Two black holes spiraled into each other in a spectacular collision 1.3 billion years ago.
The black holes in a galaxy far, far away then merged, vibrated and produced gravitational waves, a type of space wave that humans could not detect for a century after Albert Einstein first predicted them in 1916.
For 1.3 billion years, the waves shuddered across intergalactic space until they reached our Milky Way galaxy 50,000 years ago, when human ancestors shared Earth with Neanderthals.
Elder Quentin L. Cook, left, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, greets Kip Thorne, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017, before he spoke Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at BYU. | Rio Giancarlo, Deseret News
For the past four decades, a global collaboration raced to create a gravitational-wave detector envisioned by a theoretical physicist who grew up in Logan, Utah.
Kip Thorne and a few colleagues at MIT and CalTech began in 1972 to conceive a way to prove Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves.
So far as scientists know, there are only two types of waves created in the distant universe that carry information to Earth about what is out there, but humans could only detect the first — electromagnetic waves.
Galileo initiated instrument-based electromagnetic astronomy 415 years ago when he pointed his small optical telescope at Jupiter and discovered light from its four largest moons. Scientists have since expanded astronomy into the domains of other electromagnetic waves — UV rays, radio waves, X-rays, gamma rays.
In 1916, Einstein predicted the second type of wave — gravitational waves.
During 43 years the small team of Thorne’s colleagues and students grew to a powerhouse team of 1,000 scientists and engineers who galloped toward a detection solution as the waves from the collision of the two black holes sped from the edge of the Milky Way toward Earth.
Finally, on Sept. 14, 2015, the burst of gravitational waves from the collision struck the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and traveled through the earth until they emerged and were detected by the team’s gravitational-wave outpost in Livingston, La.
Seven milliseconds later, the waves emerged from the earth and were detected by the group’s second outpost in Hanford, Washington.
It had taken a century, but headlines screamed, “Scientists prove Einstein was correct.”
For their roles in this, Thorne and two colleagues — Rainer Weiss of MIT and Barry Barish of CalTech — were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017.
If that sounds like a movie, well, Thorne has done that, too.
He helped create the concept and the scientific backstory for “Interstellar,” which made $771 million at the box office.
Kip Thorne, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017, speaks Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at BYU. | Rio Giancarlo, Deseret News
BYU students and faculty packed the Joseph Smith Building auditorium on Thursday to hear the modern Galileo speak. They filled the 1,000 seats, lined the side and back walls and sat in the aisles. At least 100 more were turned away.
The crowd included Thorne’s high school classmate and debate teammate, Elder Quentin L. Cook, as well as Elder Gerrit W. Gong, both of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Nobel laureate who packed the room dropped a bombshell at the end.
Thorne, who is 85, predicted that the scientific research expanding from his original team’s work might prove wrong physicists’ favorite version of the the big bang theory, even though that version appears to explain where all the matter and radiation in the universe came from in a simple and elegant way.
“I speculate that this beautifully simple theory, called inflation, will be proved wrong in the coming few decades by observations of primordial gravitational waves,” he said.
In 2017, half the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Rainer “Rai” Weiss, who described an idea for a detector for gravitational waves in a 1972 paper and became the lead experimenter on the project. The other half was shared by Thorne, who provided the scientific vision for the project, and Barry Barish, who created the large collaboration that constructed the operated the gravitational wave detectors. But Thorne has argued that the prize should have gone to all of the 1,000 scientists and engineers who worked on the project.
In 1972, Thorne at first was skeptical about Weiss’ idea for the detector, but after three years of on-and-off study and conversations with Weiss and others, he became convinced that it had a reasonable possibility of success. He then made a decision to work with Weiss and others on what came to be known as the LIGO Project (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory).
“I committed myself,” he said, “that I and my students would devote much of the rest of my career and much of their careers to helping the experimenters pull this off if they chose to move forward with it.”
Congress funded the design and construction of LIGO beginning in 1992 through the National Science Foundation.
Thorne trained younger, “really brilliant” theorists to take over the roles he played “and do it better than I could,” he said.
He left LIGO’s day-to-day operations in 2001 so he could work with another team to program supercomputers to numerically solve Einstein’s general relativity equations so they could predict the details of gravitational waves from colliding black holes — details that would be crucial to underpin the analysis of LIGO’s data.
Thorne was visibly excited about the future of gravitational wave research.
“We are just at the beginning of gravitational wave and multi-messenger astronomy,” he said. “Multi-messenger combines electromagnetic and gravitational waves. I’m convinced that gravitational wave astronomy and multi-messenger astronomy together will revolutionize our understanding of the universe by the end of this century and beyond.”
The original and current LIGO detectors in Louisiana and Washington are built with a pair of 4-kilometer arms at right angles.
Those are tiny compared to what is planned.
“By the 2030s, we expect — we hope, if Congress is willing to fund it — we expect to have a 40-kilometer successor to LIGO beginning to go into operation,” he said. “It’s called Cosmic Explorer. And the Europeans will have a similar successor called the Einstein Telescope.”
Also by the late 2030s, scientists expect to have, in addition to these ground-based interferometers which observe waves with periods of milliseconds, three other types of gravitational-wave detectors operating in three other frequency bands:
LISA — three spacecraft that track each other with laser beams that will move relative to each other under the action of a gravitational wave and measure gravitational waves with periods of minutes to hours.Radio telescopes that look at arrays of pulsars on the sky, whose precisely timed pulses are disturbed by gravitational waves passing through the solar system. These pulsar timing arrays have already detected gravitational waves with periods of a few years, most likely from very heavy black holes orbiting each other. Observations of patterns of polarization put onto cosmic (electromagnetic) microwaves by primordial gravitational waves with periods of hundreds of millions of years.
The last of these projects could make the discovery about the inflationary version of the big bang that Thorne wants to see.
“In addition, around 2050, maybe 2060, I expect that there will be a successor to the LISA mission,” he said. “It will be a combination of a number of spacecraft that track each other by laser beams that will be observing directly primordial gravitational waves with periods of seconds. This mission might also disprove inflation.”
The theory of inflation is the result of the hubris of theoretical physicists who think they have settled how the universe really works, he said.
But the universe occasionally produces a huge surprise that proves physicists wrong.
“This is one place where I think there’s a good possibility that we’re wrong,” he said.
“I hope wrong, because that will produce a real revolution in our understanding of the universe.”
BYU President Shane Reese, left, and his wife Wendy listen as Kip Thorne and Elders Gerrit W. Gong and Quentin L. Cook talk after Thorne lectured for a standing-room-only crowd at BYU’s Joseph Smith Building in Provo, Utah, on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025. | Tad Walch/Deseret News