Kip Thorne, Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist known for his pioneering work in astrophysics, and Lia Halloran, multi-award-winning artist and photographer, join to talk about their cosmic collaboration—a book of poetry and paintings called “The Warped Side of Our Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves.”
Debbie Millman:
Astrophysics has proved we had the Big Bang and there are black holes and undulating space time and all manner of nearly unimaginable phenomena. But what do these things look like? We are such a visual species that for most of us without degrees in advanced math, these things don’t make a lot of sense unless we can somehow see them. Enter Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran. Kip Thorne is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist as well as a poet. Lia Halloran is a multi award-winning artist and photographer who is deeply interested in the natural world and science. Together, they have created a book of poetry and paintings called The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. They join me today to talk about their lives and their very cosmic collaboration. Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran, welcome to Design Matters.
Kip Thorne:
Great pleasure to be with you.
Lia Halloran:
Thanks so much for having us.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Kip, is it true that the prize for a scientific bet you won with Stephen Hawking was a subscription to Penthouse Magazine?
Kip Thorne:
Yes, that’s true. That was a long time ago. That was the era of the 1970s. It was a different era from today.
Debbie Millman:
What was the bet?
Kip Thorne:
The bet was whether a particular object that had been seen with optical telescopes and radio telescopes called Cygnus X-1, also with X-ray telescopes, whether it had a black hole at its center. And I bet that it did, Stephen bet that it did not. He regarded that as a insurance policy because he had so much riding on it turning out to be a black hole that he figured that he would at least get… For him, it was a subscription to a different magazine, Private Eye, his British Magazine. For me, it was Penthouse. Well, in the end I won, but it took about 20 years until he signed off.
Debbie Millman:
Ah, okay. Well, good to know. Kip, you were born in Logan, Utah, a town of 16,000 people nestled in a valley in the Rocky Mountains. Your dad was a professor and your mom had a PhD in economics. She was a deeply committed community activist and a feminist and the author of the book Leave the Dishes in the Sink: Adventures of an Activist in Conservative Utah. Was your mom an active member of the community all through your childhood or did it begin later in life?
Kip Thorne:
Oh, she was very active in the community throughout my childhood and throughout her life. When she died, there were gigantic headlines in the local newspaper, Old Radical Dyes. By the standards of conservative Logan, Utah, she was a radical. I think by the standards of southern California, she would’ve been very mainstream.
Debbie Millman:
What would you say is the most important thing she taught you?
Kip Thorne:
I think she taught me to investigate things that I was interested in. She took me when I was age eight to a talk given by a professor at the local university to talk about the solar system. And I fell in love with the idea of the solar system with its then nine planets going around the sun with these enormous distances between the planets by comparison of their sizes. And she helped me get started on doing various astronomy projects thereafter and got me to the point quite quickly that I was on my own and I was inventing projects of my own to do. And she was just wonderful with her children And inspiring in this way.
Debbie Millman:
I understand before you fell in love with astronomy, you had a deep desire to become a snowplow driver.
Kip Thorne:
Oh yes, absolutely. The snow in this mountain valley that I grew up in, Cash Valley, in 1948 particularly, it was very deep. And the snow plows in front of our house would push the snow up to a height that could be two or even three times higher than my father was tall. And that was clearly the most powerful job in the whole world, and so yes, that’s what I wanted to be before I fell in love with astronomy.
Debbie Millman:
Once you fell in love with astronomy, I understand that you began to devour everything that you could find about astronomy in the local library and in bookstores. You’ve said that when you found a paperback copy of One, Two, Three, Infinity by the physicist, George Gamow, you were dazzled. And your description of the book was so compelling, Kip, that I just bought it as well. And it’s really a wonderful book. I don’t want to say it’s easy to read because it’s not easy to read, but for somebody like me that’s more of a fan of physics and astronomy as opposed to anywheres close to even remotely able to do anything in physics or astronomy, I found it to be really, really enjoyable. What did you find particularly remarkable about it?
Kip Thorne:
The thing that struck me the most and that just totally captivated me was Gamow’s description of the laws of physics as controlling the universe, controlling how the universe was born, perhaps, surely controlling how it has evolved, controlling the kinds of things that have come to exist in the universe. And that was the point at which I decided I wanted to be a theoretical physicist who worked on the laws of physics rather than astronomer, but one who then focused on how the laws of physics controlled the astronomical universe. And that’s what happened.
Debbie Millman:
As a teenager in the 1950s, you played saxophone and clarinet in a dance band, you participated in exhibition dancing, edited the high school yearbook, you were on the high school debate squad. And it-
Kip Thorne:
Well, you know so much about me, it’s shocking.
Debbie Millman:
You had quite a lot of range in high school. At that point, did you know what you wanted to do professionally?
Kip Thorne:
Well, I knew I wanted to become a physicist and work in astrophysics. I knew that very clearly from age 13 on that-
Debbie Millman:
Even then. Oh, okay.
Kip Thorne:
But I knew how to enjoy life as well. And that was another aspect of me from the beginning is I wanted to enjoy life and I wanted to understand the universe. I wanted to contribute what I could to human understanding of the universe and have fun doing it.
Debbie Millman:
I understand that one of the reasons you chose Caltech for college was that you read that if on an exam you got the wrong answer but your arguments were good, you could get a decent mark.
Kip Thorne:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
What did that tell you about Caltech? What did that give you the sense that the school was like?
Kip Thorne:
Well, it gave me a sense that it was a place that did not have… wrote rules about how things were done, a place that was very reasonable and flexible that focused on what was important. In this case, when you’re a student trying to learn science and how to do science, more important than learning facts was learning how to figure facts out, how to figure things out. And that was the epitome of the statement that I read in Time Magazine in 1954, I think it was. It was a euphoric article about Caltech, a cover story about Caltech in Time Magazine. And I decided at that point I’m going to go to Caltech, I’m going to be a student at Caltech. And I wanted to have a career at Caltech. Well, here I am.
Debbie Millman:
It was at Caltech that you first developed your interest in black holes. What first intrigued you about this phenomena? Why black holes?
Kip Thorne:
Well, I was intrigued by black holes, but I didn’t understand them at all while I was at Caltech. To really understand them, I had to learn in depth Einstein’s general relativity and the laws of warped space time. At Caltech, I just was intrigued by the idea that there would be this object into which things could fall and out of which nothing could come. And I struggled to understand how that could be and how that fit in with the rest of physics. But I didn’t really succeed in understanding that until I went to Princeton as a graduate student and in my early months at Princeton started to study general relativity under John Wheeler and Bob Dickey, were two professors there, one of them a great theorist, the other a great experiment are both working in Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Debbie Millman:
Is it Princeton that you began to develop a vision for the future of gravitational wave astronomy? Can you share what a gravitational wave actually is for our listeners?
Kip Thorne:
A gravitational wave is a… I’m going to describe it in several different ways in order to capture it. First, I can describe it as a ripple in the fabric of space and time that travels at the same speed as light. A ripple, like a ripple on the surface of the ocean. But that doesn’t really tell you what you would feel if a gravitational wave went through you. It doesn’t really explain in a very clear way what’s going on. What the gravitational wave actually does is it stretches space in one direction perpendicular to the direction it’s traveling. If it’s traveling from me to you, then in the perpendicular direction between us, it stretches space in one direction and squeezes space in the perpendicular direction. And then a moment later, it stretches space in the perpendicular direction, squeezes space horizontally. And it’s an oscillating, stretching and squeezing of space as time goes on. That’s not the full story of the gravitational wave. It is also twisting space clockwise and twisting space counterclockwise. It’s a rather rich form of space warping as time passes.
Debbie Millman:
In 1972, Rainier Weiss, the physics professor at MIT, proposed an L-shaped laser interferometer gravitational wave detector with free swinging mirrors whose oscillating separations would be measured via laser interferometry. At the time, you didn’t think it was very promising. Why not?
Kip Thorne:
Because I had a pretty good idea how strong the strongest gravitational waves are that pass through the earth, and they’re very, very weak by the time they reach the earth. Why said is, “You’re going to bounce the light off of mirrors. And you have interferometry, which enables you to measure to high precision the motion the two mirrors that it’s bouncing back and forth between.” And the gravitational waves are enormously larger than the atoms in the mirror, it just didn’t seem to me at all plausible that you could pull this off. I could see that it was conceivable in principle, but in practice to do this down to 10 million or 100 million times smaller than an atom where the mirrors are made out of those atoms, mirrors are bumpy, and the light is bouncing off these bumpy mirrors, and the mirrors are moving by 10 million a hundred million times smaller from those atoms, that was crazy.
I was in the process of writing with my former PhD advisor, John Wheeler, at the time, and Charlie Misner, another former student of his, writing a textbook about general relativity. And I was writing a section on ideas for detecting gravitational waves, and so I just mentioned Ray Weiss’ idea. And I simply said, “It’s not very promising.” I held back. I didn’t say it was crazy, I didn’t say he had gone off a deep end, but I was very blunt at that level. It’s not very promising.
Debbie Millman:
After you studied Dr. Weiss’ report in more depth, you came to consider it a blueprint for the future. And it took many decades of work, but on September 14th, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, began the first search for gravitational waves. LIGO-
Kip Thorne:
Let me just say indeed, after two or three years of studying his paper and talking with him and with several other colleagues, I became convinced that it had a reasonable shot at success, and so I wound up devoting a large fraction of my career to helping him succeed after having declared that this was not very promising. And as you remarked, by 2015, we did have success.
Debbie Millman:
You spent a lot of your life, as you just said, working on this. What did you think the odds were of success?
Kip Thorne:
I didn’t quote odds to anybody. I was vague in the following sense. It was quite clear when we first proposed to build LIGO, our gravity wave detector system of two detectors of this sort, it was clear that we would have to build very expensive facilities and then build a first generation of detectors, and we would very probably not see anything. We, by then, would’ve spent several hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money, and then we would having learn enough from these instruments that we had built to be able to design and build the advanced gravity wave detectors or advanced LIGO.
What was the odds of success? This depended on two things. It depended on how kind nature was. And I had a fairly good idea of how kind nature was, but we weren’t by any means sure. It depended on how good the experimental team was. And by that time, I knew we had the best possible team that could be put together from the best physicists in the world. My expectation was certainly considerably better than 50/50 odds, up 80%, 90% odds that if we continued to be funded into the second generation, the advanced detectors and pushing the advanced detectors all the way up to their design sensitivity, I would said 90%… I didn’t quote a number, but I’d say 90%, 95% odds that we would succeed at that level. But that level was very far from where we began; very far. And the whole issue was whether we could really get to that level. But I had confidence in this superb team that had been put together. And once we had that team in place, I was feeling pretty optimistic.
Debbie Millman:
LIGO captured a strong signal from the collision of two black holes 29 and 36 times more massive than our sun and located 1.3 billion light years from planet Earth. The waves carried away as much energy as would be produced by annihilating three of our suns. After intense scrutiny of the results, the LIGO scientists announced this discovery to the world on February 11th, 2016. What are gravitational waves actually made of?
Kip Thorne:
They’re made from a warping of space and time. They’re not made for matter, they’re not made from electricity or magnetism, they’re made from a pure warping of space and time, the stretching of space, the squeezing of space, clockwise twisting of space, counterclockwise twisting of space. And it is really quite remarkable. This is the thing that so excited me as a young man when I came to understand the nature of Einstein’s relativity theory, that you could have what I would call a warped side of the universe, objects and phenomena that are made from a deformation, a warping of space and of time.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that gravitational wave astronomy could someday allow direct observation of the earliest history of the universe. And I’m wondering how would we be able to observe that?
Kip Thorne:
I expect that it’s likely that within the next decade we will indirectly see the gravitational waves that came from the birth of the universe. Indirectly in the following sense: That those waves with very, very long wavelengths, very slow oscillations, wavelengths 100th or 1/10th the size of the observable universe; unbelievably long wavelengths. Those waves stretched and squeezed the very hot matter in the early universe at the moment that it was emitting, it was producing electromagnetic waves that we now detect called the cosmic microwave background. The plasma is being stretched and squeezed by the gravitational waves, and as the electromagnetic waves scatter off that plasma, they get an imprint from the gravitational waves that were stretching and squeezing it. And that imprint is what we call a polarization imprint. And that polarization imprint has been seen by cosmologists. However, there are other ways that that polarization imprint can be made in the universe. And the challenge is to separate out the imprint that was produced by the primordial gravitational waves from imprint produced in other manners. And that’s what the holy grail of this area of cosmology is today, but it’s a holy grail that I think is they’re going to pull it off in the coming decade.
A more direct observation of these primordial gravitational waves will likely be achieved in the middle of this century by gravitational wave detectors that are very similar to LIGO, but they’re out in interplanetary space, something called the Big Bang Observer, the future gravitational wave space mission. And those will see gravitational waves that oscillate with periods from about a second to a minute, whereas the ones that put the imprint on this cosmic microwave background, it’s periods of 100 million years. And so I think that by the middle of this century, we’re likely to be observing the primordial gravitational waves directly or indirectly in very two different frequency bands, as we say, or oscillation period bands, period bands of 100 million years versus period bands of tens of seconds. That will be so exciting because the gravitational waves that we’re observing will be carrying direct information about the birth of the universe. And the birth of the universe is controlled by laws of quantum gravity that we don’t understand. And the challenge then of unraveling the effects of the laws of quantum gravity and the details of birth of the universe from these gravitational waves will be an extremely exciting challenge. And I think it could be the biggest thing going on in science in the middle of this century.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that we’ll be able to learn what the conditions were that led to the Big Bang?
Kip Thorne:
I hope so. I don’t know. There’s a question of how much information will actually be there. I think through the combination of theory, by then we may have a much better understanding of the laws of quantum gravity. And if we do, then the focus will be on using the combined laws of quantum gravity and observations to try to get a handle on the conditions that led to the Big Bang.
Debbie Millman:
Lia, speaking of origins and conditions, I understand that when you were six years old you told your mom you wanted to have your hair cut like Han Solo.
Lia Halloran:
This is true.
Debbie Millman:
Did she allow it? Did she allow it?
Lia Halloran:
Oh, absolutely. I think I was just initially irritated that my name Lia was so close to Princess Leia that I was like, “If there was any character in this movie, I would absolutely be Han Solo.” And yes, my parents took me. I think the hairstylist was more confused that this mother was like, “Yeah, give her what she wants.” And I got a flat top.
Debbie Millman:
How did it look?
Lia Halloran:
it matched my parachute pants that I was wearing and rocking while I was break dancing around the neighborhood, so I looked like a perfect ’80s California surfer skater kid.
Debbie Millman:
Well, you were born in Chicago but grew up in the Bay Area. Your dad was a physicist, and you grew up in your father’s lab at UC, San Francisco. And I believe it was he who gave you your first telescope. Is that right?
Lia Halloran:
I don’t know, actually, where I got my first telescope. My dad gave me my first skateboard when I was, I think, four years old.
Debbie Millman:
Four.
Lia Halloran:
Yeah. Yes. But I think the first telescope that was actually mine I think I got when I was in college as an undergrad.
Debbie Millman:
Oh. Oh, perhaps you were looking at his telescope in his labs.
Lia Halloran:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
What were you looking at back then?
Lia Halloran:
My father studied the realm of the small. He actually studied bones. And so one of the coolest things that he did when I was young is he just encouraged a general sense of creativity and exploration. He would say to me when I was young, “Oh, Lia, I’m really overwhelmed in my lab. Would you come and help me out? Do you think you would be okay getting out of kindergarten?” And I thought this was a really important job that he needed help with. And he would set me up washing test tubes and just explain everything to me. He was doing all sorts of experiments in the ’80s that were looking at how bones were affected when we went into space. It was very cool. I got to see the space shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base, and I got to go to a shuttle launch, the Columbia shuttle launch in Florida. But my father was just captivated with the world, whether it was studying bones. He would stop a diesel truck driver broken down on the side of the road, “Oh, what’s happening with your engine? What’s going on?” And he just instilled this absolute passion for curiosity in me.
Debbie Millman:
He also, as you mentioned, gave you your first skateboard. But you’ve stated that you were not invited into the culture of skateboarding in the Bay Area and that you didn’t actually meet a female skateboarder who could really skate until you were in your 20s. Why weren’t you invited in when you first started?
Lia Halloran:
I think skateboarding culture, it’s almost hard for us to imagine what it was like in the ’80s and ’90s. Skateboarding was a subculture. We didn’t have Tony Hawk Pro Skater, there was no X Games. It was a subculture. And if you imagine that, women were really the sub subculture. And there were skater girlfriends hanging out at the skate park, but no one who was actually skateboarding.
I think when I was 12, 13 years old and I was really skateboarding ramps all the time, I was also really starting to become aware that I was queer. And I felt this very much like an outsider even within this subculture. The way that I would describe it is almost like a circus monkey. I’d show up at a skate park, and for me to be invited in there… These are not skate parks that are sponsored by the city, these are guys getting concrete and mixing it on the weekend and transforming spaces that you’d get kicked out of, chased by police. It was really a do it yourself vibe that I absolutely loved. And I find that is very much akin and in parallel to being an artist.
But it was very much like I had to prove myself to be able… They’d say, “Do a kick flip. Oh, jump over this thing.” And then if I did it, then they’d be like, “Okay, you’re cool. You can hang and stay in here.” But yeah, the first time I met a female skateboarder, I was probably in my mid to early 20s.
Debbie Millman:
You ended up having a half pipe in your backyard. Did you build it yourself?
Lia Halloran:
Yeah, my dad and I built several ramps. I will say my dad is not just a scientist, he’s an incredible surfer. He’s just has a passion and love of the ocean. I grew up just south of San Francisco in a small surfing community, and my dad just always had me on a board. Just like the haircut, I said, “Oh, I want to build some ramps.” My dad was like, “How big? How many? What shape?” And we built all sorts of weird stuff in my backyard. But I think since I was probably about nine to when I went to college, I had some kind of skateboard ramp in my backyard that I spent most of my time on.
Debbie Millman:
You were featured in Thrasher Magazine when you were 15 as part of a new wave of young skateboarders. I happened to find a copy of it online, by the way. I can send you the picture picture of you.
Lia Halloran:
That’s incredible research.
Debbie Millman:
They misspelled your name. They spelled it L-E-A, not L-I-A, but I could pick you out of the people. But since your friends had never heard of Thrasher, you still felt like the odd person out. Looking back on that now, you’ve said that you gained a power from that. What kind of power?
Lia Halloran:
Well, when they first contacted me, they said they were going to do an all female issue of Thrasher, which I was so excited about. And I was photographed. At the time, the top spots in San Francisco was Embarcadero. Was photographed in the Thrasher venture ramps on the big half pipes.
I was actually photographed when I was 14 years old, and it almost was an entire year before it came out, and I just never heard anything. And then I got the information that, well, there just weren’t enough women that were… or girls that were good enough to be in Thrasher, so I ended up in this article called 50 Unknowns Soon to Go Pro. And I thought, well, that can’t be right because I’m a girl. No one is going to turn me into a pro skateboarder. I laughed at it even at 15 years old realizing how futile even that title was. But it did give me this sense… It was on one hand like, oh wow, I’m so good. I’m being told that there’s not enough women to make a whole article, but it was also just, in the same way, heartbreaking that there was no community there, so it was a little bit alienating.
But skateboarding for me is very similar to maybe the way that people talk about more akin to surfing because I didn’t feel invited into that community. What I did fall in love with was the creativity of my body moving on the ramps and ditches and just moving through that urban space. And much of me being a young skateboarder, I was skateboarding by myself, whereas when you think of skateboarding, you almost immediately think of that second word, skateboarding culture. It’s like this group. And it took me until I was in my mid-20s to find and form that group in a all-girls skate crew that we called ourselves Rib Death. Very serious.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s really, really cool. There’s some fun videos I found online. Do you still skateboard?
Lia Halloran:
I skateboard with my daughter nearly a couple times a week. I skate her to school. And I have two kids, a two and a five-year-old. And they’re really into the scooters, but I haven’t gotten them completely addicted to the skateboard yet. But little Atlas at two years old, I think he’s my best promise. He’ll stand on it and pull it out. I think I have a second wind in me of being a skateboarder by translating that love to my kids. But yeah, Jass and I skate to school a couple times a week.
Debbie Millman:
When you were 15 years old, you asked your parents if you could have your birthday party at an exploratorium. Why did you want to have it there?
Lia Halloran:
These are great questions, Debbie. When I was 15, I had gone on a field trip I think the year before to this hands-on physics museum in San Francisco. And there’s 9,000 exhibits at the Exploratorium. It was at the Palace of Fine Arts; just a beautiful place. And they have something there called the tactile dome where it was completely, completely dark. It’s not a maze, you can’t get lost, but you are led through these tunnels. You can’t see your hand in front of your face, and you try to move through this space. And when I was there on a field trip, they were saying, “Oh, you could rent out the tactile dome.” And so I think the year later I told my parents, “That’s what I want to do is go to the tactile dome.”
Debbie Millman:
You ended up getting your first job there as well initially conducting cow eye dissections and laser demonstrations, and then in the machine shop where you learned how to build and use a sand blaster and a lathe. At that time, did you think you wanted to be a scientist?
Lia Halloran:
I knew, I would say, even from my early Han Solo six-year-old days that I wanted to be an artist. But I was really passionate about learning how to build things, and I think for me, the idea of science was always intrinsically tied to what being an artist and making could be. Even though I was my first job working in a science museum, everything that I did there, I just thought that that was somehow supporting me being an artist in some way. It was like a vehicle to study the thing that I was going to make work about.
Working in the machine shop, I apprenticed under a really amazing builder, Tom Tompkins. And I felt like that was truly the foundation for me to go to art school. I learned how to build everything, the lay, the end mill, like you said, the sand blaster. Every weekend Tom would throw some weird thing at me and say, “I need 100 of these knobs, and they have to be to 1/100th of an inch.” And just gave me such a dedication and passion for precision, for refining your craft, for really understanding how things work. And if you didn’t understand it, we would absolutely just take the thing apart. Building a museum exhibit, you’re building something to try to share something with someone that has never existed before. Very similar to art making.
Debbie Millman:
You got your BA from UCLA and went on to get an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. McLean Thomas and Kehinde Wiley were two of your classmates. Paul McCarthy was one of your favorite professors at UCLA. And you said that one of the favorite things he told you was that after he makes something, it could take upwards of six months to really understand what he did. How did that influence you?
Lia Halloran:
That was a really profound thing to hear when you’re in school from someone that you just admire so much. In school, the structure of a semester, you’re supposed to come up with an idea and follow it and execute it and defend it in a critique. And to have someone that was so ingrained in making and would let their studio practice lead them through that making to what the content was, that was just so freeing to me. It just gave me a big, open space to be extremely exploratory.
That’s one of my favorite things that anyone said to me as an undergrad. I pass that on to my students. And I think about it all the time. When I’m lost in my studio, I don’t know what I’m doing, I actually find great comfort in the unknown at this point because of that, to think you have plenty of time to figure out what it is. And through the act of physically being creative, your body and your intuitive marks will tell you something about the thing that you’re doing more so than thinking about it can.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk a bit about some of your early projects before we talk about your collaboration with Kip. In 2009, you began working on a performance performance-based photographic series called Dark Skate using long exposure photography to document their trajectories of your movements on a skateboard at night. The series consists of site-specific two dimensional images that are part photograph, part performance and part self-portrait drawings. Dark Skate has been described as an exploration of relationships generated between the body and space, expressing the universal and intimate qualities of each. What inspired this piece?
Lia Halloran:
Well, I think, as an artist, I do things without thinking, just that I’m drawn to and I want to explore, and then they turn out to then be ingrained in my art practice. I don’t think that I ever set out to make a project that was about skateboarding, but because skateboarding is such a huge part of my history, I was really interested in answering the question how could I make work that embodied the way that I could express myself physically through space? And to me, one of the spaces that I’m the most free and exploratory is through skateboarding. And I loved that I would be actually setting a project that documented my physical limitations of what I could do.
In this series, I attach a light to my body and I’m skateboarding bowls in the pitch dark. Well, a lot of people think, oh, that’s outrageous, or it’s such an extreme idea, but it’s actually not, it’s muscle memory. Like we talked about in my childhood, I’ve spent so much of my life on a skateboard on a ramp that it actually is really very much like a self-portrait. And in so much of my work, it’s really important to have an intimate connection to whatever I’m making my subject matter and to put myself in it. Even though you don’t see a photograph of me, I also think that people in a lot of ways are surprised that there is a female skateboarder, a queer body that is a skateboarder. I fly planes. People are surprised that there would be a female skateboarder. All those things, it’s very subtle, but it’s really important as an artist to represent those spaces. And so Dark Skate is really so much… I think of them as double portraits. It’s the portrait of the city, the urban space, the explorer, myself, the self-portrait of me within those spaces.
Debbie Millman:
They’re absolutely haunting and quite beautiful. You were in a show with Guggenheim called “Haunted Contemporary Photography Video Performance,” and the curators placed your work in the section of performance. Did that surprise you?
Lia Halloran:
I loved that. I felt that I always tried to tell everyone in these pieces that I’m not really the photographer. The photography is the necessary intersection to document those movements. I just thought it was absolutely perfect because when I’m moving in that space, I am being very inventive. And you capture this glimmer in a moment. The photograph flattens it out. But it’s so akin to making a mark, a line, a gesture. You can find reference in drawing, and also just the body moving through space.
One of the most influential things in conceptually thinking about this space is every time I would go surfing with my dad, which was every Saturday when I was growing up in Pacifica, I would be eagerly trying to get into the ocean, and he’d say, “Hang on, hang on, let’s take a look.” And he’d always want to watch the ocean. I was so impatient. And he’d say, “Where are you going? What wave are you going on? Are you going left or are you going right? Where are you paddling out?” And from that age, I always imagined… I think I started projecting this line coming out of my chest that I would look and find my way on the wave. Then before getting to the ocean, I’d say, “Okay, we’re going to paddle through that channel and we’re going to sit on the crest of that wave and we’re going to take the wave to the right.” And that, to me, was also so much of what Dark Skate was, was inserting my own personal, intimate way of reinterpreting the urban space around me.
Debbie Millman:
Lia, you said that not only is your work about science or drawing from science, but the process itself always has an experimental quality. And I understand you’d never made a cyanotype before you began this series, your body is a space that sees, and it took you six months to master the process. Was that process enjoyable? Is that experimental phase one that you find fulfilling even if you don’t have an outcome that you can foresee?
Lia Halloran:
I think it’s actually the most exciting because it’s like it can be anything. You’re determining what the thing can be through the experiment. Making a cyanotype to take six months, it sounds like a lot, but me and my studio team really trying to figure out how to make these things on a really large scale.
Debbie Millman:
Kip, what about you? Do you find the process of going through the unknown something that is enjoyable, or does it produce anxiety and tension because you don’t know what the outcome is, and in your case, spending decades on something where you don’t know if you are going to get a result? How do you manage that? How do you calibrate that experience into your psyche?
Kip Thorne:
As Ray Weiss, my MIT soulmate, says, “It was such great fun that we didn’t ever get discouraged.” The whole process is exciting. It’s more enjoyable in many ways than the discovery itself.
Lia Halloran:
That’s how it feels. Making art, being in the studio, creating, discovering something, it has the potential for anythingness, especially when I don’t know what the medium, where it will take me. When it’s done, then it goes off, it goes to a gallery, it has another life, and then you’re just… I feel like then I transform back into a viewer and I stop becoming the maker. But I ended up getting into everything that I do because I love the making, I love the sitting in that unknown and the opportunity to find something new that could surprise or shock me in my own studio. How wonderful could that be to then show someone what that could become?
Debbie Millman:
You two met at a cocktail party in Pasadena in 2007. Lia, is it true that you overheard someone say Kip’s name, and you went up to him and effusively and unapologetically shared how much of an impact his writing had had on your artwork?
Lia Halloran:
Absolutely. And so much so that the woman he was talking to, under her breath, but loud enough for me to hear, uttered, “Physics groupie,” to me.
Debbie Millman:
Kip, did that scare you at all?
Kip Thorne:
No.
Debbie Millman:
How do you manage the physics groupies?
Kip Thorne:
It just goes with the territory, unfortunately. What has been difficult for me was I win the Nobel Prize, I become an icon, which is what they want, the Nobel Committee wants, icons for science. I’m uncomfortable being an icon. I don’t want to be an icon, but I am, and I’ve just gotten used to it. And so I’ve more or less try to ignore it and try to just be Kip.
Debbie Millman:
Kip, as Lia told you what she did, you realized that a filmmaker, who was interested in making a movie that engaged some of your science, needed someone who could help make drawings and paintings of black holes and wormholes to help convey the ideas. And the film ended up being the 2014 film, Interstellar. And while the original director was Steven Spielberg, you ended up working with the director, Christopher Nolan. But it was Spielberg you had to convince to not use a spaceship that could travel faster than the speed of light. Is that correct?
Kip Thorne:
No, that one was Christopher Nolan.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was Christopher Nolan?
Kip Thorne:
Yes, yes.
Debbie Millman:
Oh. I’m disappointed in Christopher Nolan. I thought that he was smarter than that.
Kip Thorne:
In reality, his whole attitude was one of pushing the envelope. And he had discovered in his conversation with me very early that I could make pronouncements and I could turn out to be wrong. My PhD advisor, John Wheeler, used to say, “The greatest physicists are the ones who make the most mistakes the most rapidly on their way to the truth.” And so, yes, I could frequently be wrong. And Chris would say to me, “I would like such and so.” For example, he said, “I would like one hour on Miller’s planet in the movie, The Water Planet, is seven years back on Earth.” And I said to him immediately, “That’s not possible.” And he said to me, “You go do a real calculation.” By then, he knew the foundation is to do a real calculation with the real laws of physics and not just guess. And so I went off and did a real calculation, and sure enough, he was right, I was wrong; this was possible. It was very extreme, but it was possible. And so he had this experience of me making pronouncements, and then when he pushes me to the wall, I go check for absolutely sure and I’m shocked to find I was wrong. When he said that he wanted to go back to earth faster to the speed of light, I told him, “Absolutely, that’s not possible.” At that time, I was right.
Debbie Millman:
You prevailed?
Kip Thorne:
I was absolutely right. I prevailed. But the interchange with Christopher Nolan was an enormous pleasure. We worked together productively with a give and take. It was very similar to my interactions with Lia. I’ve had two wonderful collaborators in Chris and in Lia.
Debbie Millman:
Interstellar is one of, if not my favorite movie of all time. Well, maybe that and Arrival and Contact. And you also consulted on contact with Carl Sagan. Lia, I understand that you created over 250 paintings based on Kip’s scientific writings. Did that mean you had to fully understand them?
Lia Halloran:
Huh. That’s a good question. Is there a test in the end here, Kip?
Kip Thorne:
No, no, no. I’m just really curious.
Lia Halloran:
Well, I think that for the book, there’s probably 150 paintings that appear in the book, and we’ve counted up now to about 668 is last week’s count. The reason that they keep going is we’re going through all the old archive because over 13 years, I’ve made so many different iterations. And I think that through drawing and through painting, I would get closer to understanding what Kip was talking about.
Some of the things like black holes and wormholes, I already had peripheral information and knowledge and had taken many classes on these things and just a totally separate interest before meeting Kip, which is why I was so excited to meet him. But through our conversations, Kip would just explain it a little bit different, just a different entry point, and I’d make a painting. And in a weird way, the way that even Paul McCarthy was talking about, I would learn something by even me making the painting. Then Kip would look at it and nudge it in a different direction, say, “Well, why doesn’t it go a little bit more like this? Or the tendexies should be spinning a little bit more like this.” And so I think through our conversations and through the visualizations, those things would bring me to understanding the topics within our book. Even more so than reading
Kip Thorne:
Kip, you’ve said that you could see the spirit of science captured in Lia’s drawings in a way that people who are not physicists could get some real sense of what they were. Do you think that ideas expressed visually are easier to comprehend than verbally?
Different people’s minds work differently. For me, visualization of ideas is very powerful. My mind operates visually. When I’m doing research, mathematics is the language of science, mathematics is the ultimate arbiter that tells me what the laws of physics are predicting, but the visualization is the thing that enables me to make leaps of insight, and with those leaps of insight, decide what mathematical calculations to do in order to verify whether or not my leaps of insight are correct. When I’m thinking about physics, I’m almost always thinking in terms of visualizations and not in terms of the mathematics. It’s only when I’m trying to get things nailed down for sure that I turn to the mathematics. And so going from my thinking of physics to communicating with Lia or more generally with the non-scientist public, the visualizations are the natural tool. They just carry right over from my research right into the conversation.
Debbie Millman:
You’re about to publish a new book together, a book that has been nearly two decades in the making. It is titled The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. Now, is it true that this book began with an article you were asked to write and illustrate for Playboy Magazine?
Kip Thorne:
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Debbie Millman:
Tell us more about that.
Kip Thorne:
Isn’t that a natural way for a book to begin?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, between that and Penthouse, we’re getting this all covered.
Lia Halloran:
Listen, we have Thrasher in there too. You see a theme.
Debbie Millman:
That’s true, that’s true, there is a theme. I love it, I love it.
Kip Thorne:
This was the era when Playboy was trying to distinguish itself from other men’s magazines by having what they regarded as high quality interviews, high quality literature. And so the editor that I had had on a previous book I had written called Black Holes and Time Warps had become literary editor at Playboy Magazine. And she contacted me and asked if I would write an article about warped space time for Playboy. And I said, “Yes, but I would like to bring on Lia to do paintings as part of the article.” She and the art director at Playboy looked at some of Lia’s paintings on the web and came back great, very enthusiastic, and so we got a contract with Playboy Magazine to do this. We moved forward and we submitted then an article that… I’ve forgotten, it was maybe 3,000 or 4,000 words long and had four or five of Lia’s paintings in it. And fairly quickly, we got a response. Lia, you want to describe the response?
Lia Halloran:
Well, I was personally rejected by Hugh Hefner, which I wear as a badge of honor.
Debbie Millman:
Now, he rejected the paintings. Why?
Lia Halloran:
Well, they weren’t up to Playboy’s standards. He said, I don’t think that I had properly objectified these women, is essentially what it came down to.
Debbie Millman:
That is definitely a badge of honor.
Lia Halloran:
Yeah. And I thought I was being subversive because for the models, I had used different queer and trans women. And I was like, “This is the first time they’re going to be in Playboy Magazine and no one will know then.” Yeah, Hugh Hefner said that my paintings did not live up to the Playboy standards.
Debbie Millman:
And you also featured your wife as one of the models, right?
Lia Halloran:
Yes. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Very, very beautiful woman. His mistake.
Lia Halloran:
Well, the good news is for Kip is that all those original paintings that were supposed to be in Playboy existed. And when we transformed them into a book, Kip got all the originals. He has one hanging behind him right now.
Kip Thorne:
Yes, here in my office, a beautiful painting of Lia’s wife. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Well, since this is a podcast, we can’t see it, but maybe we can post it when the show goes live. And people can’t see the book so I want to actually describe it a little bit. It was designed by the legendary artist and designer, Rebecca Mendez. It has 240 luscious coffee table sized pages, a stunning jacket. It includes more than 100 magnificent four color paintings by Lia throughout. It has multiple gatefolds. And the text is an epic prose poem written by Kip. What made you both decide to make this book like this book?
Lia Halloran:
The way this book came to be is such a good force for collaboration because I don’t think that we ever set out to make what you just described. What we did set out to was to have these conversations and to continue with what we started in making for Playboy. And we called it our little book. For years, we thought, oh, it’ll be 30, 40 pages. Because what happened was every time Kip and I would get together, we’d have these wonderful conversations, then I would make more paintings. And Kip would look at the paintings and he’d extend the writing. And then I’d look at the writing, and then I’d make more paintings. And it would go back and forth and back and forth. But I would say we never intended to make what it looks like now. It’s almost like the book made itself or the collaboration and our friendship and our love for each other of just making the book that we would want to read based on black holes and wormholes and time travel, it told us what it needed to be.
Kip Thorne:
And I never intended that it would be poetry or verse. It was prose originally. But I had always, in all of my writing, even very technical writing, worked hard to polish the prose so that it was really understandable, so it flowed beautifully, and so it was a pleasure to read. That’s what I had done with this Playboy prose.
And early on, after we decided we’d make it into a little book, Lia had a friend lay it out as a book. And that friend happened to break up on two facing pages happened to break my prose into stanzas. It was a particular piece that naturally got broken into the stanzas. But I looked at that; I had an epiphany. I realized that because I had worked so hard to polish the prose so that it flowed beautifully, it could be turned into verse.
And as I experimented with turning it into verse, I then came to realize that this combination of tightly integrated verse and paintings could convey the essence of the science that I was talking about. The warped space and time, black holes, wormholes, the Big Bang could convey gravitational ways, could convey the essence of that much more powerfully than the standard writing I had always done for the non-scientists of prose together with illustrations.
This is very different. The verse is simultaneously more constraining and more liberating. More liberating in the sense of opening myself up to focusing on the essence of what is going on, the beauty and the essence of it, instead of focusing on getting all the fine details right. And I think this was an epiphany for me, but it’s really an epiphany probably for Lia and me together as we jointly came to understand the power of this combination.
Lia Halloran:
Yeah, I think it was also a moment for me to realize that we could make something that would possibly embody and really offer a wide invitation to these things that people are very curious and passionate about but feel maybe intimidated by didactic writing and mathematics that could we have an entry point? Could we make something that wasn’t just the science or the art, but it was like this third thing where the text and the paintings, really, they supported each other, like you need one to have the other?
Debbie Millman:
Did you get the manuscript first, Lia, and then make the paintings? Or were you collaborating back and forth, volleying?
Lia Halloran:
Yeah, that’s how it was made. It was made in a very untraditional way. Kip didn’t have something that I then, quote, “illustrated.” I really think of them as paintings, not illustrations. A lot of times, I would make a painting, and I’d show to Kip, and Kip would look at it, and then he would write based on looking at the painting. And then he’d send me things, and then I would pick out what to me… He would never say, “Make a painting about this,” he would send me different passages, and then I would say, “Okay, if I want to understand what was the essence and the ethos of what we’re trying to communicate here…” And maybe it’s one painting, and sometimes I’d say, “Okay, this short passage, we need five paintings here.” Because that’s, to me, what could create what we came to describe, which was we want a book that transfers someone into it a total experience, an experience of the universe.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how we got here, what we’re made of, et cetera. And I was a little bit intimidated by the book because I’m limited only by what I don’t know when it comes to thinking about these things. And that’s a lot. I actually decided I was going to read the glossary first. I went through the book and I saw there was a glossary, and I’m like, “Let me read the glossary,” so I could really get a sense of these terms and then read it feeling like I had a little bit more of a foundation.
And I actually found that you don’t need to do that, you don’t need to do that. It’s so beautifully understandably rich that it’s nice to have the glossary because I think it’s a way to go back and say, “Oh, I know what a gravitational wave is now. It’s this.” Or, “I know what the bulk is. It’s this.” It’s almost like a piece of music that you’re going through, and the prose and the art are so intertwined. It’s really quite a marvelous journey to go through the book. Lia, you say that your collaboration presents one aspect of art and science, and I’m wondering if you can describe that aspect.
Lia Halloran:
Well, the collaboration for the book, it just gave me an opportunity to make something that I would never make in and of myself in my studio. I exist in this strange art world where a studio artist… I make things often alone in my studio sometimes on large scale works. I have an amazing studio team. And then those things, where do they go? They go to galleries or museums. And oftentimes, I don’t see them again or there’s a show, it gets put up, we celebrate it, and then they go away.
This collaboration, on a large scale, I’m really interested in accessibility and art. I’m a professor and chair of the Art Department at Chapman University. I think of teaching as a complete extension of my studio practice. It’s not just something that I do, but often when I’m thinking of an idea and I’m in that period that we’ve talked about before with Paul McCarthy of figuring out what it is, often I’ll write a course that I then share with my students. I think of collaboration with my students, with Kip. I’ve had other collaborations in the past that have just been so fruitful in getting me to understand the thing that I’m curious about.
And the way that I envision it, and because I am so visual, I often have these mind exercises, is if I’m thinking about a black hole, I would imagine that I’m putting that thing in the middle of the room. And then I circle it from all different aspects. Maybe one of those might be making a drawing about it. Another thing is reading one type of writing about it. Another way would be looking at how did someone else depict it? Just really engaging in enmeshing myself in a community of other thinkers.
I think of collaboration as being absolutely integral in my studio practice, not only for the concepts and the development of a subject matter, but actually for the technical exploration. You had asked me have I ever made a cenotype before, but I made another piece in the last couple years called Double Horizon where I took several cameras and I attached them to the external parts of a Cessna plane while I was learning how to fly. I just thought to myself, how could I represent time and time-based piece that also engaged what a landscape could be? And then I thought, well, of course it has to be time-based, but I had no idea what that was, so I was basically flying around recording flights for two years. But that took an exceptional amount of collaboration because I’m not a videographer, I’m not an editor, I’m not a sound person. And honestly, these collaborations, it has just been so rewarding in my life because it gets me to meet and work with so many incredible people.
As we talk about the book coming up for its release, Kip and I talk on the phone and Zoom and see each other on a weekly basis for how many years. And I’m like, “We’ve got to get another project going because it’s been just so amazing to…” The reason we wanted to make this was just so we could work together.
Debbie Millman:
Well, Double Horizon is stunning. When I was looking at the photographs, it reminded me a little bit of the planet that Murph lives on at the end of Interstellar [inaudible 01:02:25] of time is bending on top of itself. Kip, I want to ask if you’ll read a short excerpt from the book so people can get a sense of the prose. But before that, I just wanted to ask you one question. Early in the book, you state this: “For decades, I, a beast materially composed, have been consumed by quests to fully comprehend this warped side of our universe. How? Through tricks of mathematics and computer simulations probing Albert Einstein’s relativity equation.” My question is, how do you come up with the tricks of mathematics to better understand parts of the universe we didn’t even know existed?
Kip Thorne:
Well, mathematics is the language of the universe. Mathematics is the language of the physical laws that control the universe. We have two ways to really explore with confidence the universe. If we have confidence in our physical laws, then it’s a matter of working with those mathematical laws. And mathematical tricks or a major part of working with those laws to figure out what the predictions are for what may be going on out there. And then going out and doing observations such as our observations with LIGO, with gravitational waves. Those are the essential final tools for firm understanding the manipulation of the mathematical laws and the observations. We’ve been talking about the visualization in paintings, or mental visualization. Those are the essence of the intuition that enable us to make great leaps of understanding. The mathematics is really very central to the deep understanding.
Debbie Millman:
Will you be willing to read us a little excerpt from the book?
Kip Thorne:
Sure. Sure.
Debbie Millman:
Tell us what you’re going to read us.
Kip Thorne:
I’m going to read the beginning of the prologue that basically explains what the book is all about. That introduces the warped side of the universe, which is what appears in the title of the book, and the challenge, the excitement of our first contact as human beings with the warped side of the universe.
Debbie Millman:
Wonderful.
Kip Thorne:
Our universe is varied and vast. Galaxies, planets, stars and moons, quasars, pulsars, and magnets all made from atoms and molecules just like you and me and all that we hear and touch and see. Our universe is also endowed with a marvelous shadowy side that is warped, phenomena forged for warped space time. Witness the ravenous fat black hole that Lia here depicts ingesting her wife, Felicia. I’m going to stop reading and just make a comment. The verse by itself is pretty dry. It is pretty sparse.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, Kip, no, no.
Kip Thorne:
Without the painting, it’s pretty sparse, and so you have to understand that to really experience this, you need the painting side by side with… The painting here of Lia’s wife, Felicia, being ingested by a black hole is so powerful as it ties so tightly into the verse.
Debbie Millman:
I disagree. I think that, yes, the experience of the book as one unit is wonderful, but the prose is really beautiful.
Kip Thorne:
Okay, well I’ll move on. Although this warp site is entwined in the weft of our matter-filled universe, its stars, its planets and nebulae, its galaxies and its comets, we humans never saw it until just recently. Why did we never see warp space? Time cannot produce light or other signals that yesterday’s technology was able to perceive. Now how has that changed?
A very long time ago, a billion years in the past, well, here on earth multi-cell life arose and spread around the globe, but in a galaxy far, far away, two spinning black holes danced around one another, rippling the fabric of space and time. The ripples, we call them gravity waves, suck energy from the holes orbits, so the hole spiraled inward, eclipsing each other toward a climactic collision. The holes at half of light speed catastrophically collided and merged in a brief cataclysmic storm of writhing and twisting space time that brought the waves to crescendo. The climaxing gravity waves from this catastrophic collision surged out of their birthing galaxy and into interstellar space, spreading across our universe for nearly a billion years. They stretched and they squeezed all that they met, stars and planets and nebulae, in patterns that encoded a portrait of their birth, colliding holes and space time storm.
Then 50,000 years ago when humans shared earth with Neanderthals, the spreading and weakening gravity waves sailed into our spiral alarmed Milky Way, our galaxy, our home. On September 14th, 2015, near the Antarctic peninsular tip, the waves flying upward plunged into the earth through air, then rough oceans, then rock. Whispering up through earth’s bowels unscathed and emerging just north of New Orleans, the gravity waves came face to face with a complex and huge L-shaped invention designed and built to perceive them. LIGO, the Laser and Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory. Flowing through LIGO, the gravity waves stretched and then squeezed microscopically two very long beams of bouncing light that extracted the portraits the waves had encoded, colliding holes and space time storm. This tiny shutter in LIGO was momentous for the whole human race, our very first moment of contact with the warped side of our universe.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. I have three last questions for you both today. First one is for Lia. Lia, do you have any plans to have an exhibition to show off the full-sized paintings that are featured in the book?
Lia Halloran:
Yes. I have a solo show opening on November 4th with my gallery here in La, Luis de Jesus. And we will be showing a collection of the original art from the book. And then I’ve made a larger piece that celebrates each of the chapters as an expansion of the book itself. We’ve made a print so that… We wanted to make something that was like an extension of a special edition of the book, so a print will also be available for the first two weeks that the book comes out to celebrate its release. And you can find all that on… the information for the exhibition in Los Angeles on my website at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles. And the print information is on those sites as well.
Debbie Millman:
Wonderful. Kip, my next question is for you. You know that I went to high school with David Spergel, the MacArthur fellow former professor of astronomy at Princeton University and currently the president of the Simons Foundation. And I told him that I was interviewing you today and I asked him if he had any burning questions for you, and this is what he responded with. Question from David Spergel. “Among the many fascinating things that Kip has thought about, one of my favorite topics and one that will likely be of interest to your listeners is closed timeline curves, the possibility that we could travel back in time. Kip has thought deeply about how closed timeline curves change the structure of reality. Self-consistency requires that you don’t kill your grandmother before you were born, but like in Back to the Future, you could help your father meet your mother.” David’s question is this: “I have wondered whether closed timeline curves are stable to quantum fluctuations. Could the photon travel back in time and then circle around endlessly, back and forth in time getting brighter and brighter?”
Kip Thorne:
I think that David was feeding that to me. It did get me to respond the following way. He knows a lot about my thinking on this. This process, that if you had a time machine and you first turn it on, then a photon could be the first thing to travel through. It could go through the time machine and come back arriving back at the very same place as it started at the same moment as it started, and now you have two photons there at the same point in space and time; you have the original one and you have the older one that’s made the trip. And then those two can go around and come back to where they started; now you have four. And so what began as one photon can wind up as being an enormous number of photons. In fact, that could build up so explosively, it might destroy the time machine at the moment that it gets turned on.
And this was a question raised for me by two colleagues at the University of Chicago when I was thinking about time machines and closed time like curves. And it triggered me to ask the question in a little more sophisticated way. I can save the time machine by just simply blocking the photon so it can’t go through, and so then I’ll still have a time machine. But there’s something I can’t block, and that is fluctuations of what we call virtual photons; quantum fluctuations of light. These quantum fluctuations of light are unstoppable and they’re unremovable. And so I sat down with a postdoc some years ago and did the same analysis and discovered that these quantum fluctuations going through this incipient time machine when it was just first being turned on do create a gigantic explosion.
Stephen Hawking and this student of his did a similar calculation about the same time, and we then got into a big argument between ourselves. It appeared to me that the explosion would be strong enough to destroy the time machine, it appeared to him that it might not be. And as we went back and forth, we came to realize that the answer as to whether it’s strong enough, that all time machines will always be destroyed when you first turn them on. Whether that’s the case or not, it was held tightly in the grip of these poorly understood laws of quantum gravity. There we are. We don’t understand the laws and quantum gravity well enough to be sure whether time machines always self-destruct when you turn them on.
There’s a whole chapter about this in our book. And Lia even invented… She invented a very simple version of this that you have to read in the last part of that chapter, a variant that is much easier to understand than what I just said. A wonderful part of the collaboration was the elaboration that Lia did.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Didn’t Stephen Hawking have a party for future physicists to come back in time and had food and drink and no one showed up?
Kip Thorne:
Yep. And no one showed up. That’s right, that’s right.
Debbie Millman:
Well, since we’re speaking speculatively, I have one last question for both of you. What do you think the chances are of there being extraterrestrial life in the universe?
Lia Halloran:
As an artist who is so influenced by reading about science and hearing about it from all aspects, I think that because I’m not a scientist, I get very excited hearing from different ways that we’re creatively thinking about what people are doing at JPL and what they’re sampling and what they’re doing. And I think that it seems very unlikely that there is not life out there. And there’s probably much more well said by Carl Sagan that, “What a lonely place it would be if there wasn’t.” But-
Debbie Millman:
Big waste of space.
Lia Halloran:
Yeah. And I think in the same way that Kip is looking at what the next generation of LIGO can be, I feel like what an exciting time to bear witness that I think within our lifetimes we’re going to be able to see what those life forms are. I’m really excited to see what the mission to Europa being built by JPL is going to show. Yes, it’s going to be tiny, little unexciting microcosms of life and not a multi-celled body, but I vote yes enthusiastically.
Debbie Millman:
Kip, what about you?
Kip Thorne:
Well, let me describe a gathering that I had when we were just working on the movie, Interstellar, when Steven Spielberg was the director in the early creative phase. It was at Caltech. We brought together I think 18 scientists from around the United States who were experts in various aspects of the science that was going to be in the movie. And Steven himself, he posed toward the end of our discussion… It was an all day discussion. He posed the question, “How many of you think that it is very likely that there are civilizations out there, advanced civilizations out in the universe besides our own?” And every hand went up, all 18 scientists said they thought it was very likely. And I was surprised at that. I wasn’t surprised that it was a majority, but I was a little surprised that it was everybody; people who were experts on astrobiology, experts in quantum physics, experts in rocketry. But everybody, including me, thought it was quite likely.
Debbie Millman:
Kip Thorne, Lia Halloran, thank you so much for making so much work that matters, for helping us comprehend the magic and the science of the warp side of the universe. And thank you, thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Kip Thorne:
Thank you.
Lia Halloran:
Thank you so much for having us.
Debbie Millman:
Kip Thorne and Lia Halloran’s new book is titled The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves. You can read more about Lia Halloran at liahalleran.com and more about Kip at nobelprize.org. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.