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All Quotes by author - Kip Thorne
" A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time. "
Small
True
Matter
" A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado. "
Black
Mountains
Rich
" As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble. "
Been
True
Many
" As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a snowplow driver. When you grow up in the Rocky Mountains, like I did, you see the snow drifts piled up six feet high, and you're two feet, so it's impressive. "
Snow
Feet
Mountains
" Black holes do not emit light, so you visualize them through gravitational lensing - how they bend light from other objects. "
Light
You
Other
" 'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past. "
Meet
You
Yourself
" Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool. "
Two
Bathtub
Black
" Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity. "
Waves
Will
Maps
" I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time. "
You
Travel
Time
" I can enjoy 'Harry Potter' and 'Star Trek,' but I really appreciate hard science fiction. "
Science
Star
I Can
" I can't imagine not being in a phase where I'm trying to understand something or create something. That's the essence of life. "
Trying
Life
Create
" I do hope that 'Interstellar' and this kind of science in film will catch the public fancy and help to reignite an interest in science - and a respect for the power of science in dealing with the problems that society has to deal with. "
Society
Hope
Power
" If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe. "
Go
Black
You
" If you have a wormhole, then you can turn them into time machines for going backward in time. "
Machines
Going
You
" If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen. "
Intellectual
Creative
View
" If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably... is being, like, from New York to Australia... what we've achieved so far, in going to the moon, that's about two-and-a-half inches. So that's the challenge. "
Think
Challenge
Live
" I got a lot of notoriety early on. Much of my career I was just trying to prove I was as good as the world thought I was. "
Good
Thought
Got
" I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough to make your brain mushy and go to sleep. "
Movies
Brain
Enough
" I'm a real klutz computationally, so Mathematica is just ideal for me. "
Just
Me
Real
" In subjects that physicists think of as purely quantum, classical ideas and classical computational techniques can often be powerful. "
Powerful
Ideas
Think
" I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that. "
Race
Think
Time
" It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up. "
Up
Time
Surprise
" I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that's the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked. "
Growing Up
Job
Me
" My passion is to understand the non-linear dynamics of warped space-time, and the ideal venue for this is black-hole collisions. "
Understand
Passion
Ideal
" Our universe - it's three-dimensional, but we can pretend it's two-dimensional so it's like this sheet of paper - and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it's thousands of miles from Pasadena to London. "
Live
Universe
Over
" Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it. "
You
Technology
Space
" The essential point is that, although coordinates are a powerful, and sometimes essential, tool in many calculations, the fundamental laws of physics can be expressed without the aid of coordinates; and, indeed, their coordinate-free expressions are generally elegant and exceedingly powerful. "
Sometimes
Powerful
Physics
" The human race has a yearning to explore. That's part of our biological and psychological makeup. "
Human
Explore
Makeup
" The jury is not in, so we just don't know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That's sad, that's unfortunate, but that's the direction in which things are pointing. "
Know
Sad
Travel
" We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change. "
Quantum
Physics
Change
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