Kip Thorne: physicist studying time travel tapped for Hollywood film

Film will splash one of Thorne's big ideas – traversable wormholes through space and time – across popular culture
Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne has advanced some of Albert Einstein's most intriguing theories about relativity and gravity fields. Photograph: Rory Carroll/

If you could pass through a wormhole and fast-forward to November 2014, odds are many people will be talking about Kip Thorne and the possibility of time travel.

Hollywood's publicity machine will be in overdrive promoting a blockbuster film, Interstellar, which draws on research by the theoretical physicist.

Christopher Nolan, who directed the Dark Knight trilogy, has assembled Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine to star in what has been billed as "a heroic voyage to the farthest borders of our scientific understanding".

The real star, however, will be Thorne and his planet-sized brain. The 73-year-old scientist is already revered among peers for advancing some of Albert Einstein's most intriguing theories about relativity and gravity fields. The film will splash one of Thorne's big ideas – traversable wormholes through space and time – across popular culture.

"Closed timelike curve is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past," he said in an interview this week, seated in a sun-dappled courtyard at the California Institute of Technology. "Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity. We are several decades away from a definitive understanding, 20 or 30 years, but it could be sooner than that."

The jury, in other words, is still out on time travel. Serious science used to shun the topic as a realm for cranks and pulp fiction but Thorne, holder of multiple awards and honorary degrees, and adviser to Nasa and Congress as a member of the National Academy of Sciences' space science board, has made it respectable.

In 1988 he published a paper titled Wormholes, time machines and the weak energy condition, with two students, Michael Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever. In 1994 he published a book, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, which was translated into six languages. On the heels of Thorne's big-screen debut next year will be the centenary of the 1915 general theory of relativity, which Einstein elaborated while teaching at Caltech in the early 1930s.

Thorne, who helps run the university's Einstein Papers Project, said the great man's insights were stimulating recent, potentially revolutionary advances in quantum physics. "How the universe was born will be definitively answered by these new laws. What goes on in the core of a black hole will be definitively answered. All the big mysteries of physics and cosmology are likely to be answered by those laws."

It is rumoured that Interstellar, a project Nolan inherited from Steven Spielberg, will feature a character based on Thorne, a colourful figure who wears jeans, Birkenstocks, Hawaiian shirts and a battered cowboy hat. He regularly makes scientific wagers with Stephen Hawking, a close friend, and invariably wins. (Hawking's penalties have included forking out for a subscription to Penthouse magazine).

Thorne's foray into Hollywood – just 15 miles away but a different galaxy from the lawns and libraries of his Pasadena campus – comes amid an exciting, turbulent period for astrophysics and science in general. Nasa's Mars rover and private space missions have rekindled interest in the final frontier at the same time the US radical right has challenged mainstream scientists over evolution and climate change.

Thorne praised Elon Musk's Space X for being cheaper and nimbler than government programmes and gave qualified backing for manned missions. "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."

Manned missions diverted resources from more scientifically rewarding, automated exploration. Even so, in centuries to come humans would and should spread beyond our solar system, he said. "There always is a very small but real danger of a catastrophic event on Earth … from gigantic asteroids or unexpected biological development. The human race has a yearning to explore. That's part of our biological and psychological makeup."

Asked about a one-way trip to Mars, Thorne said, apparently only half-joking, he would accept only after turning 100. "I'd be ready in about 30 years when I figure I have only a few years left. I enjoy life too much."


The soft voice acquired an edge when discussing conservative attacks on evolution and climate science. "It's very worrying for the future of our country. I don't think it's been a major issue for science today but the danger is it will be a major issue for science in the future. To have one political party that's under control of anti-intellectuals who don't accept the fundamental tenets of science is really scary. That's where we are."

Thorne, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, cited the example of Trofim Lysenko who as Stalin's science guru stifled genetic research for ideological reasons.

"Russia basically lost most of its foundation for modern biological science. We could be somewhat like that if the forces that oppose climate science and evolution and scientific laws and efforts were to prevail."

At stake was not just government funding but public education. "We could wind up becoming a backwater in areas of science and technology that are tremendously important to the future. I'm optimistic that won't happen but that's the danger."

A separate threat, he said, was "dysfunctional" science management by Nasa under the Bush and Obama administrations which has let Europe steal a lead on high-energy physics with the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. "Europe forging ahead is somewhat symbolic of the US beginning to cede technological leadership to other countries."

One bright spot in the US, said Thorne, was the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational Wave Observatory
(Ligo), an ambitious effort to detect ripples in space and time known as gravitational waves, something Einstein posited back in 1915.

Thorne, along with colleagues Ronald Drever and Rainer Weiss, persuaded the National Science Foundation to spend $365m building a pair of unique observatories in Louisiana and Washington in 2002.

A decade later no gravitational waves have been detected but Caltech's emeritus professor is upbeat, saying newly sensitised detectors should start detecting waves between 2015 and 2017. "It will be a tool to probe aspects of the universe we've never seen. Even if we see only things we expect to see we'll still learn a lot we didn't know before. But every time a new kind of window on the universe has been opened there have been big surprises."

It is little surprise that Hollywood has wooed a scientist with echoes of the Christopher Lloyd character in Back to the Future. Carl Sagan, the cosmologist and writer, asked Thorne's advice on how to transport a character (played by Jodie Foster in the film of his novel Contact) through the universe. The solution was a hypothetical traversable wormhole connecting two periods in time.

Thorne credits Contact and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey, based on Arthur C Clarke's novel, as good films with strong scientific foundations. "In both cases the original stories were developed by people who understood science and had physics training."

He enjoys romps like Star Trek even when they violate laws of physics. He values them for enthusing audiences about science. "Hollywood has played that role quite well and I'm sure it will continue to do so."

Interstellar, a co-production between Warner Bros and Paramount Pictures, is based on a treatment by Thorne and the producer Lynda Obst which Jonathan Nolan turned into a script for Spielberg, who has handed directing reins to Christopher Nolan (brother of Jonathan) who in addition to the Dark Knight trilogy made the sci-fi thriller Inception.

The story is believed to concern explorers who travel through a wormhole to another dimension. Nolan has veiled the project in secrecy. "I can't talk about Interstellar right now. You'll have to wait till next year," said Thorne, who is an executive producer.

Will there be a character based on him? He smiled. "You shouldn't believe everything you read."

Thorne is married to Carolee Joyce Winstein, a professor of biokinesiology, the study of human movement, and has two adult children from a previous marriage.

He divides his time between the film and academic research, currently focused on the nonlinear dynamics of curved spacetime.

Asked how he stayed so spry, he replied. "By enthusiasm and intense work on my research projects, and my writing and movie projects." He smiled. "And by engaging in lots of great sex."

 This article was amended on 25 June. The original stated that Steven Spielberg was still a producer on Interstellar. This has been corrected.