The movie Interstellar is reasonably accurate from a scientific standpoint. Some of the concepts in the movie, such as wormholes and time dilation, are supported by theoretical physics, but have not been proven conclusively. Other aspects of the movie, such as the gravity equation, are based on real-life equations but are not well understood. Interstellar is a popular science fiction thriller that covers a vast range of topics – from fleeing Earth due to environmental catastrophes to wormholes and time dilation. The movie explores several intriguing concepts, some with varying degrees of scientific accuracy. This article will dive deeper into these ideas and discuss whether they could exist in reality. Note that this article contains spoilers, so proceed with caution if you have yet to see the film.
Can People Really Travel Through Wormholes? The wormhole in Interstellar is the driving force behind the entire plot; a portal appears somewhere near Saturn that has been seemingly created by omniscient fifth-dimensional beings. A wormhole is basically a ‘tunnel’ that bends space-time and allows energy and information to move from one side to the other. The simplest explanation for it is actually given by Romilly in the movie itself, but you can read here to learn more.
Can wormholes exist, though? Well, science points towards the theoretical possibility of one, but we haven’t discovered a wormhole yet, which means that it’s still a giant hypothetical. Aside from that, the walls of a wormhole are intrinsically unstable, so traveling through it would cause the wormhole to collapse on top of you. The chances of finding a naturally occurring wormhole are improbably small, so for a traversable one to exist, it must be created by some form of advanced civilization with the power to move entire stars. It’s mind boggling, indeed, but theoretical physics still allows for the possibility of wormholes to exist. We just need the fifth-dimensional beings to notice us first.
Verdict: Wormholes have been a sci-fi staple for decades, and will likely remain that way. Traveling through one is all but impossible. (Sidenote: falling into a black hole will definitely kill you.)
Can Robots Like TARS Exist? The most difficult part of creating a robot like TARS or CASE would be its artificial intelligence, not the motor movements or the design. In fact, the simplistic design behind TARS’s monolithic representation has gained widespread adoration. Partly due to it being an homage to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but mostly because of his funny quips. A rigid and rectangularly designed robot would work in theory, but it would require a massive amount of torque to move its limbs in the way it does in the movie; for example, carrying Dr. Brand and doing cartwheels through the sea would require massive amounts of power. A real robot in that situation would probably have wheels and claws instead of Lego-shaped hands. Aside from the power, there’s the man-hours that would go into programming everything from its vocabulary to the humor setting, which is just not possible in a single product today, at least not in a version as refined and deterministic as TARS. Not to mention all the sensors, circuitry, wires and hydraulics that would all need to be stuffed into a sleek mobile unit. For a robot like TARS to exist, dozens of giant tech companies would have to devote thousands of people full time to work on one product – possibly for decades. The movie explains this by saying it’s a retrofitted Military robot, which makes sense in the setting, but probably wouldn’t be the ideal companion in a manned interstellar mission.
Verdict: Artificial intelligence is making rapid progress (think GPT-class models and humanoid robots like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas), but a single, fully-embodied companion as witty, autonomous and physically capable as TARS is still well beyond what any company has built. The monolithic, slab-like design is also unlikely to be the form factor of choice.
How Does The ‘Gravity Equation’ Help The Mass Exodus Of Humanity? The equation that Murph is trying to solve as her solitary pursuit to ‘save humanity’ is simply called ‘the gravity equation’ in the movie. Well, there’s a gravity equation in real life too, although the two aren’t quite the same. In the movie, Murph and Prof. Brand are trying to figure out a blackboard’s worth of numbers to ‘solve gravity’, as that would mean the success of Plan A, which is an evacuation response that can help the world’s population move off the planet using gravitational propulsion rockets. She eventually figures it out after getting information about the ‘infinite gravity’ inside the black hole. One of the equations on that blackboard is a version of the famous Einstein field equation, which is a differential equation for gravity that explains everything from the Big Bang to black holes, and pretty much any gravitational anomaly in between. Written out, that equation reads Gμν + Λgμν = (8πG / c4) Tμν: the left-hand side encodes how spacetime curves, while the right-hand side describes the matter and energy doing the curving. The ‘G’ in that last term is Newton’s gravitational constant, the very quantity Brand’s team is desperate to learn how to control. The discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO, detected on 14 September 2015 (signal GW150914) and announced in February 2016, confirmed one of Einstein’s key predictions about gravity. The signal came from two colliding black holes roughly 1.3 billion light years away. Kip Thorne, who served as Interstellar’s science adviser, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his decisive contributions to that detection. What Murph is trying to solve in the movie is essentially an elaborately conceptualized Einstein field equation that helps ‘create gravity of your own’, which could allow you to lift entire cities into space. It’s almost poetic how it is Einstein’s work that ultimately saves humanity in the movie, along with a little help from Murph and some trans-dimensional interaction, of course.
Verdict: The equations exist in some form, but they won’t help us leave Earth anytime soon. So, what is “the equation” in Interstellar? On screen, the equation Murph and Professor Brand obsess over is never spelled out as a single line; it’s a board full of tensor calculus. But Kip Thorne, the film’s science adviser, has explained that it represents an attempt to unify Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics, the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. Specifically, Brand is trying to model gravitational anomalies (the falling drone, the dust patterns in Murph’s bedroom) as leakage from a higher-dimensional “bulk”, and to figure out how to control the gravitational constant G so that NASA can lift entire space stations off Earth. The crucial missing ingredient is data from inside the event horizon of a black hole (quantum information about how spacetime behaves where general relativity breaks down). That’s why Cooper has to fall into Gargantua: TARS scoops up the quantum data from the singularity, and Cooper transmits it back to Murph as Morse code on the second hand of her wristwatch. Armed with that data, adult Murph can finally close out the equation and unlock controllable gravity. In real physics, this is exactly the kind of information physicists do not have. We have general relativity (which describes gravity at large scales) and quantum field theory (which describes the other three forces at tiny scales), but no experimentally verified theory that joins them. Candidates exist (string theory, loop quantum gravity, causal dynamical triangulations), but none have a Murph-style closed-form solution that lets us hoist cities into orbit.
Time Dilation And The Tidal Wave Planet This one is probably the biggest wringer in the movie. How can someone up in the spaceship age 23 years, 4 months and 8 days while the people on the ground are there for only about 3.5 hours? Let’s first try to understand some basics about time dilation. Let’s say that we’re on the surface of Miller’s planet with Romilly up in the spaceship orbiting the black hole, Gargantua. According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, a clock that sits deep inside a strong gravitational field ticks more slowly than a clock far away from any massive object, which is exactly what happens in the movie. Dr. Brand and Cooper land on Miller’s planet, perched dangerously close to Gargantua, where the black hole’s immense gravity drastically slows the local passage of time. The towering tidal waves they encounter aren’t caused by rapid spin of the planet itself; they’re tidal bulges raised by Gargantua, and the planet rocks back and forth through them as it orbits. Miller’s Planet Orbiting Gargantua Romilly, however, is orbiting Gargantua from a distance, making the effect of Gargantua’s gravity on him a lot less. Note that time only slows relative between the two groups of people; if we assume the Endurance spaceship that Romilly is in has an equal gravitational potential as that of Earth, 23 years will also pass for people on Earth as well. No one actually experiences anything in slow motion. If Cooper wore a GoPro on his head for the entire 3.5 hours and was somehow able to stream that video to Earth instantly in one shot (not actually possible due to information being unable to travel faster than the speed of light), his daughter Murph would just see a 3.5-hour video, not a slow motion one. If he was live streaming it on Periscope, however, Murph would receive a few bits every few days or even weeks, and the live stream would be in ultra-slow slow-motion. For the level of time dilation depicted in the movie (one hour on the planet equating to roughly seven Earth years), Kip Thorne worked the numbers backwards. The effect is overwhelmingly gravitational, not motion-based: Gargantua had to be a near-maximally spinning black hole, and Miller’s planet had to sit just outside its event horizon. Even so, to keep a stable orbit at that radius, the planet still has to rip around Gargantua at more than half the speed of light. Being that close to a black hole would have hugely adverse effects on the planet, and it probably wouldn’t be able to exist in its current form due to the incredible gravitational forces involved.
Verdict: The math is a bit off, but allowing for some creative leeway, since it’s a sci-fi movie, the effects of time-dilation is spot-on. Interstellar (which celebrated its 10th anniversary with an IMAX 70mm re-release in December 2024) remains one of the most physically faithful science-fiction films ever made. Kip Thorne, the science adviser for the film, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology and a 2017 Nobel laureate in Physics, wrote an entire book on it called ‘The Science of Interstellar’ walking through the relativity, wormholes, and tesseract scenes in detail. A lot of the questions that arise in the movie are explained, and his involvement pushes the movie within the realm of possibility from the fringes of sci-fi, despite its metaphysical elements… but that’s a post for another day. Last Updated By: Ashish Tiwari
The Science of Interstellar – Wikipedia
The Science of Interstellar is a non-fiction book by American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, with a foreword by Christopher Nolan. The book was initially published on November 7, 2014 by W. W. Norton & Company. This is his second full-size book for non-scientists after Black Holes and Time Warps, released in 1994. The Science of Interstellar is a follow-up text for Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain.
Overview
Kip Thorne was the scientific consultant and an executive producer for the movie. In this book he explains the scientific concepts behind the film’s cosmological ideas. The book is composed of seven parts with a foreword by Christopher Nolan and one additional chapter discussing the inception of Interstellar. Thorne starts by laying out introductory information about the universe, spacetime, physical laws, relativity, tidal forces, and black holes. The next section covers the supermassive black hole Gargantua, explaining its appearance and how it was created via CGI, as well as gravitational slingshots and a scientifically inaccurate statement by a character in the film. Thorne then shifts to Earth, discussing the crop-destroying blight, development of interstellar travel technologies, and another scientifically inaccurate statement in the film. The next part discusses the wormhole, explaining the basics of how wormholes work, how Interstellar’s wormhole was rendered via CGI, and a method by which the wormhole could have been discovered in Interstellar’s universe via the detection of gravitational waves. Thorne then explores the development of planets orbiting a supermassive black hole and how the planets depicted in the film could form in real life. The next section discusses some of the more advanced and extreme physics depicted in the film, including large extra dimensions, warping the gravitational constant, and the different types of singularities inside a black hole, including the BKL, mass-inflation, and shock singularities. The final part discusses the climax of the film, including Cooper’s plunge into the black hole Gargantua, the tesseract scene and four-dimensional space, and getting colonies of people off of the Earth.
See also
Related articles
Similar books
– Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku
– The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
– The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene
– The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
– The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking
References
– Thorne, Kip S (2014). The Science of Interstellar. Foreword by Christopher Nolan. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393351378. OCLC 891611098.
– “The Science of Interstellar by Kip S. Thorne, Christopher J. Nolan (Foreword)”. goodreads.com. Retrieved 2015-02-21.
– Thorne, Kip (November 29, 2014). ““Our universe would be destroyed”: Inside the science of “Interstellar””. salon.com.
Kip Thorne – Wikipedia
Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American astrophysicist and author. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.” With John A. Wheeler and Charles Misner, he coauthored the general relativity textbook Gravitation in 1973. He has also written popular science, notably Black Holes and Time Warps in 1994 which was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science for that year. Thorne was the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech from 1991 until 2009. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he advised Sagan on the physics of wormholes for his novel Contact. He was a scientific consultant for Christopher Nolan’s films Interstellar and Tenet. He received the 2018 Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing.
Life and career
Thorne was born on June 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah. His father, D. Wynne Thorne (1908–1979), was a professor of soil chemistry at Utah State University, and his mother, Alison (née Comish; 1914–2004), was an economist and the first woman to receive a PhD in economics from Iowa State College. Raised in an academic environment, two of his four siblings also became professors. Thorne’s parents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and raised Thorne in the LDS faith, though he now identifies as an atheist. Shortly before his mother’s death, she urged Kip and his siblings to leave the LDS Church because of its discrimination against women, which they all did. Regarding his views on science and religion, Thorne has stated: “There are large numbers of my finest colleagues who are quite devout and believe in God …. There is no fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. I happen to not believe in God.”
Thorne excelled at academics early in life, winning recognition in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search as a senior at Logan High School. He received his BS in physics degree from Caltech in 1962, and his master and PhD in physics from Princeton University in 1964 and 1965 under the supervision of John Archibald Wheeler with a doctoral dissertation on Geometrodynamics of Cylindrical Systems. He returned to Caltech as an associate professor in 1967 and became a professor of theoretical physics in 1970, becoming one of the youngest full professors in the history of Caltech at age 30. He became the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in 1981, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Utah from 1971 to 1998 and Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University from 1986 to 1992. Since 2009, Thorne has been the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus.
Thorne and Linda Jean Peterson married in 1960. Their children are Kares Anne and Bret Carter, an architect. Thorne and Peterson divorced in 1977. Thorne was set up on a blind date with Lynda Obst, later a film producer, by physicist Carl Sagan. They dated in 1979–1980, and parted and remained friends, to the extent that they later collaborated on the movie Interstellar. Thorne and his second wife, Carolee Joyce Winstein, a professor of biokinesiology and physical therapy at USC, married in 1984. In 2015, he collaborated with Obst and Stephen Hawking on a movie script, for which they wrote several drafts.
Throughout the years, Thorne has served as a mentor and thesis advisor to many students who became leaders in observational, experimental, or astrophysical aspects of general relativity. Approximately 50 physicists have received PhDs at Caltech under Thorne’s personal mentorship. Thorne is known for his ability to convey the excitement and significance of discoveries in gravitation and astrophysics to both professional and lay audiences. His presentations on subjects such as black holes, gravitational radiation, relativity, time travel, and wormholes have been included in PBS shows in the U.S. and on the BBC in the United Kingdom. In 2017, Thorne gave the George Gamow Memorial Lecture at the University of Colorado Boulder, on “Probing the Warped Side of the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes.”
Research
Thorne’s research has principally focused on relativistic astrophysics and gravitation physics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes and especially gravitational waves. He is perhaps best known to the public for his controversial theory that wormholes can conceivably be used for time travel. However, Thorne’s scientific contributions, which center on the general nature of space, time, and gravity, span the full range of topics in general relativity.
Gravitational waves and LIGO
Thorne’s work has dealt with the prediction of gravitational wave strengths and their temporal signatures as observed on Earth. These “signatures” are of great relevance to LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), a multi-institution gravitational wave experiment for which Thorne has been a leading proponent – in 1984, he cofounded the LIGO Project (the largest project ever funded by the NSF) to discern and measure any fluctuations between two or more ‘static’ points; such fluctuations would be evidence of gravitational waves, as calculations describe. A significant aspect of his research is developing the mathematics necessary to analyze these objects. Thorne also carries out engineering design analyses for features of the LIGO that cannot be developed on the basis of experiment and he gives advice on data analysis algorithms by which the waves will be sought. He has provided theoretical support for LIGO, including identifying gravitational wave sources that LIGO should target, designing the baffles to control scattered light in the LIGO beam tubes, and – in collaboration with Vladimir Braginsky’s (Moscow, Russia) research group – inventing quantum nondemolition designs for advanced gravity-wave detectors and ways to reduce the most serious kind of noise in advanced detectors: thermoelastic noise. With Carlton M. Caves, Thorne invented the back-action-evasion approach to quantum nondemolition measurements of the harmonic oscillators – a technique applicable both in gravitational wave detection and quantum optics. On February 11, 2016, a team of four physicists representing the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, announced that in September 2015, LIGO recorded the signature of two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light-years away. This recorded detection was the first direct observation of the fleeting chirp of a gravitational wave and confirmed a prediction of the general theory of relativity. Kip Thorne, who served as Interstellar’s science adviser, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his decisive contributions to that detection.
Black hole cosmology
In 1963–1964, Thorne’s PhD mentor at Princeton, John Wheeler, assigned him a problem to think about: find out whether or not a cylindrical bundle of repulsive magnetic field lines will implode under its own attractive gravitational force. After several months wrestling with the problem, he proved that it was impossible for cylindrical magnetic field lines to implode. Thorne determined that the gravitational force can overcome all interior pressure only when an object has been compressed in all directions, as in the case of a spherical star imploding under gravitational force. To express this realization, he proposed his hoop conjecture, which describes an imploding star turning into a black hole when the critical circumference of the designed hoop can be placed around it and set into rotation. That is, any object of mass M around which a hoop of circumference can be spun must be a black hole. Thorne and his students have developed an approach to the theory of black holes called the “membrane paradigm”, and used it to clarify the Blandford–Znajek mechanism by which black holes may power some quasars and active galactic nuclei. With Igor Novikov and Don Page, he developed the general relativistic theory of thin accretion disks around black holes, and using this theory he deduced that with a doubling of its mass by such accretion a black hole will be spun up to 0.998 of the maximum spin allowed by general relativity, but not any farther. This is probably the maximum black-hole spin allowed in nature.
Wormholes and time travel
Thorne and his co-workers at Caltech conducted scientific research on whether the laws of physics permit space and time to be multiply connected (can there exist classical, traversable wormholes and “time machines”?). With Sung-Won Kim, Thorne identified a universal physical mechanism (the explosive growth of vacuum polarization of quantum fields), that may always prevent spacetime from developing closed timelike curves (i.e., prevent backward time travel). With Mike Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever, he showed that traversable wormholes can exist in the structure of spacetime only if they are threaded by quantum fields in quantum states that violate the averaged null energy condition (i.e. have negative renormalized energy spread over a sufficiently large region). This has triggered research to explore the ability of quantum fields to possess such extended negative energy. Recent calculations by Thorne indicate that simple masses passing through traversable wormholes could never engender paradoxes – there are no initial conditions that lead to paradox once time travel is introduced. If his results can be generalized, they would suggest that none of the supposed paradoxes formulated in time travel stories can actually be formulated at a precise physical level: that is, that any situation in a time travel story turns out to permit many consistent solutions.
Relativistic stars, multipole moments and other endeavors
With Anna Żytkow, Thorne predicted the existence of red supergiant stars with neutron-star cores (Thorne–Żytkow objects). He laid the foundations for the theory of pulsations of relativistic stars and the gravitational radiation they emit. With James Hartle, Thorne derived from general relativity the laws of motion and precession of black holes and other relativistic bodies, including the influence of the coupling of their multipole moments to the spacetime curvature of nearby objects, as well as writing down the Hartle-Thorne metric, an approximate solution which describes the exterior of a slowly and rigidly rotating, stationary and axially symmetric body. Thorne has also theoretically predicted the existence of universally antigravitating “exotic matter” – the element needed to accelerate the expansion rate of the universe, keep traversable wormhole “Star Gates” open and keep timelike geodesic free float “warp drives” working. With Clifford Will and others of his students, he laid the foundations for the theoretical interpretation of experimental tests of relativistic theories of gravity – foundations on which Will and others then built. As of 2005, Thorne was interested in the origin of classical space and time from the quantum foam of quantum gravity theory.
Publications
In 1973, Thorne co-authored Gravitation with Charles Misner and John A. Wheeler; that according to John C. Baez and Chris Hillman, is one of the great scientific books of all time and has inspired two generations of students. In 1994, he published Black Holes and Time Warps, a popular science book that traces black holes from John Michell to Stephen Hawking and beyond. It has been published in at least twelve languages: English, German (1994), Spanish (1995), French and Japanese (1997), Greek (1999), Czech (2004), Polish, Chinese and Korean (2005), Thai (2008), and Italian (2013). In 2014, he published The Science of Interstellar, in which he explains the science behind Christopher Nolan’s film; Nolan wrote the foreword. In the book Thorne discusses the major role of the fictional black hole Gargantua: “First a weird claim: Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else–no matter whatsoever.” In September 2017, Thorne and Roger D. Blandford published Modern Classical Physics: Optics, Fluids, Plasmas, Elasticity, Relativity, and Statistical Physics, a graduate-level textbook covering the six major areas of physics listed in the title. With artist Lia Halloran, Thorne used poetry and illustrations to explore astrophysics in The Warped Side of Our Universe. Thorne has published more than 150 articles in scholarly journals. His articles have appeared in publications such as Scientific American, the McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology, and Collier’s Encyclopedia, among others.
Honors and awards
Thorne has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1972), National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences, and American Philosophical Society. He has been recognized by numerous awards including the:
– American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award in Physics and Astronomy,
– Phi Beta Kappa Science Writing Award,
– American Physical Society’s Lilienfeld Prize,
– German Astronomical Society’s Karl Schwarzschild Medal (1996),
– Robinson Prize in Cosmology from the University of Newcastle, England,
– Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Society’s Common Wealth Awards for Science and Invention, and
– California Science Center’s California Scientist of the Year Award (2003).
– Albert Einstein Medal in 2009 from the Albert Einstein Society, Bern, Switzerland
– UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal from UNESCO (2010)
– Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016)
– Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2016)
– Shaw Prize (2016) (together with Ronald Drever and Rainer Weiss).
– Kavli Prize in Astrophysics (2016) (together with Ronald Drever and Rainer Weiss).
– Tomalla Prize (2016) for extraordinary contributions to general relativity and gravity.
– Georges Lemaître Prize (2016)
– Harvey Prize (2016) (together with Ronald Drever and Rainer Weiss).
– Smithsonian Magazine American Ingenuity Award for Physical Sciences (2016)
– Princess of Asturias Award (2017) (jointly with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish).
– Nobel Prize in Physics (2017) (jointly with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish)
– Lewis Thomas Prize (2018)
– Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (2019)
He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and Fulbright Fellow. He has also received the honorary degree of doctor of humane letters from Claremont Graduate University and an honorary doctorate from the Physics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In 2024 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from University of Cambridge. He received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2026. He was elected to hold the Lorentz chair for the Leiden University in 2009. Thorne has served on the:
– International Committee on General Relativity and Gravitation,
– Committee on US-USSR Cooperation in Physics, and
– National Academy of Sciences’ Space Science Board, which has advised NASA and Congress on space science policy.
Kip Thorne was selected by Time magazine in an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the American world in 2016.
Adaptation in media
– Thorne contributed ideas on wormhole travel to Carl Sagan for use in his novel Contact.
– Thorne and his friend, producer Lynda Obst, also developed the concept for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. He also wrote a tie-in book, The Science of Interstellar. Thorne later advised Nolan on the physics of his movie Tenet, and advised Cillian Murphy on his portrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan’s film Oppenheimer.
– In Larry Niven’s novel Rainbow Mars, the time travel technology used in the novel is based on the wormhole theories of Thorne, which in the context of the novel was when time travel first became possible, rather than just fantasy. As a result, any attempts to travel in time prior to Thorne’s development of wormhole theory results in the time traveller entering a fantastic version of reality, rather than the actual past.
– In the film The Theory of Everything, Thorne was portrayed by actor Enzo Cilenti.
– Thorne played himself in the episode of The Big Bang Theory entitled “The Laureate Accumulation”.
– Thorne is featured in an episode of the documentary series The Craftsman entitled “Science, Art & Inspiration”.
Partial bibliography
– Misner, Charles W., Thorne, K. S. and Wheeler, John Archibald, Gravitation 1973, (W. H. Freeman & Co)
– Thorne, K. S., in 300 Years of Gravitation, (Eds.) S. W. Hawking and W. Israel, 1987, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), Gravitational Radiation.
– Thorne, K. S., Price, R. H. and Macdonald, D. M., Black Holes, The Membrane Paradigm, 1986, (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press).
– Friedman, J., Morris, M. S., Novikov, I. D., Echeverria, F., Klinkhammer, G., Thorne, K. S. and Yurtsever, U., Physical Review D., 1990, (in press), Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves.
– Kip S. Thorne (1994). Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-31276-8.
– Thorne, K. S. and Blandford, R. D., Modern Classical Physics: Optics, Fluids, Plasmas, Elasticity, Relativity, and Statistical Physics, 2017, (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
– Manning, Anne J. (November 15, 2023). “Nobel-winning physicist, artist illustrate universe’s ‘warped side’”. Harvard Gazette.
– Thorne, Kip S. (2024). The Warped Side of Our Universe. With Lia Halloran.
External links
– Media related to Kip Thorne at Wikimedia Commons
– Kip Thorne at IMDb
– Home Page at California Institute of Technology
– Kip Thorne at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
– Crunch Time – Founding Fathers of Relativity
– Kip S. Thorne on Nobelprize.org