Zitat des Tages von Kip Thorne:
I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.
When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.
Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.
When I ask myself what are the great things we got from the Renaissance, it's the great art, the great music, the science insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Two hundred years from now, when you ask what are the great things that came from this era, I think it's going to be an understanding of the universe around us.
I wanted to be a snowplow driver when I was a kid. Growing up in the Rocky Mountains, that's the most glorious job you can imagine. But then my mother took me to a lecture about the solar system when I was 8, and I got hooked.
We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.
I can't imagine not being in a phase where I'm trying to understand something or create something. That's the essence of life.
We're born with a curiosity about the universe. Those people who don't have a curiosity don't have it because it's gotten beaten out of them in some way.
A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.
A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.
Wormholes - if you don't have something threading through them to hold them open, the walls will basically collapse so fast that nothing can go through them.
When Galileo first trained his optic telescope on the heavens and opened up modern optical astronomy, that was the first of the electromagnetic windows out of the universe: light.
When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.
We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.
I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough to make your brain mushy and go to sleep.
If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.
As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.
If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
