Kip Thorne

I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that's the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked.

Read quote

We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.

Read quote

'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

Read quote

If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

Read quote

Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool.

Read quote

Our universe - it's three-dimensional, but we can pretend it's two-dimensional so it's like this sheet of paper - and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it's thousands of miles from Pasadena to London.

Read quote

My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions.

Read quote

A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.

Read quote

A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

Read quote

When Galileo first trained his optic telescope on the heavens and opened up modern optical astronomy, that was the first of the electromagnetic windows out of the universe: light.

Read quote

The human race has a yearning to explore. That's part of our biological and psychological makeup.

Read quote

Quotes by Kip Thorne