Kip Stephen Thorne
active c. 1940, Logan, Utah, USA
American theoretical physicist, the relativistic 'brain' of LIGO — co-founder of the gravitational-wave detection project.
Thorne studied under John Wheeler at Princeton, then taught at Caltech for half a century. He computed the gravitational waveforms of colliding black holes — the 'score' LIGO listens for — co-founded LIGO with Weiss, and wrote the popular book 'Black Holes and Time Warps'. He also advised the film Interstellar, where his black-hole simulations yielded real scientific papers.
Nobel-winning work
Thorne supplied LIGO's theoretical backbone: predicting gravitational-wave signals from inspiraling binaries, the required sensitivity, and the new physics extractable from observations — tests of general relativity in the strong-field regime. The 2015 detection confirmed his predictions about the 'chirp' of merging black holes.
Workplaces: Caltech
United States