American · b. 1940
Kip S. Thorne is an American theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he held the Feynman Professorship of Theoretical Physics. He studied under John Wheeler at Princeton and spent his career on general relativity, black holes and gravitational waves. In the 1980s he helped Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever found LIGO, the observatory that made the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015. For that work Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Weiss and Barry Barish. He also wrote Black Holes and Time Warps in 1994 and co-authored the textbook Gravitation with Charles Misner and Wheeler. He served as executive producer and science adviser on the film Interstellar and wrote The Science of Interstellar. His work on wormholes and time travel helped bring those ideas into serious physics discussion.