Kip Thorne on black holes, Nobel Prizes and taking physics to Hollywood

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  BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.

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  Hello, and welcome to the podcast edition of the Life Scientific.

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  I'm Jamal Khalili and this is the show where I get to talk with some of the world's leading scientists and you get to find out what drives them.

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  So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy the episode.

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  Hello and thank you for joining me here at London's Royal Institution for a special edition of the Life Scientific.

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  One that'll take us on a journey in space and time through black holes and wormholes to giant experimental labs and Hollywood studios.

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  My guest is Kip Thorne, emeritus Professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, and someone who's had a huge impact on our understanding of Einstein's theory of gravity.

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  An early fascination with the subject led Kip to break new ground in the study of black holes.

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  And his work as part of the team that recorded gravitational waves for the very first time.

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  The the product of a collision between two massive black holes more than a billion light years away earned him a share in the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics.

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  As if that wasn't enough, he subsequently took astrophysics to the movies, developing the original idea behind Christopher Nolan's time travel epic interstellar, and since then, acting as the scientific advisor on various big screen projects, most recently, the spectacular and highly acclaimed Oppenheimer.

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  There can't be many physicists who've had a hand in a Nobel Prize and an Oscar, but Kip seems to have found a way to span those seemingly disparate universes.

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  Perhaps there's a wormhole involved.

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  Kip Thorne, welcome to the Life Scientific.

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  Now, I mentioned the project that led to the first recording of gravitational waves, which then subsequently earned you a Nobel Prize.

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  So can I ask you to set out in basic terms what they are?

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  Gravitational waves you can think of as ripples in the shape of space that are generated by things like colliding black holes or the birth of the universe and travel at the same speed as light does, bringing us detailed information about their source.

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  And of course, they were predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity.

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  Einstein.

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  Einstein conceived his general theory of relativity.

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