'We want to know about the universe. It is human curiosity and our quest to learn about the universe,' said Prof. Kip Thorne, one of the world's leading experts on the astrophysical predictions of general relativity, when he was talking to a packed audience of students at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan, on the afternoon of October 30.
Prof. Thorne is the Feynman Professor (Emeritus) of Theoretical Physics at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He is also an executive producer of the feature film Interstellar.
In his talk, Prof. Throne introduced the fundamentals of general relativity and its developments over the last 100 years, and also explained how the physics of general relativity was applied to the script writing and production of Interstellar.
Prof. Thorne being welcomed on his third visit to Taiwan was happy to see so many students coming to the lecture saying, 'I'm very impressed by the people, the young people especially, questions they ask, their enthusiastic for science.'
'You have some great scientists here. One of the reasons I came is to talk with them,' Prof. Thorne added.
Talking about his book, The Science of Interstellar, Prof. Thorne said, 'The movie for me was an opportunity to attract people especially young people to science and the book is an opportunity to make them become so interested and they will continue to study it, to provide information and ideas that they will take away in the rest of their life.
Prof. Thorne advised people who had seen the movie and interested in digging more to start with his book and then 'in the book at the back you'll find a lot of references to places you can go learn more.'
Being asked about the biggest challenge in producing the movie, Prof. Thorne said, 'For me the hardest part is to get the mathematics correct for making the images.'
He continued, 'The images that you see in the black hole, worm hole, hot gas around the black hole, these images are all accurate images.'
It's the first time that this is ever being done, but to make these images I had to provide the equations that carry the light from the source of light, pass the black hole to hit the camera. I had made many mistakes in the equations so the hardest part is to get the equations correct.
Medical student Angela Liu asked Prof. Thorne about what keeps him doing research for such a long time. Professor responded, 'Curiosity!'
'To understand the universe, I really want to know how the universe works and to discover things unknown about the universe. It's fun!' he said.
He advised the students to 'continue to be interested, be curious and pursuing answers. Finding answers first by reading about these things and try to figure out what you read is right or not because many things on the internet are wrong but then if you're really interested in becoming a scientist go study in the university and learn the fundamental laws of physics which controls space and control universe, control planets and the earth, learn how to use those to figure out what's going on in the universe.'
Prof. Thorne was invited by the Academia Sinica Institute of Physics Shui-Chin Lee Physics Lectureship to give a public lecture entitled 'A Century of Relativity: from the Big Bang to Black Holes and Interstellar' on October 28 and then in NCKU on October 30.