Kip Thorne (English version)

Longtime friend of brilliant Hawking, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne shares many of his comrade's remarkable characteristics such as genius and a remarkable sense of humor. Kip Thorne was featured on the famous sitcom "The Big Bang Theory", playing himself (as did Hawking) and was also an executive producer of the famous science fiction movie "Interstellar", where he oversaw and conducted the scientific aspects covered in the film. Thorne has released along with the film a book called "The science of Interstellar", in which he discusses all the formal science present in the feature film, as well as hypothetical phenomena ("spaces" taken by fiction) while still maintaining a scientific perspective on them.

Born in Utah, United States, on 06/01/1940, Kip Stephen Thorne was quick to stand out, and at age 30 he was already teaching at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the world's most renowned colleges. As a teacher, Thorne taught the famous Richard Feynman. In 1965 Kip Thorne earned his PhD from Princeton University (the same college where Einstein had taught).

Kip Thorne has been awarded many awards, and in 2017 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish) for the incredible gravitational wave detection, consolidating the physicist's work and notable contributions for the development of the LIGO detector. His main areas of research include affluent topics of general relativity, such as black holes, relativistic stars, and his greatest success: gravitational waves. In his research at Caltech, Thorne, along with colleagues, emphasized the study of wormholes (hypothetical objects) with a view to the implications of their existence.

In the twentieth century, the existence of black holes was subjective, as there was no solid evidence as exist today, and Hawking and Thorne started to make public bets, especially about black holes, where the winning party would receive at the cost of the loser, a subscription of a magazine of choice. One of the main bets between the two minds was on a famous paradox in the world of theoretical physics, the so-called "information paradox". Such a paradox is concerned about what happens to the information of an object after it is "consumed" by a black hole: would it be lost? The "loss"/apparent destruction of information contradicts one of the main principles of physics, which states that information in a system cannot be destroyed.

Photo of Kip Thorne preparing the set for one of the "Interstellar" scenes