From being enthralled by science fiction movies as a kid, to initiating one (Interstellar), from reading about astronomy and astrophysics in newspapers and journals to kick-starting the project to hunt for Gravitational Waves (GWs) and finding them, Kip Thorne, who bagged the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C Barish has completed the full circle. In an interview with TOI, he speaks about science, fiction, and the future of astrophysics.

Like many big science projects, there was a time when building LIGO seemed difficult, did you have opposition?

Thorne: We had faced difficulty for two years. We were vigorously opposed by some powerful members of the astronomy community, who found it very hard to believe that we would use $300 million and not see anything, but we prevailed. And from the first the time Congress gave the first construction fund in 1992 and until today we have sustained funding. It is remarkable given that they knew this would be a long and hard goal...And, sustained support was absolutely crucial as knew that we had to build two generations of instruments to succeed and we had said that to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and through them to the Congress. We knew that the first generation LIGO instrument would see nothing, but they were an essential stepping stone to the advanced detectors that would have high probability.

Were you always convinced about detections?

Thorne: It’s been a long journey, I began thinking about it about 50 years ago from a theoretical point of view, though it was 45 years ago when Rainer Weiss proposed the type of GW detectors we use in LIGO. It took me four years to get convinced that his design and idea has a serious chance to succeed, and once I was convinced I made a commitment to do everything to help him and his experimental colleagues to pull it off. I never had any serious doubts that this would succeed once I fully understood how this may work and the obstacles, and came to know the significant possibility to succeed. There were many obstacles we overcame, and originally I thought it would be much faster and by 2000 I thought it would be much later, I thought 2017 but 2015.

The goal was less to prove Albert Einstein right and more to provide a new tool for science, is that right?

Thorne: You’re right, the primary goal was never to prove Einstein right, it was less interesting to do that. What was more interesting is that we were going to do with GWs what Galileo (Galilei) did with electromagnetic waves. Laws of physics tell us that there are only two kinds of waves that propagate through the universe and bring us information from far away: Electromagnetic, which includes light, X-Ray, gamma rays, radio waves and GWs. Galileo changed the way we learnt about the universe 400 years ago, and LIGO, which has initiated GW astronomy now will have a similar impact. If you look at what Galileo’s work did for 400 years, we can only speculate what GW can do. It is going to be a marvellous path to discoveries.

India has been a major player in LIGO, an equal almost, do you agree?

Thorne: That’s absolutely right. There were three major directions of research here . One was the experimental side of things—development of detectors—and India didn’t play much role in that. But the second thing was to understand the shape of the waves that we were likely to see, which was essential for us to compare and get information out, and there India played a major role with contributions especially from Bala Iyer (now head of India LIGO), who computed the shapes of the waves from black holes spiralling together and neutron stars spiralling together. The third strand was data analytics techniques, there the pioneer was Bernard Schutz from Germany who trained (Sanjeev) Dhurandhar from IUCAA, who did a lot of work along with Satyaprakash. India’s role has been very big.

What impact did Sci-Fi movies have on you as a child, and is interstellar really a science fiction as Lynda Obst puts it?

Thorne: I was enthralled by Sci-Fi as a kid and they did have a significant role in pushing me toward science, although reading serious articles about science between 8-14 years probably played a bigger role. Interstellar is one of three movies that had science built into it from the beginning. Contact (a 1997 sci-fi film) where the team worked closely with scientist Carl Sagan (who originally wrote the book of the same name in 1985) and 2001: A Space Odyssey where the team worked with Arthur C Clarke (who originally wrote the book of the same name in 1968) are the other two. And yes, in Interstellar Lynda and I initiated the movie and she brought the Nolan brothers after we had written it. They came on board and embraced the idea. They almost completely changed the story but kept all the science.

