Baker’s Dozen with Kip Thorne

This is the first in a new, occasional series in which Caltech News aims to highlight the less well-known sides of some prominent Caltechers by asking them 13 questions on topics somewhat off the beaten track. To inaugurate the feature, Caltech News writer Rhonda Hillbery sat down with Caltech’s Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Kip Thorne ’62, renowned in the scientific community for his research into gravitational physics and black holes, and known to the wider public as an articulate and engaging science popularizer. His first book for nonscientists, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Science Writing Award, and the (Russian) Priroda Readers’ Choice Award. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, among numerous other honors, Thorne was named California Scientist of the Year in 2005.

How do you describe the mysteries of black holes, wormholes, and gravitational waves for the uninitiated?

Einstein told us that space and time are warped by the matter and energy that live in space-time, such as you, me, and the sun. The challenge of much of the work that my research group has been involved in is to understand the laws that govern that warping of space and time, and especially to understand how warped space-time behaves when it’s very stormy. It’s as though we had seen the surface of the ocean when it is very smooth and quiescent, and we’d never seen a storm, a whirlpool, never seen a waterspout, or violently crashing waves. The challenge is to see phenomena in warped space-time that are analogous to crashing waves on the ocean. So that is what I’ve been after for most of my career.

What is the most interesting question about the universe?

The most interesting question is to understand clearly the laws that govern the birth of the universe and what happened in the first fraction of a second as both the universe and the fundamental laws in their present form came into being.

What do you consider the most interesting question about humanity’s existence?

Whether there is intelligent life in the universe besides humanity itself. The challenge of understanding what other forms of life there are elsewhere, particularly intelligent life.

What is your greatest accomplishment as a scientist?

The training of a new generation of physicists who work on trying to understand the roles of warped space-time in the universe. My students, even just as students, before they went out into the world as mature scientists, have done more really important research than I have.

Can you name a few of your student standouts?

There have been so many, it’s hard to name any single student, but examples include Saul Teukolsky, who got his PhD in 1974 and is a pioneer of numerical relativity. At Cornell, he’s now the Hans Bethe Professor of Physics and Astrophysics and chair of the physics department. As a graduate student he developed the mathematical theory of small perturbations of the warped space and time around black holes. That theory is now the foundation for much of the modeling we do of gravity-wave sources.

I’ve had something like 50 PhD students. Many of them have wound up pursuing academic careers, but some have pursued careers in other areas. One Caltech trustee who was a superb student is David Lee [PhD ’74]; he went into business and founded Global Crossing. Another is Walter De Logi [PhD ’78] who is a major entrepreneur in biotech [he’s a founder of Ceres], who did his thesis jointly with me and with Charlie Papas. Some students have come here for a PhD in theoretical physics, gone to business school and then out in the business world. They say many years later that their Caltech physics training was more valuable to them than business school because in physics they learned how to think and analyze issues and problems.

What is your career path not taken?

When I was young I imagined pursuing politics, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realized I’m not emotionally suited for that. I’m fairly good at dealing with things of that sort, but they tear me apart inside. I’m fundamentally an introvert. I behave like an extrovert when I have to.

I intend to make a career change in a few years because I can only imagine myself continuing to do very good physics research and mentoring students for another 10 years or so. But I can also imagine myself as a very good writer and continuing that into my nineties, so I plan to make a transition of careers into writing. Not right away but gradually, beginning in a few years. In some ways, my former student Alan Lightman [PhD ’74] is my inspiration. He is very diverse, from writing poetry and science essays, to novels, as well as having pursued a very successful career as an astrophysicist.

What would you like to write?

There are things I’d like to write at the popular-science level, and also some technical things. I also would like to try my hand at fiction. Whether I could do that successfully I don’t know, but I would enjoy trying. As for technical things, I wrote but never published a monograph on gravitational waves that I would like to resurrect, update, and publish. And unless somebody else does it in the next few years, I would like to write a successor to the classic textbook on general relativity, Gravitation, that I coauthored in 1973 with Charles Misner and John Wheeler. Remarkably, there has not really been a replacement at the advanced level. The subject has changed enormously since 1973. So a completely fresh text is needed. It has been needed for 10 or 15 years but nobody has managed to write one.

Are there political or social issues that you care about?

On social issues I am a liberal Democrat, if you want to put a label on me. But a liberal Democrat who is aghast at fiscal irresponsibility. And so I share fiscal views to a great extent with my conservative Republican friends. My mother got a PhD in economics in the mid 1930s. She was not allowed to teach at Utah State University, in the town where I grew up, because my father was a professor there. There were nepotism laws to prevent both husband and wife being employed by the state. So she pursued a life of political activism, started the antipoverty program in our area, and Head Start. She was elected to the school board and was its chair for many years until she led an anti-Vietnam War protest march. In the next election she got defeated by the largest margin in the history of the valley. When she died, the banner headlines in the local newspaper read “Old Radical Dies,” because she had been such a strong liberalizing force in a very conservative community. She was a highly respected person who had pushed hard on social issues, women’s issues, issues of the poor. I care about the same issues, but I haven’t put the kind of heart and soul into them that she did.

Could you talk about your early influences?

Up to age eight I wanted to be a snowplow driver. I grew up in a high mountain valley in Utah—Cache Valley—and during the winter of 1948 there was very heavy snowfall, and these snowplows going down the street in front of our house pushed the snow banks up to heights of 10 feet or so. The power of the snowplow driver was really awesome to a small child.

But in the spring of that year my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system by a professor of geology. I was totally enchanted by the idea of the sun and the planets, so she then began doing astronomy projects with me. She got a list of the diameters of the sun and the planets and the distances between them, sat me down, and together we did calculations to scale. She showed me how to calculate how big the earth should be if the sun were four feet in diameter, and how big should be the distance between the sun and the earth. So we worked this all out and then we went out on the sidewalk in front of our house. We drew a four-foot sun in chalk and then we took a long tape measure and measured down the block to where Mercury was, which was in front of the neighbors’ house, Venus was two houses on down, the earth was near the end of the block, and Pluto was in the next town. And these planets were so tiny!

That opened my eyes up to the great stretches of space in the universe and started me on the way to getting books out of the library, buying paperback books about astronomy and then later about physics, about relativity and so forth. So that’s a large part of why I’m here today.

If you could give one piece of advice to today’s Caltech student, what would it be?

To undergraduates I would say, you’re living in an artificial environment where the pressure is intense, your peers are brilliant, and you see yourselves competing with them. You should try to put that competition away; make it not affect you, and focus instead on simply learning and enjoying science. This is a totally artificial environment. You’ll never be in this situation again. When you leave Caltech, you will find yourself surrounded by more ordinary mortals. Now, that’s a weird kind of advice, but I have seen too many talented undergraduates get discouraged and drop out, either actually or spiritually.

My main advice, then, is to focus on enjoying science. Make your learning of science something that reaches out beyond your studies and into the world more broadly. Keep up with what’s going on outside of your own areas of study. Maintain your intellectual curiosity and learn thereby how to function like a real scientist rather than just focusing on the narrow, particular areas that are involved in your coursework—or in your dissertation, if you are a grad student.

What was the last nonscientific book you read?

The Children by David Halberstam: a history of the civil rights movement in the South and the roles of young people in it.

What do you do to relax?

At night just to get my mind off things and go to sleep, I flip through channels on the TV in a mindless sort of a way. That’s because there are so many things going on in my mind from the day. I scuba dive, but not very much. I ski, but not very much. I have a home on the Oregon coast that my wife and my brother and I have built; I just hide out there, do physics, write, hike, and run on the beach. For me, relaxing is simply getting away from people and having quiet time to myself. My wife and I take a major vacation every few years. We did a 20-day foot safari in East Africa a while back. We’re hoping to do several weeks in Kamchatka [Russia] at some point in the not too distant future. We have enjoyed sailing in the Adriatic Sea with Walter De Logi and other friends. The sea can be so calming!

Do you believe in God or a “higher power”?

No. I lost interest in religion many years ago, when it became evident to me that religion is far less effective in dealing with the world and improving the lives of people than science is, and when I developed a strong aversion to believing things on pure faith. My parents instilled in me a strong moral compass based not on religion, but on humanism—and on an appreciation for the rights of others to think differently, believe differently. Despite the woes of the world, I see that humans have an enormous capacity for good, an enormous capacity to help each other achieve better and richer lives.