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Interstellar

College of Arts & Sciences Presents

Kip Thorne | 2017 Nobel Laureate of Physics

Executive Producer of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster movie, Interstellar, and Co-Founder of the billion-dollar Ligo Project, Kip Thorne, and his students, pioneered the modern theory of wormholes and time travel.

DATE: October 16, 2018
TIME: 7:30 PM
PLACE: University Theatre

In this talk, based on his bestselling book The Science of Interstellar, Thorne uses the underpinning themes of the movie as a springboard for explaining the physical laws that govern the universe. Interstellar has the most remarkable, and perhaps puzzling, climax found in science fiction film since Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. In this lecture, Thorne discusses the deep scientific concepts portrayed during the film's most pivotal moments.

Over the past three decades, Kip Thorne has had an enormous impact on Hollywood science fiction—and Hollywood, in turn, has triggered some of Thorne’s deepest scientific insights. His conversations with Carl Sagan during their contact collaboration catalyzed Thorne’s breakthrough scientific research on wormholes and time travel. Later, Thorne’s discussions with Christopher and Jonathan Nolan were key to integrating the real science of gravitational waves into the fabric of Interstellar.

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This 20-minute documentary on the scientific dedication to those who for nearly 30 years in the design and development of this single scientific instrument to explore and discover the mysteries of gravitational waves. LIGO is set out with an objective to provide scientific evidence to one last piece to Einstein's theory of General Relativity.


This single experiment was funded by a collaboration of the NSF (National Science Foundation) and the University of Mississippi. Watch the 25-minute video documentary in which generations of scientists through official channels of communications, sharing of hard work, published research, and long periods of dedication made LIGO a reality.

On September 14, 2015 the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors measured ripples in the fabric of spacetime – gravitational waves – generated by the merger of two massive black holes over one billion light years from Earth. This, the third film in the series, explains the effort required to validate the detection and then celebrates this incredible event.

National Geographic presenting illustrates the nature of Gravitational waves and the technique developed to detect these waves. Physics evidence from the data acquired by LIGO allows Theoretical Physics to be brought into the realm of observational reality.

Dr. David Reitze takes us on the journey of a set of gravitational waves moving through the Universe as ripples in spacetime from the collision of two black holes that merged in a very hostile event that began 1.3 billion years ago. This a short 3-minute video on the LIGO discovery from 14 September 2015.

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