Interview with Kip Thorne, Nobel Prize in Physics 2017

I grew up in Logan, Utah, which is high in the Rocky Mountains, altitude nearly 2,000 meters. We had deep snow when I was growing up. And so obviously, before I was eight years old, I wanted to be a driver of a snowplow, because you could push the snow to such great heights. But then when I was eight, my mother took me to a lecture about astronomy, about the solar system. And I became very excited about the idea of the solar system. So she did some projects with me about astronomy. And I started doing reading on my own. Decided I wanted to be an astronomer. But then when I was 13, I found in the big city, Salt Lake City, a great big city of about 100,000 at the time, I found a little paperback book called 1, 2, 3, Infinity by a physicist cosmologist named George Gamow. And it described ideas from mathematics and theoretical physics and cosmology that I found even more exciting than astronomy. And so at age 13, I decided I wanted to be a physicist, that I would work on things connected to astronomy. And so here I am. The most enjoyable part of science is doing it. It's sometimes very hard, sometimes very frustrating, but extremely rewarding when you suddenly understand something. It's an adrenaline rush when you suddenly understand something. It doesn't matter very much whether somebody else has understood it first or not. It's nice if you're the first person. But just to suddenly understand a puzzle that you've been struggling with for a long time is just fabulous. And it is remarkable that we as humans are capable of understanding the physical world around us in such detail that we can predict things that turn out to be true, that we can understand things that are very far from Earth, such as the black holes that we have discovered colliding with gravitational waves, and that we can use the understanding we develop in the physical laws for technology for human benefit. And so that aspect of it also is really quite wonderful, the power of science for understanding and for technology. Personally, the joy of discovery is the big deal. Imagination and creativity are really very crucial, particularly for the big leaps of understanding. But they are far from enough. Because you may have imagination and creativity and suddenly think you understand something far beyond the frontiers of current knowledge. But you will usually be wrong. And you validate this through experiment. And you validate it also by seeing how it fits into the well-established laws of nature and how it fits logically into this complex structure of all the well-established laws of nature. And so you really, in order to validate the insights, you have to use these two additional things, experiment and detailed mathematical analysis. There are a number of people that have influenced me in how I think and work as a physicist. John Wheeler, who was my PhD mentor and was a tremendous inspiration. We had very different views about the political world. But we were very much of the same mind about how you understand nature. And I learned so much from him. He was a professor at Princeton. Also at Princeton was Robert Dickey, who was a superb experimental physicist, who was a mentor to Ray Weiss, my colleague on the LIGO project. And I was there studying about black holes with John Wheeler and gravitational waves and also participating in the research group meetings with Robert Dickey. And I was learning about how experimental physics is done through Robert Dickey and his research group and Ray Weiss. So those two were among the handful of people who profoundly influenced me. Well, among the Nobel laureates, my colleagues with whom I am receiving this prize, we actually, Barry Barish and Ray Weiss and I, are icons for a very large experimental team of 1,000 people in LIGO. And that team is so superb. But the people that really have inspired me working with them are Weiss and Barish and Ronald Drever, who is no longer with us, has passed away, whom I have worked with intensely on this. Also Robbie Vogt, who was the first director of LIGO and helped us in the first step in the transition from a set of ideas into the real world of what LIGO is today. Let me describe my own personal, my personality. I'm a person who likes to work on science quietly by myself or with one or two students, maybe a postdoctoral student. I'm an introverted. I behave like an extrovert. I learned how to do that. But I'm fundamentally an introvert. And I get the greatest pleasure from that kind of work. But LIGO could only be done as a big collaboration. There was no other way to do it. And so I gritted my teeth, and I plunged into this and helped in every way that I possibly could to lay foundations for LIGO and then to help Barry Barish, wherever he needed any help from me, grow LIGO from a small experimental project that he began with with Ronald Drever at Caltech and Ray Weiss at MIT, this small collaboration into what it is today. It could only be done as a big collaboration. It is so difficult. The things that go wrong are such a huge number of different things. It requires large numbers of experts and variety of different pieces of physics and engineering to pull it off. And LIGO is the triumph of 1,000 people, the superb experimental team. And I think my biggest contribution was to understand where they had to go, because I'm a theorist, and I knew about how strong the waves were. I understand how they interact with the detector. I understood what needed to be done. There's no way I could do any of that. I could also convey to the funding agencies and the science community my faith in the experimental team, and I could explain why I had faith in the experimental team. So that was probably my biggest contribution, was to convince funding agency and physicists that this should go forward. It's a strange kind of a role, but I think without that role, it would probably not have happened. For a project of this sort, the only way it could be done was through a governmental agency. It was a project that cost, up until now, about $1.1 billion. It's a lot of money, not as much as some of the very biggest physics projects, but by far, I think, the largest thing that the National Science Foundation in the US has ever done. It was absolutely crucial. So this really was a collaboration, initially, between Caltech, led by Ronald Drever and me, MIT, led by Rainer Weiss, and the National Science Foundation, where the key person was Richard Isaacson, who was our program director, who himself had made an enormous breakthrough in the theory of gravitational waves. It solved a problem that had puzzled everybody from Einstein on for decades. How is energy carried by gravitational waves? This was Isaacson. He turned into a government funding agent, and he understood how things worked in Washington. He understood what we were doing, because he was such a superb physicist himself. He was really the additional person that pulled this off. And without NSF and Isaacson, this would never, never happen. You need to work on a breakthrough problem with whatever kind of team is optimal. And in many areas of physics, a very small team is optimal. That's true, particularly in condensed matter physics. It was true on this year's chemistry Nobel Prize, which was done by physicists. It is true in last year's physics Nobel Prize. And so I would say the majority of breakthrough work can still be done in small teams, but there are certain things, and gravitational waves is one that can only be done in a big collaboration. We in the physics community have learned, I think, how to function side by side as colleagues, with some people working in huge teams, like LIGO with 1,000 people, and others who are working in the manner that I prefer to work myself, in a very small effort with just one or two or three professors and a small number of students and postdoctoral students. Both are needed, depending on the problem. My mentoring has been one of my greatest joys. I am proud that I have mentored 50-something, 50, I don't know, 52 or 54, I don't even know the number, PhD students during my career, and that they have gone in a huge number of different directions, because I mentored them broadly so that they had the tools to be able to work in anything from an analyst at the CIA, on one extreme, to very abstract theoretical physics, another extreme, in the computer industry, in management. I had two students who moved into the financial world very, very successfully, and they look back and they say far more useful to them than Harvard Business School, which was a key piece for what they wanted to do, was doing a theoretical physics PhD under me. Because in doing a theoretical physics PhD, they learned how to take a complex problem, break it down into pieces that could be solved, how to transform a problem into a soluble form. And that general skill that is the essence of success in physics is transferable to all these different areas of human enterprise. So yes, I'm proud of my mentoring, and I've taken great joy in it. Well, I have several favorite bits of advice. The one that I gave particularly to my granddaughter, who is a physics PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University now, I told her when she said she wanted to be a physicist, I said, physics is a great springboard from which you can move in many directions. So fine, but you have to find a direction that you absolutely love, because if you're going to spend a large portion of your life on something, it has to be something you love. Yes, it also should be something that's important, something that can help the world, but you have to love it. And this is advice that I got from my own grandfather when I was about four or five years old. He told me, Kip, you will succeed in life if you find a job that is like play. That's one thing. You have to be willing to, ready to, eager to work very, very hard. It does not come easily. And so that's the second piece of crucial advice. Third piece of advice is you find your own way of functioning. My mind is much slower than most of my colleagues' minds. And I discovered that when I was an undergraduate. And I struggled for the first year and a half as an undergraduate at Caltech, where I spent most of my subsequent career. But I developed my own ways of learning things, keeping records of what I was learning, working things out in my own way in notebooks and so forth, that enabled me to achieve despite having a slow working mind. So I advise students, you find your own way. And you have to experiment of mastering material and your own directions that you can be successful in. And everybody is different. And we can all succeed in different ways. Almost everything that I have done was something I never planned to do. That was true of LIGO, gravitational waves. I've watched through my entire career, my lifetime, particularly as an adult, for opportunities, unexpected opportunities. And that is basically what gravitational waves were. I came along at just the right time to do this together with Barry Shinnweiss. And I jumped on the opportunity once I saw that it had a real possibility to succeed. Similarly, I never intended to be involved in movies. But I was single in Southern California for about nine years. And I dated in Hollywood. And one of the people that I dated was a woman named Linda Obst. She was a movie producer, had just arrived in Hollywood at the time that I was single. And so our romance never went anywhere, because perhaps I was too much of a nerd for her. And she was perhaps too intense for me. But we became very close friends. And she's a close friend of my wife, Carol Lee, as well today. And so many years later, Linda telephoned me. And she said, would you like to brainstorm with me for a movie? And I thought for a very short time and said, yes. So I could see immediately, one, it would be fun. I would be working with brilliant people who are very different from me. And that's particularly fun. And I would have a possibility to convey, through a Hollywood movie, the beauties and power of science to an audience of, well, what turned out to be about 100 million people who bought tickets to this movie? And how else can a professor reach 100 million people? So I said yes. And so we brainstormed. We created the ideas for a movie. She brought Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan on board to write the screenplay, direct it. They completely changed our story, but kept all the science that we had put into the movie in there. And so it turned out to be a wonderful collaboration between me and these filmmakers about a movie in which the movie is really based on and is steeped in the real science. Popular culture has tremendous potential for inspiring people about real science. I don't know how effective we can be about educating people about real science. Interstellar was not an education process. It was more of an inspiration process. So I wrote a book to go along with the movie called The Science of Interstellar, which is my attempt to provide education in addition. But I think popular culture can provide tremendous inspiration about science and can convey some of the ethos of science, but hard to convey the basic ideas with any precision, obviously. Well, I think my two favorite films that weren't necessarily scientific were the two that preceded mine that also had the science built into them from the beginning. 2001, A Space Odyssey, where a physicist, Arthur C. Clark, provided the underpinnings for it. It was Stanley Kubrick's film. And then the movie Contact, which was a collaboration between Carl Sagan and Linda Opes, the same woman that I collaborated with to make Interstellar. It's the beginning of that film. It was Carl Sagan's film. And in both cases, again, the science was embedded so deeply, it was inextricably interwoven with the film. And I have loved that in small ways, but not major ways. So in Interstellar, I worked very closely with the visual effects team, computer graphics people at the company Double Negative, where the lead person is Paul Franklin, who got the Academy Award for the visual effects in Interstellar. And in order to make the beautiful images of the black hole, gas around the black hole, swirling gas around the black hole, the wormhole in that film, it was necessary to create a whole new way of going from a computer simulation to visuals on a screen. And so Oliver James, who is the chief scientist at Double Negative, and I worked out this new method to do it, which was necessary because you could not get the high-resolution, smooth images that were required for this science fiction movie in any other way. But the methods that we devised are now being used by astrophysicists as part of their visualization of simulations they do of things like black holes and accretion disks around black holes and neutron stars, colliding neutron stars, and so forth. So there's a feedback in that sense. But I think beyond that, the direction of the feeding is largely from the science into the film and through that to popular culture. So my current career at the interface with the arts, which is not just movies. It's music with Hans Zimmer and visual effects, multimedia concerts. It is a book I'm working on of my poetry and paintings by a superb young painter. My new career is my hobby in some sense. I thoroughly enjoy these interfaces with the arts. But also, my wife and I just enjoy each other, and we have a wonderful time. In very extreme moderation, we don't have that much time for it, but we hike, we scuba dive, and we ski, but not very much in the last few years. The last few years have just been too hectic. The kind of work that I do, and whether it's working on a movie, searching for ideas for a movie or in physics, I collect information, problems, issues that I'm struggling with during the day, day after day. And I may be struggling with some issue, some issue of how do you depict something in a movie, or how do you solve a particular physics problem. I may collect all this information related to it during the day for a few days. Then in the middle of the night, the inspiration comes. Somehow things connect together in the middle of the night. I get up, go in the bathroom, and write notes, and go back to bed. And usually the notes are fairly coherent, and often they have a key idea that I couldn't get in any other way. My mind has to go more or less blank, and things have to just somehow naturally start fitting themselves together in a semi-conscious state. And that's where the inspirations come. Gravitational waves are a tool to explore what I like to call the warped side of the universe. These are objects and phenomena. They're not made from matter, like you and I and people watching this video, but instead are made from warped space and warped time. A black hole is the prime example. A black hole is made from warped space. The diameter of a black hole is huge compared to the circumference, whereas normally the circumference is bigger. Time slows to a halt near the surface of a black hole. You see this in an interstellar, where Cooper's daughter Murph, Cooper being Matthew McConaughey, Murph being Jessica Chastain. Daughter Murph ages from age 11 to 95, while Cooper ages hardly at all, because Cooper goes near a black hole where time slows. So near a black hole, time slows down. Inside a black hole, time flows in a direction you would have thought was a space direction toward the center, but that's the direction time flows. Black hole drags space into whirling motion, like the air in a tornado. So a black hole is made from warped space and time. And colliding black holes create a veritable storm in the fabric of space and time. There are other phenomena on the warped side of the universe. The birth of the universe itself, the earliest moments of the universe, space and time tremendously warped. Things called cosmic strings, where the circumference around this sort of rubber band-like object is less than pi times the diameter. These weird things that are made from warped space and time are a wonderful topic for a book about the warped side of the universe. And so this book is a collaboration between Leah Halloran, who's a young painter and photographer who is good enough to have sold pieces to the Guggenheim Museum in New York until she's in her 30s. And so it's her paintings of these phenomena, the storm in the fabric of space and time that produces gravitational waves, cosmic strings that produce gravitational waves. So her paintings and my poetry about it. And so I've never shown anybody except my wife hardly any of my poetry, my attempts at poetry. If my poetry is so bad that it makes this book be a total loser and doesn't sell but two copies, one to her and one to me, well, that's all right. I've had success elsewhere. And if I drag her down, that's all right. She's had success elsewhere. So we're having fun doing something that's different for us. And perhaps people will enjoy it. I enjoy the process very much of working with creative people who are very different than I am and trying to do something different from what I've done before. Right now, the harder thing for me, writing poems, is a lot harder than doing physics because it's new. But that's why I'm doing it. I've done physics for most of my life. I've been doing physics in a serious sort of a way for more than half a century. So let's do something different that is also very hard because I'm very new at it. So that's the challenge, and that's the joy.