatively short period of time, exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have gone from an intriguing conjecture to an active field of scientific study, with over 5,000 confirmed dis...

25 Elo 20251h 12min

325 | Alvy Ray Smith on Pixar, Pixels, and the Great Digital Convergence

The world is becoming pixelated. As computers and other digital devices become ubiquitous, human knowledge and communication and information is gradually being converted into, and manipulated as, stri...

18 Elo 20251h 26min

324 | Elizabeth Mynatt on Universities and the Importance of Basic Research

It is not manifestly obvious that universities should be where most scholarly research is performed. One could imagine systems that separated out the tasks of "teaching students" and "generating new k...

11 Elo 20251h 13min