Kip S. Thorne
American physicist, writer, and Nobel Laureate
Who is Kip S. Thorne?
Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American astrophysicist and author. With John A. Wheeler and Charles Misner, he coauthored the general relativity textbook Gravitation in 1973. 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.
Historical significance
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". 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.
