Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne, born in 1940, is an American theoretical physicist and one of the world's leading authorities on the consequences of general relativity. He was a close friend of Hawking's for decades, and their relationship produced some of the most entertaining episodes in modern physics.

His own work

Thorne spent his career at Caltech studying the extreme physics of black holes, gravitational waves and the possibility of time travel through wormholes. His greatest achievement was as a founder of LIGO, the vast experiment that, in 2015, made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime from two distant black holes colliding. For this he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is also widely known beyond science as the executive producer and scientific architect of the film Interstellar, whose black hole imagery he helped make physically accurate.

His connection to Hawking

Thorne and Hawking were friends and intellectual sparring partners, and they are famous for their wagers. In 1974 Hawking bet Thorne that the object Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole, an odd position for a black hole theorist, which Hawking framed as a kind of insurance policy: if he was wrong about black holes existing, at least he would win the bet. As the evidence mounted, he conceded in 1990.

A second, more serious bet, made with Thorne against the physicist John Preskill, concerned the black hole information paradox. These wagers were not stunts; they were Hawking's way of staking out clear, falsifiable positions and, when the evidence turned, conceding them in public and with good humour, a habit explored on the page about how his mind worked. Through it all, Thorne remained one of his closest companions in physics.

Their wagers are collected on the page about Hawking's famous bets.

Thorne's most famous public project is explored in the science of Interstellar.