Kip Thorne

Kip Stephen Thorne (English: Kip Stephen Thorne, June 1, 1940 - ) is an American theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the fields of gravitational physics and astrophysics. Thorne has maintained long-term friends and colleagues with the British physicist Stephen Hawking and the American astronomer, popular science writer, and science fiction writer Carl Sagan. He served as the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology until 2009. He is one of the leaders in the world today in the study of general relativity theory and experiments in the field of astrophysics. In 2017, Thorne shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for their decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and gravitational wave detection.