Kip Thorne. The Gravity of the Situation

Abstract

Kip Thorne is a world expert on Einstein's general theory of relativity. He co-authored with John A. Wheeler and Charles W. Misner the text Gravitation, a work once characterized as “the book with the most physics per dollar,” since it was one of the heaviest books on most physicists' shelves (rightly so for a book on gravitation). According to general relativity theory, the collision of two giant black holes should send out waves of gravitational energy. However, the signals are very weak and therefore very difficult to measure. In 1984, Thorne was co-founder of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO is actually two observatories: one in Louisiana, one in Washington state. When both measure the tiny signals simultaneously, that means that a burst of waves is passing the Earth. Thorne produced an important part of the mathematical analysis of how the bursts were supposed to look and how they could be measured. Over the last few years, LIGO has measured many such events. Thorne was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.