Kip Thorne

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.

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.

Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.

'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

If you think that the distance from the Earth to the nearest planet where we could live comfortably... is being, like, from New York to Australia... what we've achieved so far, in going to the moon, that's about two-and-a-half inches. So that's the challenge.

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.

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.

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.

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 going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.

As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.

The human race has a yearning to explore. That's part of our biological and psychological makeup.

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.

It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.