Episode 24: Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar

Blog post with show notes, audio player, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
Patreon: / seanmcarroll
I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to where they needed to get to in terms of sensitivity, the mumblings in the audience after the talk were clear: “They’ll never make it.” Of course we now know that they did, and the 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves led to a 2017 Nobel Prize for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish. So it’s a great pleasure to have Kip Thorne himself as a guest on the podcast. Kip tells us a bit about he LIGO story, and offers some strong opinions about the Nobel Prize. But he’s had a long and colorful career, so we also talk about whether it’s possible to travel backward in time through a wormhole, and what his future movie plans are in the wake of the success of Interstellar.
Kip Thorne received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University, and is now the Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics (Emeritus) at Caltech. Recognized as one of the world’s leading researchers in general relativity, he has done important work on gravitational waves, black holes, wormholes, and relativistic stars. His role in helping found and guide the LIGO experiment was recognized with the Nobel Prize in 2017. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including a famously weighty textbook, Gravitation. He was executive producer of the 2014 film Interstellar, which was based on an initial concept by him and Lynda Obst. He’s been awarded too many prizes to list here, and has also been involved in a number of famous bets.

[@carljuanhill]

I just want to say thank you for creating this podcast.

[@ryanjames2673]

This was a rad episode, thank you Rogan for putting me on to Sean

[@xixeoxeno]

Interstellar is my favourite movie. Sean, I practically squealed when I saw the title. Thank you for the work you do

[@mrmustang2000]

Interstellar is a masterpiece imo.

[@philliplc]

An underrated masterpiece yes, and the Hans Zimmer soundtrack is absolute GOAT - particularly the sequence leading up to and including the docking scene followed by Gargantua slingshot (tracks: Coward, Imperfect Lock, No Time for Caution, Detach).

[@AwesometownUSA]

nah that movie sucks U guys need to see the Love Guru, now THAT’S a movie!

[@GnomiMoody]

These are too short! I want an extra hour tacked on to your podcasts from now on!

[@RandyH524]

Love your content sean. Thank you.

[@DiogenesofSinope1]

You had me at Kip Thorne

[@tobydouglas1410]

Thanks for more episodes!

[@lineumiziara7907]

This is the best podcast ever!!Kip is marvellous, a gift to mankind!

[@SauceGPT]

This. This is what I'm thankful for.

[@woody7652]

Love the podcast thank you, Sean.

[@jonathanbyrdmusic]

I can’t believe we get to hear this conversation. This is peak internet.

[@gpz219]

Excellent podcast, Sean! By the way, my favorite book is "The Big Picture"; such well-articulated thoughts and ideas about naturalism/poetic naturalism. The ideas resonate harmoniously with my personal world-view, and I could not have imagined better words to elucidate such notions. And my favorite movie is "Interstellar", and I would also recommend reading "The Science of Interstellar" by Kip Thorne. So this particular episode hits my interests dead-on! Thank you!

[@eva2k0]

Sean if you see this, I have one recommendation. It sounds like you are recording in a big empty room with hard floors. If possible please place carpet down or other objects that will aid in sound dampening... books, papers, etc... Or just cheap sound dampening material. Prefab fiberglass panels with upholstery covers go for around $60 and would greatly reduce the echo if it is indeed being caused by recording in a non ideal environment. I love your podcast. Please keep it up.

[@AwesometownUSA]

don’t listen to him, Sean! This guy’s obviously just a shill for Big Dampening!

[@MrPeterquinn]

Steven Gordon Big Upholstery 😂

[@jessestrehlow1979]

Sound dampening? Making sound wet? Sound damping may be more appropriate

[@aurelstrat1829]

Excellent presentation!

[@Keefralei]

Utterly fascinating and mind boggling. It’s a huge effort to bend the mind round the reality of gravitational waves. The power of 30 solar mass black hole collisions is on a scale I cannot begin to conceive of though in trying I get shivers of terror when occasional glimpses flash across my imagination. Truly awesome in the real sense

[@joegaribaldi2892]

Love this Podcast!

[@Starlite4321]

Excellent show. Out here in the wild one doesn't get much of a chance to hear directly from this great man. Thanks Dr. Carroll!

[@andrewzanas9387]

Congrats, wild one, for your judicious under-use of commas. You stand alone, sir. The majority of the posters on Sean's podcasts should be forced to face the grammar police firing squad for the unending over-use of commas, "ands", run-on sentences of more than thirty-seven words and the lack of paragraphs. No twitter twits here. /S (personally I hate the grammar police.)

[@yaserthe1]

Brilliant podcast, All together now aaaaeeeeh! 😉

[@robertchristiandau1090]

Awesome and I just started listening

[@GlennThoughts]

People: "Alright" Me: "Ayt" Thorne": "Aaaeeeyyyyt"

[@nicholasgreenamyer433]

Was looking for this

[@elguada123]

😂😂😂😂

[@stickystuff1001]

sounds like he's drunk. a brilliant drunk.

[@dreed7312]

Good conversation

[@markden21]

That was bloody marvellous.

[@Imaginose]

I'm from the Logan area Very Very Proud you Dr. Thorne.

[@lashram32]

I swear I'm not trying to be cruel, (I hope Kip wouldn't take offense,) but ya know when ligo recorded that giant gravity wave and put it to an audible sound... it's the same sound his tick makes all these years of studying his lectures. Makes me smile.

[@erichodge567]

How amazing these people are.

[@kitersrefuge7353]

Awesome. It was running in the background as I worked...only recently did i "clock" an erroneous picture of a black hole; its just warped space!! Previously I thought of it as a mass sitting in a hole.

[@bryandraughn9830]

Fantastic!

[@Altobrun]

Great podcast Sean. I’d love it if you could get a geo-physicist or a geo-chemist on sometime. I find those disciplines are often overlooked but they’re very interesting and quiet important :)

[@johnteddyJoe]

Love these podcasts, they are grounding in a weird way

[@gsilcoful]

Thank you.

[@shmookins]

An OG. Respect.

[@vlex756]

So what was the radius of the Sphere of Death that resulted when these two neutron stars collided? It's slightly sobering to consider that this magnificent discovery may have also resulted in the destruction of other lifeforms that had the misfortune to be "nearby."

[@tommasofazio7586]

These podcasts are simply spectacular. Please do one on the Quantum Computer and Quantum Computation in general, Quantum Information, and Circuit QED. There's a huge amount of experts on the field at Yale University for instance (Blais, Girvin, Wallraff, Schoelkopf, etc.). It would be just amazing!

[@GarySinghgsin3725]

Excellent talk, would loved video feed. Criminal how this has so few views relative to the junk on KZbin these days

[@GlennThoughts]

I'm really loving the "aahheeii"

[@andrewshortt4338]

I think each of us experiences life as a personal interpretation of information. This doesn’t mean we create reality or any woo like that simply that what we experience as time and space and all the goings on is a personal extrapolation of and from information of a highly detailed and complex nature. Thus time travel will never be a thing. You’d have to go back to yourself interpreting as you did then. Such as state would be indistinguishable from the original state perhaps with a minor déjà vu overlap. This to me would be a somewhat useless endeavour. This hypothesis is based on the idea that time and space are just personal representations of the information we are interpreting. You could think of it as everything is happening at once and we separate it out and apart thus time and space allows us make sense of it as a simpler framework.

[@clayz1]

44:38 Let me see if I’ve kind of got this. Vortices in empty space. Each vortex is a tornado-like twisting shooting out of either the north or south poles (the spin axis) of a Black Hole. Two BH’s collide, causing six vortices. Three vortices each at north poles, three at south poles. One vortex at each pole for each BH, that’s four of them, and one vortex at each end for the new merge that is happening. Eventually this will come down to just two vortices again when the merge is complete. And the BH’s themselves are in essence empty space? So this activity is all happening where there is nothing in our space, its all in BH space, spewing out gravity waves into our space all the while. God I love this stuff.

[@The_Tauri]

Truly, with people this accomplished and conversations this complex, it'd be wonderful to have a Joe Rogan style 2-3 hr long podcasts so that we could go on many more tangents. Other than that, great episode Sean!

[@dizzytitan8481]

Can we use earth or venus lagrange points to make a giant gravitational interferometer?

[@realcygnus]

Ah-ight ! You gotta dig my man Kip

[@nicklezetc]

I dont understand how someone could measure something so small, over such a large distance. Truly mindblowing

[@owlredshift]

You will love this episode, the man HIMSELF explains how!! Enjoy 😎

[@Fast85FoxGT]

Kip is the man who started me off on scientist book authors. Such an intelligent man.

[@naedolor]

Why does Kip's vocal tic sounds like two merging black holes?

[@yaserthe1]

😂😂😂

[@kconger_]

I read your comment before completing the podcast, and now when that strange vocal expression arises I begin laughing.

[@nias2631]

That's hilarious!

[@executivesteps]

I'm sorry I read that! You're absolutely right. Talk about irony.

[@danboquist]

Does light experience time? Does anything that lacks mass experience time?

[@alijassim7015]

YES, YES, PHYSICS

[@NessieJapan]

A lotta inside baseball there, Dr. Carroll.

[@LudvigIndestrucable]

+sean carrol Thank you for this video, very interesting, but... I have a favour to ask. I got into something of an 'argument' with someone in the comments section who seemed to be a proponent of the 'electric universe' theory. I must admit that I know very little about it, other than the same channel posted a video of Rupert Sheldrake claming that stars are conscious and that they seem to be pushing the aether model of the universe. I know that this isn't really what you got into podcasting to do, but I'd be interested in a solopodcast by you explaining various defunct theories. I am NOT asking for any commentary on flat earth or similar as it's too tedious and Tyson has that one covered.

[@bryandraughn9830]

I can understand why Sean wouldn't even bother to mention certain pseudoscience ideas. Anything that brings attention to them might enable the use their deceptive tactics. Ignoring their ridiculous B.S. says it all. That's just how I see it. People should debunk such things but Sean Carroll prioritizes his time very effectively. Occasionally he makes it clear where he stands in general towards those things but he doesn't bother getting specific. I can't blame him. Peace

[@LudvigIndestrucable]

@@bryandraughn9830 well, the science and reality behind pseudo science can actually be quite interesting. Homeopathy was born out of the same idea as vaccines, without a working knowledge of viruses, it's not a terrible idea to wonder whether vaccines could be extended beyond small pox etc, so it sounds much less crazy in a historical perspective. What I'm proposing is effectively the history of failed scientific theories, but the ones loons still cleave to.

[@fps8786]

Were they talking about TeneT in the END 🤯

[@N7Arietta]

Came for Kip, stayed for ‘Home Improvement Tim Allen.’

[@kconger_]

Aaaaeeeaaahh?

[@wesmartino64]

It's probably a neurological tic disorder. He has no control over it and it's probably been a huge burden his entire life. I can only imagine how much he must have been tormented as a child.

[@johnfreeman5857]

First cause Sean was my teacher at Cal Tech for two years

[@seriouskaraoke879]

@@yourfairyGodgod Yeah ,right, I've noticed the same, a number of times in fact. But as I remember it Sean said that "John was a jack ass" student.

[@johnfreeman5857]

@@seriouskaraoke879 Yeah what does he know

[@johnfreeman5857]

@@yourfairyGodgod He wasn't really all that knowledgeable anyway so fuk em

[@MrTweetyhack]

DIdn't know he had to teach morons

[@SkyFoxTale]

Breakthrough Prize is also in mathematics.

[@drbqqq1433]

Was this recorded while driving along a hilly road?

[@whirledpeas3477]

Funny, aarrrrtt

[@Imaginose]

It seems bizzare to me they can actually collide with all that twisted time going on.

[@leighedwards]

Stargate the movie was a few years before Contact with the use of Wormholes, geek mode off!

[@Monkismo]

Does it depress anyone else to hear so many scientists declare that "we" are all there is in the universe, esp. when you look around the world and see what we're doing with it?

[@albertods611]

Conversation between geniuses.

[@chrisrecord5625]

Okay just so Get this straight. Thorne (Nobel Laureate) to Sagan. Don't use a black hole for Elle Arroway (Foster) for space and time travel (they, bhs exist, right?) instead use a worm hole ( even though they don't exist naturally and if they were created by an advanced civilization then they would still, likely, be unstable, tiny and require enormous energy to send anyone through them) plus no person can travel through them faster than the speed of light, use a worm hole, even if information might, in Contact (note, putting three or more ifs together bad). I am guessing these flaws would not impact the box office take, either way.Smart move for Kip diverting to LIGO.

[@DanielFBest]

We've detected gravitational waves:- now, how can we manipulate them?

[@beastrule]

Why does his voice go up like that sometimes?

[@jackmarkgraf]

Glad I'm not the only one that noticed this lol... no clue why though

[@markthebldr6834]

Probably cause it's cool. Duh

[@3dlabs99]

Why not?

[@elguada123]

To show Sean that he’s smarter than him

[@thelenzperspective8297]

Kip "aahua" Thorne.. he sounds like professor Farnsworth from Futurama

[@levijackson3797]

I found this to be one of the most interesting podcasts Mr. Carroll has put out but that noise is so distracting it's comical. It's testimony to how smart and fascinating the podcast is. Have you ever been flicked in the nose every 10 seconds during sex with a super model? I bet it's the same.

[@diabeticbiohacker9844]

the lenz perspective 😂😂😂

PRESKOČI NAVIGACIJU  the lenz perspective You ignorant fool, inform yourself before judging someone who is about Google number times better than you. He has Tourrete syndrome and dealing with it same as good as with physics. It is not something that can be said about your Ignorance syndrome!

[@rymc420]

@ it's annoying

@@rymc420 then switch to some other less anoying speaker and stop whining.

[@SuperDynamite666]

Let him do his own intro or in bits

[@stevephillips8083]

All those tiny wormholes ... wouldn’t that contribute to expansion?

[@hashirbinabbas7054]

You need to have a very good attorney🤭🤭🤭kip is as cheeky as he is smart

[@mathadventuress]

Hi

[@user-uf5vk2ey7z]

We need to travel quickly from the continent of Europe to the continent of Australia . We need Instant Transfer . We need to invent tubular hole To travel quickly to distant continents in the earth .There are a lot of people suffering from fatigue And exhaustion This is because their homes are far from their work sites . Humans should be interested in the (Tubular hole) For the immediate transportation project . Many animal experiments should be done for the Instant Transfer project, .The immediate transport project depends on the wormhole industry (Tubular hole)

[@jonesjao5441]

AAAEEEEHHH

[@jbu89gb]

Jones Jão Aruuueeh

[@Limpn00dle84]

Dude I would love to know what causes that s*** or what happened to this guy

[@Limpn00dle84]

Lmao

[@skepticalbadger]

@Enter the Braggn' You're a fool.

[@TheXitone]

@@Limpn00dle84 Thats so nice of you ...its a speech impediment ,nothing happened to him and he cant help it and you lot suck.

[@bryandraughn9830]

It looks like the universe is building up black holes in a variety of ways... Maybe it's a "priority"??

[@arbitrarysequence]

Stargate 1994 = first movie with wormholes. Contact 1997

[@pensulpusher2729]

You need to-eugh-get some, eugh, video feed.

[@franciscoj9968]

Great podcast. A lot of it made me feel dumb...

[@HarryNicNicholas]

surely if you get in your time machine and go backwards all you do is collapse a different wave function. you go back, kill your grandmother (i'm a mysoginest) but it makes no difference to you cos you come from the timeleine where that didn't happen - it's a whole new universe that only ONE OF YOU exists in - you. you in the future is a different timeline. which would make getting back tricky, but still do-able, if you can find you own original timeline. so time travel is universe travel too. is it that we can't time travel, cos in effect we are already time travelling? whatever we do, however slow we move, we can never be in the same simultaneous time to someone else? we "carry our own wave function" with us? and if we approached the speed of light time would dilate (relatively) so, isn't it already dilating, just at a miniscule pace?

[@qzh00k]

LIGO is filtering out massive amounts of background data with amazing precision, so what is in that "noise"? I'd suggest a lot, and it should be investigated.

[@anthonyward8805]

I'd imagine the noise is mainly from electromagnetic and thermal noise of the detectors, as Kip mentions, things that we already mostly have a good grasp of

[@executivesteps]

An entire professional lifetime dedicated to understanding and researching gravity waves and three days after the billion dollar "advanced" LIGO goes online they get a hit with two 30 solar mass black holes merging that occurred 1.3 billion years ago. Talk about a photo finish. BTW Where are all the a-hole KZbin commentators making dismissive comments about "mainstream academics"? Kip Thorne, a mainstream academic at his best and iirc the youngest person ever to become tenured at CalTech.

[@brendanohara1608]

Sean,vget Neil degrasse Tyson on the podcast. That be a great episode and conversation 💯💯

[@Limpn00dle84]

Alright, before they introduce mr. Thorne I believe this is the guy who's got that strange tick either in between sentences or words or it's either right after a sentence or before. But he makes this really strange and Noise and I believe it's this guy that does it I would love to know what that is! Or what causes it or what caused it...

[@adamdalgleish8769]

aaaaaeh?

[@yaserthe1]

Does kip have terets

[@timwakeford8471]

aaaeeh no

[@Frohicky1]

Squozing.

[@LudvigIndestrucable]

Who the hell downvoted this and why?? Too physicsy for you?

[@flatmarssociety3696]

I know! Unbelievable!

[@brucemckay6615]

Probably a God botherer....

[@chrisfloyd9901]

Sometimes I try to believe that there's a statistical inevitably that someone watching this on their phone but in their pocket will accidentally press the downvote over the course of the hour.

[@mtumasz]

I did too. Boring. Anecdotal. Irrelevant to 99.9999% of humanity. 😐

[@brucemckay6615]

Yeah... but that’s still 7m people... so plenty of views and likes to be had....

[@rymc420]

Can't handle this speech impediment. I'll watch another one

[@wtfjyoung91]

?

[@andrewvanderhoof2531]

kip drink some damn water, I was really looking forward to this but had to turn it off. The constant sound of him smacking his lips is like nails on a chalk board.....

[@executivesteps]

Thorne has long suffered with a neurological disease (spasmodic dysphonia) that causes uncontrollable muscular spasms in his throat while speaking. He wasn’t smacking his lips.

[@dmitryshusterman9494]

Interstellar was annoying and had little to do with science

[@LoganHudak]

The way this guy keeps saying “aaiiihh” is making this unlistenable right now

[@kconger_]

Think of it as two black holes merging.

[@killrb13]

He's not doing it on purpose, it's a neurological tic.

[@generichuman_]

piss off then, no one else has a problem with it. He's a genius with a nobel prize, let him be weird.