Kip Thorne

“When I ask myself what are the great things we got from the Renaissance, it's the great art, the great music, the science insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Two hundred years from now, when you ask what are the great things that came from this era, I think it's going to be an understanding of the universe around us.”

“We're going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.”

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

“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.”

“We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age.”

“The jury is not in, so we just don't know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That's sad, that's unfortunate, but that's the direction in which things are pointing.”

“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.”

“In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful.”

“I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough to make your brain mushy and go to sleep.”

“I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.”

“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.”

“As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a snowplow driver. When you grow up in the Rocky Mountains, like I did, you see the snow drifts piled up six feet high, and you're two feet, so it's impressive.”

“When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.”

“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.”

“I do hope that 'Interstellar' and this kind of science in film will catch the public fancy and help to reignite an interest in science - and a respect for the power of science in dealing with the problems that society has to deal with.”

“If you have a wormhole, then you can turn them into time machines for going backward in time.”

“As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.”

“It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.”

“I got a lot of notoriety early on. Much of my career I was just trying to prove I was as good as the world thought I was.”

“Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.”