Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne’s home in the hills of Linda Vista, Pasadena, felt like an observatory of the mind—a place where the boundaries between mathematics, physics, and imagination blurred. When I photographed him there on November 29, 2022, his study was filled with the artifacts of a life spent in pursuit of the deepest questions: models of warped space-time and black holes, intricate diagrams of gravitational waves, and props from Interstellar, the film he helped bring to life with the precision of real physics. His wife, Dr. Carolee Winstein, was there too, her presence adding a kind of counterbalance—a reminder that for all of Thorne’s work in the cosmos, he was still deeply rooted in the human world.
At one point, he and Carolee slipped into matching black leather biker jackets, a playful nod to the rebellious spirit that had always fueled his science. It was the kind of moment Feynman would have loved—one part physics, one part performance, a refusal to take oneself too seriously even when contemplating the fundamental structure of the universe.
Thorne had spent much of his career at Caltech, where he held the Richard P. Feynman Professorship of Theoretical Physics. “It can be a lot,” he said with a knowing smile, “having your chair named after a friend.” And yet, his approach to science—bold, intuitive, always a little mischievous—felt entirely in line with Feynman’s legacy.
But perhaps the greatest testament to his work wasn’t in titles or even theories, but in something that was once considered impossible: the direct detection of gravitational waves. Einstein had predicted them a century earlier, but even he doubted they would ever be observed. Thorne, along with Rai Weiss and Barry Barish, had spent decades proving otherwise.
At the heart of this effort was LIGO—the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—a project so ambitious, so delicate in its precision, that many in the physics community were skeptical it could ever succeed. Two immense detectors, separated by thousands of miles, had to measure distortions in space-time smaller than a fraction of a proton’s width. It was like trying to detect the shifting of a cosmic whisper through a hurricane of noise.
But on September 14, 2015, the signal came—two black holes, colliding over a billion light-years away, sending ripples through the very fabric of the universe. It was not just a discovery, but a new way of observing reality, a kind of cosmic hearing that had never existed before. For this, Thorne, Weiss, and Barish were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Sitting in his study that day, surrounded by equations that had once been just abstractions but were now the foundation of an entirely new field of astronomy, Thorne seemed as curious as ever. The Nobel was a milestone, yes, but not an endpoint. There was still so much to uncover—more black holes, more neutron stars, maybe even the faint echoes of the Big Bang itself.
Outside, the light over Pasadena had softened into evening. He glanced at one of the models on his desk, fingers lightly tracing the curve of a black hole’s event horizon, as if contemplating what lay beyond it.
Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne’s home in the hills of Linda Vista, Pasadena, felt like an observatory of the mind—a place where the boundaries between mathematics, physics, and imagination blurred. When I photographed him there on November 29, 2022, his study was filled with the artifacts of a life spent in pursuit of the deepest questions: models of warped space-time and black holes, intricate diagrams of gravitational waves, and props from Interstellar, the film he helped bring to life with the precision of real physics. His wife, Dr. Carolee Winstein, was there too, her presence adding a kind of counterbalance—a reminder that for all of Thorne’s work in the cosmos, he was still deeply rooted in the human world.
At one point, he and Carolee slipped into matching black leather biker jackets, a playful nod to the rebellious spirit that had always fueled his science. It was the kind of moment Feynman would have loved—one part physics, one part performance, a refusal to take oneself too seriously even when contemplating the fundamental structure of the universe.
Thorne had spent much of his career at Caltech, where he held the Richard P. Feynman Professorship of Theoretical Physics. “It can be a lot,” he said with a knowing smile, “having your chair named after a friend.” And yet, his approach to science—bold, intuitive, always a little mischievous—felt entirely in line with Feynman’s legacy.
But perhaps the greatest testament to his work wasn’t in titles or even theories, but in something that was once considered impossible: the direct detection of gravitational waves. Einstein had predicted them a century earlier, but even he doubted they would ever be observed. Thorne, along with Rai Weiss and Barry Barish, had spent decades proving otherwise.
At the heart of this effort was LIGO—the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—a project so ambitious, so delicate in its precision, that many in the physics community were skeptical it could ever succeed. Two immense detectors, separated by thousands of miles, had to measure distortions in space-time smaller than a fraction of a proton’s width. It was like trying to detect the shifting of a cosmic whisper through a hurricane of noise.
But on September 14, 2015, the signal came—two black holes, colliding over a billion light-years away, sending ripples through the very fabric of the universe. It was not just a discovery, but a new way of observing reality, a kind of cosmic hearing that had never existed before. For this, Thorne, Weiss, and Barish were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Sitting in his study that day, surrounded by equations that had once been just abstractions but were now the foundation of an entirely new field of astronomy, Thorne seemed as curious as ever. The Nobel was a milestone, yes, but not an endpoint. There was still so much to uncover—more black holes, more neutron stars, maybe even the faint echoes of the Big Bang itself.
Outside, the light over Pasadena had softened into evening. He glanced at one of the models on his desk, fingers lightly tracing the curve of a black hole’s event horizon, as if contemplating what lay beyond it.