Black Holes & Time Warps Quotes

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,”
― Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

“El cálculo, la teoría de variable compleja, la teoría cualitativa de ecuaciones diferenciales, la teoría de grupos y la geometría diferencial estaban cubiertas;”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“y hemos contagiado a la comunidad física mundial nuestros niveles matemáticos escandalosamente bajos.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“La violación es solamente una peculiaridad minúscula en las leyes de la física, una que presumiblemente soportan las leyes con gusto.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“tres números, su masa, su momento angular y su carga eléctrica. El”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (Wheeler, 1990).”
― Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

“En ello residía la belleza de la especulación. Era”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“quizá incluso tenía miedo— a especular.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“The nuclear force holds neutrons and protons together more tightly when they form iron nuclei than when they form any other kind of atomic nucleus.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

“De todas las ideas concebidas por la mente humana, desde los unicornios y las gárgolas a la bomba de hidrógeno, la más fantástica es, quizá, la del agujero negro:”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“La independencia nutre a la fuerza.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“cuando un cálculo confirma las propias expectativas, uno simplemente se reafirma un poco en su comprensión intuitiva de las leyes de la física. Pero cuando un cálculo contradice las expectativas, uno está en el camino hacia una nueva intuición.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“Pronto aprendimos a llevar varios problemas a la vez: un problema difícil que deba ser visitado y revisitado una vez tras otra a lo largo de muchos meses o años antes de que se abra la cáscara, con la esperanza de una gran ganancia; y otros problemas mucho más fáciles, con ganancias más inmediatas.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Agujeros negros y tiempo curvo: El escandaloso legado de Einstein (Drakontos)

“Why are black holes so different from all other objects in the macroscopic Universe? Why are they, and they alone, so elegantly simple? If I knew the answer, it would probably tell me something very deep about the nature of physical laws. But I don’t know.”
― Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

“[B]y reason of its faster and faster infall [the surface of the imploding star] moves away from the [distant] observer more and more rapidly. The light is shifted to the red. It becomes dimmer millisecond by millisecond, and in less than a second is too dark to see . . . [The star,] like the Cheshire cat, fades from view. One leaves behind only its grin, the other, only its gravitational attraction. Gravitational attraction, yes; light, no. No more than light do any particles emerge. Moreover, light and particles incident from outside ... [and] going down the black hole only add to its mass and increase its gravitational attraction.” Black hole was Wheeler’s new name. Within months it was adopted enthusiastically by relativity physicists, astrophysicists, and the general public, in East as well as West—with one exception: In France, where the phrase trou noir (black hole) has obscene connotations, there was resistance for several years.”
― Kip Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

“Isidore I. Rabi, a close friend and admirer of Oppenheimer, has described this in a much deeper way: “[I]t seems to me that in some respects Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the Universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and novel ‘than there actually was. He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone.”
― Kip Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy