Kip Thorne Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Simplicity is the touchstone in finding new physical laws. … If it's elegant, then it's a rough rule of thumb: you're on the right track.

Kip Thorne
Time is defined so that motion looks simple.

Kip Thorne
Science is a community enterprise. The insights that shape our view of the Universe come not from a single person or a small handful, but from the combined efforts of many.

Kip Thorne
Hyperspaces' third dimension has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the dimensions of our own Universe. It is a dimension into which we can never go and never see, and from which we can never get information; it is purely hypothetical.

Kip Thorne
In scientific research, as in life, many themes are pursued simultaneously by many different people; and the insights of one decade may spring from ideas that are several decades old but were ignored in the intervening years.

Kip Thorne
Memories are fallible; different people, experiencing the same events, may interpret and remember them in very different ways.

Kip Thorne
In essence, the curvature in space created by the electromagnetic field is the electromagnetic field; and this curvature can in principle be detected by purely geometric measurements.

Kip Thorne
If one intends to abandon Relativity, here is the place [black holes] to do so. Otherwise one is on the way to a new world of physics, both classical and quantum. Here we go!

Kip Thorne
The universe starts with a big bang, expands to a maximum dimension, then recontracts and collapses: no more awe-inspiring prediction was ever made. It is preposterous. Einstein himself could not believe his own prediction.

Kip Thorne
A star is only a glowing pause in the inescapable contraction of a gas cloud to an uncertain, sometimes fantastic end.

Kip Thorne
Space tells matter how to move... and matter tells space how to curve.

Kip Thorne
Some day a door will surely open and expose the glittering central mechanism of the world in all its beauty and simplicity.

Kip Thorne
I do not aspire to a historian's standards of completeness, accuracy, or impartiality.

Kip Thorne