“My Half Century Quest, with a Thousand Colleagues, to Create Gravitational Wave Astronomy”
November 12
The 2025 Nelson Series explores innovation at the intersection of STEM, space and human possibility. Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne will reveal the decades-long effort to detect gravitational ripples in spacetime created by colliding black holes, exotic objects he helped bring to life in the movie Interstellar.
Thorne will present a series of vignettes that illuminate the birth of gravitational-wave astronomy: from seminal ideas in the 1960s; through a horrendously difficult technology development program, political battles, human conflicts and 1.1 billion dollars of taxpayer money; to LIGO’s first observation of gravitational waves in 2015; and onward to LIGO today observing several black hole collisions each week.
Kip Thorne
Thorne was born in 1940 in Logan, Utah, USA, and is currently the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). From 1967 to 2009, he led a Caltech research group working in relativistic astrophysics and gravitational physics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes, and especially gravitational waves. Fifty three students received their PhDs under his mentorship, and he mentored roughly 60 postdoctoral students. He co-authored the textbooks Gravitation (1973, with Charles Misner and John Archibald Wheeler) and Modern Classical Physics (2017, with Roger Blandford), and was sole author of Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy.
Thorne cofounded (with Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever) the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project. LIGO—in the hands of a younger generation of physicists—made the breakthrough discovery of gravitational waves arriving at Earth from the distant universe on Sept. 14, 2015. For his contributions to LIGO and to gravitational wave research, Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and other major awards.
In 2009 Thorne stepped down from his Caltech professorship to ramp up a new career at the interface between art and science. This new career has included, among other things, a recent book The Warped Side of our Universe, consisting of Thorne’s poetry tightly integrated with paintings by Lia Halloran; also Christopher Nolan’s 2014 movie Interstellar (which sprang from a Treatment Thorne co-authored, and for which he was executive producer and science advisor), and Kip’s book The Science of Interstellar. Thorne is working with colleagues on a detailed history of LIGO.