The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves — Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran
Disclosure
Several years ago, Sean Carroll (then at CalTech) said, (paraphrase) if you take a poll of everything, as to who is the greatest relativist (someone who specializes in Einstein’s theory of relativity) — the answer overwhelmingly would be Kip Thorne.’
Around the same time, in my capacity as a featured cosmology editor, I had the good fortune to be granted an extended in-person interview with Sean Carroll (a day before the much anticipated publication of his new book The Big Picture, and two days before the launching of a major book speaking tour.
It was an opportunity not to be wasted. I was certain (given they were CalTech colleagues) he must have had some contact with Kip Thorne and so, with the interview already underway, and with no convenient lead-in I asked, -
“What do you think of Kip Thorne?” And suddenly but unmistakably the tone of the conversation changed. Pausing for just a moment, he seemed to lean a little bit closer -
“He is someone who understands physics very, very, well.”
Coming from Carroll, who is without a doubt one of the world’s greatest explainers of the nuances of cutting edge cosmology, it could hardly have been a more profound statement. Reflecting on his words, Carroll added, “The way he’s devoted 50 years of his career to this one project (LIGO), the attempt to detect the first gravitational wave in history — (shaking his head) I couldn’t do that.” And several months later, at the conclusion of a similarly extended in-person interview with Peter Woit, who teaches mathematics at Columbia University, this happened:
Just as I am about to leave, Peter Woit, almost as an afterthought, says:
“Ya know, you should stay tuned, a big announcement may be coming up.”
I know he is referring to a vague rumor, that, perhaps after all these years, LIGO may have detected its first authentic black hole gravitational wave.
“Haven’t they said that a number of times in the past and they were false alarms?”
“Yeah, but…well…something about this time is different…that’s what I’ve heard…so stay tuned.”
Peter Woit, along with Sabine Hossenfelder and John Morgan, are considered (by many) to be the gold standard when it comes to extreme scientific skepticism. Sure enough, two days later, there was a world wide announcement that, indeed, history had been made. Incredibly, originating from a collision of two orbiting inspiralling black holes over a million years ago — a gravitational wave travelling at the speed of light (reached the earth) had been detected reliably.
One, Two, Three… Infinity
That was the book written in 1947 by George Gamow — the genius who had been among the very first to suspect the origin of the universe may have been the result of a cataclysmic explosion — had fired the imagination of a 13 year old Kip Thorne. It drove him eventually to CalTech, which in turn would refer him to Princeton. There he would rub elbows with theoretical icons such as Robert Dicke who would miss by the narrowest of margins, being the very first to record evidence for the discovery of the historic MCB (microwave cosmic background). This would go to the renowned radio astronomers, Penzias and Wilson (who first thought they had discovered the annoying interference of pigeon droppings). When they brought their findings to Robert Dicke, they would be informed as to the true nature of their world-shaking discovery.
Last but not least, in this chain reaction of burgeoning scientific genius is the legendary John Archibald Wheeler, the architect (in the 60’s) of what came to be called the golden age of the revival of the theory of general relativity, which had been dormant for decades: the time when the experimental evidence for the existence of black holes (for which Penzias and Wilson had won the nobel prize), the time when the first quasars would be discovered. It was the time when Kip Thorne would be invited into the office of John Wheeler. Who had been assigned to be his PhD supervisor. Legend has it that it took little more than an hour for John Wheeler (“the guru”) to convince the aspiring student Kip Thorne that the way forward was a revolutionary theoretical marriage between the sought after holy grail of quantum gravity and the (until then) sleeping giants of general relativity. And to make a long story, somewhat, shorter was a landmark textbook on Einsteinian gravitation; famously called Gravitation, nicknamed MTW — after three wildly ambitious exuberant authors: Charles Meisner, Kip Thorne, and the guru himself, John Archibald Wheeler. It’s a book that the renowned mathematical scholar John Baez would call “the best semi-classical textbook on Einstein’s general relativity in the history of the field,” and one of the greatest science books ever written. It is a book that literally taught a generation of physicists about Einstein’s relativity. It was a book that I myself would purchase. Despite having taken only one calculus course in college, I was resolved to at least try to understand it as best I could. Of all the rudimentary mathematics I had been taught in high school, it was Euclid’s Elements of Geometry that fired my imagination. The way simple axioms gave rise to foundational shapes: a triangle, a square, a rectangle, a circle, that seemed magical to me. It was like an x-ray had been taken of the world — a grid, a map — that amazingly seemed isomorphic with reality — a true-life marriage between Platonic thought and the gritty actual world that seemed to work; to produce testable facts that you could not only measure but see.
I was not the only one who saw that what Kip Thorne had accomplished was a kind of magical synthesis, that, in the words of Bryan Greene (paraphrase): “ We see only once or twice a century.”
I was struck in a telephone interview I had with David Kaplan, one of the greatest planetary scientists in the world (lead scientist W-Map, still the current gold standard for the mapping of new MCB [microwave cosmic background]). When I asked him after the first official detection of the very first black hole, claimed by LIGO, who they felt would win the upcoming selection of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics- and almost instantly (and reverentially) he said Kip Thorne, “now don’t tell anyone I said that until after the announcement.” A moment later, (in a way of clarification/ justification) he added: “He’s helped create a whole new field — of multiple messenger astronomy.”
I kept my promise (waiting 6 years before revealing this) to which I know add this: at around 5 in the morning (US time), on the same morning Kip Thorne received the de rigueur phone call from Sweden, informing him he had indeed been nominated as one of the three winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics — I received an unsigned email relaying the history-making event (I told myself that it had to have been instigated by David Kaplan — that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)
And, I can add this: about a year after Kip Thorne was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, I interviewed on the telephone the young american astrophysicist, Adam Becker on his first book — What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning in Quantum Mechanics. When I asked him what he thought of Kip Thorne, a strange thing happened. After a long pause, I began to hear what sounded like the muffled sound of someone fighting back tears: “Two things…that I could live in the time when something like this (the detection of the first gravitational wave) occurred.”
I was taken aback. It’s now been about nine years since I had begun interviewing world-class physicists, scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers (in my capacity as a weekly featured psychology and cosmology editor for the popular online magazine Medium.com). I had never experienced (up until that point and subsequently up until the present) anything approaching such an honest and bare expression of the profound, historic unmediated effects that Kip Thorne was having on astronomy!
Which is a nice segue to my last reference, Janna Levin. She is a professor of astrophysics at Barnard College: the author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, a journalistic account of five years she spent on the site of LIGO. It is the most multi-faceted, narrative, intense depiction of the heroic attempt by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Ground-Based Observatory, to capture the first gravitational wave (as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1917). Amazingly, almost coincidental with her final day of a five-year study, she received a “memo” — confidential from LIGO informing her- after three months of exhausting experimental confirmation — they are indeed ready to proclaim to the world their historic discovery (as they did).
It’s one of the greatest conclusions to one of the greatest intellectual scientific adventures in the history of thought!
In my telephone interview with Janna Levin shortly thereafter I comment on her extraordinary stroke of journalistic luck to have been there when it finally happened! “I know…I know,” she responded laughing.
Coda
Although I have never had the slightest contact with Kip Thorne, I felt I should give the backstory of my fascination with blackholes. It’s by way of leading up to Kip Thorne’s extraordinary latest book: The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves, Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran.
It was written in conjunction with Lia Halloran. She is an award-winning artist who has exhibited widely with galleries and museums. She is chair of the department of Art, Associate Professor at Chapman University. She has been collaborating with Kip Thorne for more than a decade. Here’s a quote from Dianne Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses: what a beautiful alchemy of science and art. Full of playful exuberance, witty and wise, seeping across a whole universe eyt lovingly tethered to earth and the heart of what makes the seasons, this shape-shifting pageant of art, science, and poetry lures one deep beneath the spellbinding waves while time evaporates. I heartily recommend this book to everyone.
- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).
