Before he helped Christopher Nolan visualize black holes on the silver screen, Kip Thorne was already living among them –– not in fiction, but as one of many physicists crafting equations to describe the universe itself.
On Nov. 2, the Nobel Laureate took the stage at Harvey Mudd College’s Galileo Auditorium to recount his 50 year odyssey of making gravitational wave astronomy a reality. Thorne’s work blurs the line between science and imagination — as a physicist, he has done everything from establishing the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) to helping Christopher Nolan make “Interstellar” one of the most scientifically accurate movies of all time.
In 2017, Thorne received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the LIGO detector, which led to the first direct observation of gravitational waves in scientific history. He previously taught at Caltech, and has authored various books that have inspired generations of aspiring physicists, such as “The Science of Interstellar” and “Black Holes and Time Warps.”
The audience, which was composed primarily of physics students and scientists across the 5Cs, brought along their editions of Thorne’s “Gravitation” textbook to be autographed. For many, this event was a chance to meet a personal hero and put a face to the name that they’ve studied in class.
“When you’re in lectures, you definitely hear the story of how these things came about, but you hear the after-the-fact version after we’ve figured out how to tell the story,” attendee Mithra Karamchedu HM ‘26 said. “It’s really cool to hear it from the source.”
Thorne’s talk, titled “My Half Century Quest, with a Thousand Colleagues, to Create Gravitational Wave Astronomy,” is part of Harvey Mudd’s 2025 Bruce J. Nelson Distinguished Speaker Series. Thorne is one of two speakers invited to campus this fall as part of the series’ mission to explore innovation at the intersection of STEM, space and human possibility. In September, the series hosted astronaut Jose Hernandez.
The organizers, Daniel Tamayo, physics professor at Harvey Mudd, and Benson Tsai HM ’06, reflected on what an amazing stroke of luck it was to host Thorne as a speaker. They underscored how Thorne’s scientific journey represents the potential, scientific and cultural impact of long-term work.
“To put it mildly, measuring gravitational waves is such a big accomplishment in the physics world, especially when it comes to measuring it in space,” Tsai said. “I hope the audience is inspired that you can really do ultimately anything and have these grandiose projects, whether it be a movie or pioneering science in a field that’s very poorly misunderstood.”
Thorne began his exploration of gravitational waves as a graduate student at Princeton University in 1962, where he studied the warping of space and time in general relativity. However, his love affair with physics began long before that, when he was just a curious teenager.
“I fell in love with astronomy and I learned from this book by George Gamow that there are laws of physics that control the universe,” Thorne said. “That among the laws of physics are these [places] where gravity arises from a curvature of space time, or walking in space time. And that whole idea was just so neat.”
At the beginning of his talk, Thorne attempted to explain the concept of a black hole through an analogy of a blind ant crawling down a warped rubber sheet. When the rubber sheet is bent very out of shape, it creates another dimension where general relativity fails and time slows down.
Inspired by this concept, Thorne’s aim was to create a field of gravitational wave astronomy, similar to Galileo Galilei’s discovery of electromagnetic astronomy.
Gravitational waves astronomy allows us to discover more about the early universe and detect signals from black holes, supernovas and neutron stars. In order to do this, Thorne and his colleagues had to drastically innovate existing interferometer technology — a scientific instrument that measures waves.
However, this process was long and fraught. At a crossroads, Thorne decided to fully commit to his vision and began basic research in 1976.
Before Thorne’s scholarship, the technology was not sensitive enough to detect anything about the dark universe. After years of research, he and his colleagues successfully made the interferometer a million times more accurate.
Throughout the event, Thorne underscored the value of collaboration in scientific research, emphasizing that without his “thousand” partners, the project never would have succeeded as it did. Attendee Caroline Sorrels HM ’26 appreciated Thorne’s focus on collaboration.
“It was clearly a really big effort and involved so many scientists all over the world,” Sorrels said. “It helps you see a real life example of how collaboration can bring about really big changes and really big discoveries.”
In his descriptions of their team’s collaborative effort, Thorne explained how they continuously encountered the forever-challenge of scientific research: acquiring funding.
Thorne and his team did years of scientific advocacy and even testified before Congress to get 30 million dollars to build two advanced interferometers with over 100,000 data channels. This amount of federal funding for a single project is unheard of.
As he described the complex politics of project leadership, many members of the audience laughed at the relatability of this circumstance. Attendee Kevin Ye PO ’27 was particularly struck by the scale of the project, and appreciated the value of scientific communication that Thorne emphasized.
“Scientific communication to the public is especially important for large-scale fundamental science projects,” Ye said. “Only by helping the public understand their significance can these projects continue to receive funding and support.”
Thorne first envisioned this project in the 1960s. 50 years later, on Sept. 14, 2015, he and his team detected gravitational waves for the first time in scientific history. This discovery was a product of not only years of scientific curiosity and political advocacy, but also international collaboration from 1,000 scientists across 16 countries. This discovery also proved the existence of black holes. By detecting the gravitational waves created by the collision of two black holes, Thorne provided truth to verify centuries of theories proposing their existence..
Since the initial detection, LIGO has recorded over 300 gravitational waves — including black holes and neutron stars — and dramatically expanded our understanding of the universe’s most violent phenomena.
Towards the end of his talk, Thorne emphasized that there were many moments of doubt throughout this half-century of research. Ultimately, through his persistent and collaborative efforts, his youthful passion for the laws that govern the universe paid off.
“[My research partner] Rai Weiss had this feeling of guilt, that he had convinced a huge number of young people to get into the field and [they had still] not [seen] any gravity waves. We spent a billion dollars in taxpayer money,” Thorne said. “So [there was this] sense of profound relief [in 2015]. The younger generation of people who were really essential to pulling it off, they just felt euphoria.”
Thorne’s marathon journey to discovering gravitational waves was met with a resounding standing ovation.
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