50th Annual Llewellyn G. Hoxton Lecture with Kip Thorne

"Exploring the Warped Side of Our Universe"

In 1964, when Thorne was a student, there were hints that our universe might have a Warped Side: Objects and phenomena made from warped space and warped time instead of from matter. Thorne and his colleagues have spent these past sixty years turning those hints into clear understanding. They have explored the Warped Side through theory (using mathematics and computer simulations to probe what the laws of physics predict) and through astronomical observations (primarily with gravitational waves). In this lecture he will describe what they have learned about Warped-Side phenomena: black holes, wormholes, gravitational waves, our universe's big-bang birth, and the possibility of time travel.

Hoxton Lecturer: Kip S. Thorne:

Kip Thorne is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at The California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He completed his undergraduate studies at Caltech in 1962 and his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1965. He joined the professorial faculty at Caltech in 1967, where he served as faculty until retiring to become a professor emeritus in 2009. Prof. Thorne is an expert in the theory of general relativity, and his research focuses on a wide range of topics in relativistic astrophysics and gravitational physics, from the properties of relativistic stars and black holes to the theory of time travel and gravitational waves.

He, Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever co-founded an experiment with the acronym LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), which first discovered gravitational waves on Earth in 2015 from the collision of black holes that took place billions of light years away. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics in physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for his contributions to the LIGO experiment. The discovery won several other major awards, such as the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy all in 2016, just to name a few.

Thorne is also an accomplished mentor and teacher. He supervised over fifty Ph.D. students and sixty postdoctoral researchers during his career. He has co-authored two influential textbooks: the 1973 text Gravitation (with Charles Misner and John Archibald Wheeler) and the 2017 book Modern Classical Physics (with Roger Blandford). He received the J.D. Jackson Excellence in Graduate Education Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers in 2012 as recognition of his accomplishments in this area.

In addition to his research and teaching accomplishments, he has written several works of popular science and worked at the interface between the arts and the sciences. He wrote the popular science books Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (1994) and The Science of Interstellar (2014). In the arts, Thorne wrote the treatment for Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar, and served as an executive producer and scientific consultant for the film; he collaborated with the composer Hans Zimmer and visual effects artist Paul Franklin on multimedia concerts about The Warped Side of the Universe; most recently, he published a book The Warped Side of our Universe (2023), with paintings by Lia Halloran and free-verse writings by Thorne.

About the Hoxton Lecture Series:

The lecture series is named for Llewellyn G. Hoxton, who was a Professor of Physics in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences and who served as department chairman from 1906 to 1948. Hoxton had a gift for conveying new developments in physics to students in his teaching. The annual Hoxton lectures were inaugurated by the Department of Physics in 1971 to bring in lecturers to the department who share Hoxton's ability for making novel ideas in physics accessible to a broader audience.