Kip Thorne

Kip has been married twice. He got married for the first time to Linda Jean Peterson in 1960; the couple had two children.

Thorne divorced his first wife in the year 1977 and seven years later he got married for the second time to Carolee Joyce Winstein, who is a professor at the ‘University of South Carolina’.

Kip Thorne was born on June1, 1940 in Logan City of Cache County, Utah to D. Wynne Thorne and Alison Thorne. Both his parents were professors at the ‘Utah State University’; his father taught soil chemistry while his mother taught economics.

Thorne showed a remarkable interest and ability in science from an early age. When he was barely eight years old, he was successful in helping his mother build a model of the solar system.

Kip went to the famous ‘Caltech Institute of Technology’ for higher studies and in the year 1962 he was awarded the Bachelor in Science degree. Throughout his time at Caltech, he showed a remarkable ability for original thought and a thirst for knowledge.

In the year 1965, he was awarded his Ph.D. by ‘Princeton University’ after he submitted a paper on ‘Geometrodynamics of Cylindrical Systems’. His supervisor during his time at Princeton was the famous revivalist John Wheeler.

In the year 1967, Kip Thorne was appointed as an assistant professor at the ‘Caltech Institute of Technology’. During this time he further worked on his theories on astrophysics with some of the leading minds in the scientific fraternity.

After spending three years in Caltech as an assistant professor; he was made a professor in theoretical physics in 1970 and eleven years later he was promoted to the august post of ‘William R. Kenan Jr. Professor’.

In the year 1984, Kip embarked on one of his most ambitious and important projects when he started the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), which was engaged in proving the presence of gravitational waves.

He has also been one of the leading lights in the world of Black Hole Cosmology and his biggest contribution to the study of black holes has been the Hoop Conjecture; it explains how an imploding star can turn into a black hole under certain specific conditions.

Thorne’s most ambitious and famous project so far has been the one in relation to wormholes and time travel. He worked in collaboration with some of the leading minds on astrophysics like Sung-Won Kim, Mike Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever. The theories that he came up with proved that time travel, at least in theory, is a possibility.

Kip Thorne’s studies on wormholes remains his most famous work till date due to the kind of possibilities that it has opened up including something as seemingly fantastic as time travel. He strived to establish the scientific proof for time travel and the existence of wormholes through experimentation, in the process developing the theory of Lorentzian wormholes.