"The right answer is seldom as important as the right question."
--Kip Thorne
Kip Thorne came to Logan, Utah, last week to speak. Kip Thorne! The man who won the Albert Einstein Medal in 2009, and the Novel Prize in physics in 2017, and who acted as science consultant on the film Interstellar. I read his book, Black Holes & Time Warps, years ago and it blew my mind. So, last Thursday, I made the hour and a half drive north to Logan High School, from where Thorne graduated 60 years ago, to hear him give a lecture on "My Journey Through Space and Time: The Big Bang, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves." And it was awesome! He's funny, and good at explaining things, and so smart. He talked about his childhood and wanting to be a snow plow driver when he was seven, his college experiences at Cal Tech and Princeton, and his subsequent work on the LIGO detector, which detected the very first gravitational waves emitted from two colliding black holes on Sept. 14, 2015. Which led to him winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 along with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish.
Best of all, not only did I get to meet him, I also got him to sign my copy of his book! It was so cool! It was my geek moment of the week. But really, how often do you get to meet an actual Nobel Prize winner?
So, if you're looking for a stellar read on black holes, check out Thorne's masterpiece. You might feel dumb at the start, but by the time you finish it, you'll feel really smart!
Here's a couple of other out-of-this-world books that I highly recommend:
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Happy Reading!
That’s cool that you got to go to this.
ReplyDeleteIt was awesome! :)
DeleteYay You! You have a real prize there with a signed copy of a book by a Nobel Prize Winner!
ReplyDeleteRight? I'm still excited about it. :)
DeleteOh wow! That is so awesome! Sounds like you had an exciting time!
ReplyDeleteIt was a very fun day! :)
DeleteWhat an awesome experience for you!!
ReplyDeleteIt was a good day. :)
DeleteSounds exciting! And it's always a plus to get your book signed! :)
ReplyDeleteIt was a definite bonus! :)
DeleteI struggled with astronomy on my Open University course so these sound too smart for me! It's great that you got your book signed!
ReplyDeleteThanks! (And sometimes these books feel way too smart for me, too, but I'm stubborn, so I persist.)
DeleteSo glad you got to meet him and he is not only brilliant but he sounds like a very down to earth man as well. As much as I love books I realize there are big gaps in my reading experience and scientific lit sci fi I have kind of avoided and i want to change that.
ReplyDeleteI really got into physics and astronomy several years ago and read a lot of books about it...but the kind of books that scientists write specifically for non-scientists. :D
DeleteIt's so exciting when you get to see and meet an author and/or expert you really look up to and respect, and even more so when the subject is such a fascinating one. I've not read Kip Thorne's books, but his name is familiar from some of the documentaries I've watched about physics and cosmology. We had the fun of attending a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson eight or ten years ago, when we were homeschooling our daughter Robin. At the time, Robin was very interested in cosmology and astrophysics, so it was a great experience for all of us.
ReplyDeleteNeil deGrasse Tyson would be a fun speaker. :)
DeleteHe was awesome.
ReplyDeleteVery cool! It's always fun to meet authors. I definitely need to read up more on astronomy and the science of black holes. I'll add these to my list to check out!
ReplyDeleteThey're really good if you're into that kind of thing. :)
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