Prof Kip Thorne: Q&A; session with Physics Students at UCD Literary & Historical Society (2016)

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• published: 07 Nov 2016
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** QUESTIONS BELOW ** Interstellar scientist Kip Thorne's Q&A; session with UCD physics students after his address to UCD Literary & Historical upon reciept of the James Joyce Award. 00:00 What were the highlights of your experience in Moscow? 01:11 What is your take on the ‘multiverse hypothesis’ 02:18 With Higgs-Boson particle and Gravitational Waves now proven, what will the next big thing to be proven in physics be? 04:56 CERN, Human Genome project, big works of science - how effective are big works of science over smaller cottage science 07:46 What do you know about Quantum Entanglement? 09:20 Is there a distance to these colliding blackholes where you could get where you perceive the wave passing through the human being….if you’re travelling in a space ship somehsere in the universe and one of these goes off, is there a distance where you would feel it? 11:02 In 1997 you said that in the 21st century Dark Matter would be one of the biggest advances we’d make. Where do you stand on that in 2016? How do you feel about the field of studying Dark Matter and that side of the universe is going to develop over the next few years? 13:01 What can you tell us about your next movie? 17:38 What were the parts of interstellar where the science broke down and it wasn’t as accurate as it could have been? Born in Logan Utah in 1940, Kip Thorne received his B.S. degree from Caltech in 1962 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1965. He returned to Caltech as an Associate professor in 1967 and became Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1970, The William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor in 1981, The Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991, and The Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, in 2009. Thorne's research has focused on Einstein's general theory of relativity and on astrophysics, with emphasis on relativistic stars, black holes and especially gravitational waves. He was cofounder (with R. Weiss and R.W.P. Drever) of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project, which made the breakthrough discovery of gravitational waves arriving at Earth from the distant universe on September 14, 2015. Thorne was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1972, the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, and the Russian Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 1999. He has been awarded the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Karl Schwarzschild Medal of the German Astronomical Society, the Albert Einstein Medal of the Albert Einstein Society in Berne, Switzerland, the UNESCO Niels Bohr Gold Medal from UNESCO, and the Common Wealth Award for Science, and was named California Scientist of the Year in 2004. For his book for nonscientists, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Norton Publishers 1994), Thorne was awarded the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Science Writing Award, and the (Russian) Priroda Readers' Choice Award. In 1973 Thorne coauthored the textbook Gravitation, from which most of the present generation of scientists have learned general relativity theory. Fifty-two physicists have received the PhD at Caltech under Thorne's personal mentorship. In 2009 Thorne stepped down from his Feynman Professorship at Caltech in order to ramp up a new career in writing, movies and continued scientific research. His current research is on the nonlinear dynamics of curved spacetime. His current writing focus is the textbook Modern Classical Physics, coauthored with Roger Blandford (to be published in late 2016). His first Hollywood movie was Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, on which he was executive producer and science advisor. For his role embedding extensive real science in this movie and explaining it in his book, The Science of Interstellar, he was awarded the National Space Society’s Space Pioneer Award for Mass Media. UCD Twitter: http://twitter.com/ucddublin UCD Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/universitycollegedublin UCD Instagram: http://instagram.com/ucddublin UCD Homepage: http://www.ucd.ie