In the 1960s, when Kip Thorne embarked on his career as a physicist, there were hints that our universe might have a “warped side”: objects and phenomena such as black holes that are made from warped spacetime instead of from matter. Most of Kip's half-century career has been devoted to converting those hints into clear understanding. He and his colleagues have explored the Warped Side through theory (using mathematics and computer simulations to probe what the laws of physics predict) and through astronomical observations (primarily with gravitational waves). In this lecture he will recount the history of those explorations, he will describe what we now know about the Warped Side, and he will speculate about the future.

Kip Thorne (2017 Nobel laureate in Physics), California Institute of Technology

05/17/2023