The Science of Interstellar Quotes

“Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“An explosion in space makes no sound, as there is no air to transmit the sound waves.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“At our meeting, I suggested to Steven and Lynda two guidelines for the science of Interstellar: 1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe. 2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some “respectable” scientists regard as possible.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“No matter how hard we may try, we can only travel forward. The relativistic laws guarantee it.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Revolutions that upend established scientific truth are exceedingly rare. But when they happen, they can have profound effects on science and technology.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important. I hope this book contributes to that understanding.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“In 2014, the Earth’s gravity is weakest in southern India (blue spot) and strongest in Iceland and Indonesia (red spots).”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“But ours is not a dystopia. Life is still tolerable and in some ways pleasant, with little amenities such as baseball continuing. However, we no longer think big. We no longer aspire to great things. We aspire to little more than just keeping life going.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“The French translation of ‘a black hole has no hair’ is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“We don’t know what triggered the big bang, nor what, if anything, existed before it. But somehow the universe emerged as a vast sea of ultrahot gas, expanding fast in all directions like the fireball ignited by a nuclear bomb blast or by the explosion of a gas pipeline. Except that the big bang was not destructive (so far as we know). Instead, it created everything in our universe, or rather the seeds for everything.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein’s relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It’s somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Can you identify in your own life speculations that became educated guesses and then truth? Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life?”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity (Figure 26.7). Fig. 26.6. Our bet about naked singularities. Fig. 26.7. Left: Matthew Choptuik. Middle: An imploding gravitational wave. Right: The boiling produced by the wave, and the naked singularity at the center of the magnifying glass. Now, such a singularity can never occur in nature. The required tuning is not a natural thing. But an exceedingly advanced civilization could produce such a singularity artificially by precisely tuning a wave’s implosion, and then could try to extract the laws of quantum gravity from the singularity’s behavior.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“How could human civilization decline so far, yet seem so normal in many respects? And is it scientifically possible that a blight could wipe out all edible”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“politically, we don’t invest in science and technology, or we hobble them by anti-intellectual ideologies such as denial of evolution, the very”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“(Caltech is a wonderful place. Named the top university in the world by the Times of London in each of the last three years, it is small enough—just 300 professors, 1000 undergrads, and 1200 graduate students—that I know Caltech experts in all branches of science. It was”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“If we begin with the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity and then discard the fluctuations, we must obtain Einstein’s well-understood relativistic laws of physics. The fluctuations we discard are, for example, a froth of fluctuating, exquisitely tiny wormholes (“quantum foam” that pervades all of space; Figure 26.3 and Chapter 14).”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“so matter as we know it gets stretched and squeezed out of existence.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else—no matter whatsoever.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“If we know the mass of a black hole and how fast it spins, then from Einstein’s relativistic laws we can deduce all the hole’s other properties: its size, the strength of its gravitational pull, how much its event horizon is stretched outward near the equator by centrifugal forces, the details of the gravitational lensing of objects behind it. Everything. This is amazing. So different from everyday experience. It is as though knowing my weight and how fast I can run, you could deduce everything about me: the color of my eyes, the length of my nose, my IQ, . . .”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“First, a weird claim: Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else—no matter whatsoever.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Time, he realized, must be warped by the masses of heavy bodies such as the Earth or a black hole, and that warping is responsible for gravity. He embodied this insight in what I like to call “Einstein’s law of time warps,” a precise mathematical formula that I describe qualitatively this way: Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Куда бы мы ни смотрели, мы смотрим в прошлое, поскольку свету нужно время, чтобы дойти до наших глаз.”
― Кип Торн, The Science of Interstellar

“I cofounded the LIGO Project in 1983 (together with Rainer Weiss at MIT and Ronald Drever at Caltech). I formulated LIGO’s scientific vision, and I spent two decades working hard to help make it a reality. And LIGO today is nearing maturity, with the first detection of gravitational waves expected in this decade.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“The resulting, stable singularities now carry the name BKL in honor of Belinsky, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz. A BKL singularity is chaotic. Highly chaotic. And lethal. Highly lethal.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Cooper, entering the tesseract, falls down a channel between beams, dazed and confused,”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“As the Ranger carries Cooper deeper and deeper into the bowels of Gargantua, he continues to see the universe above himself. Chasing the light that brings him that image is an infalling singularity. The singularity is weak at first, but it grows stronger rapidly, as more and more stuff falls into Gargantua and piles up in a thin sheet (Chapter 27). Einstein’s laws dictate this.”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar

“Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity”
― Kip S. Thorne, The Science of Interstellar