Kip Thorne’s decades-long quest for gravitational waves led to LIGO’s 2015 detection and a 2017 Nobel Prize

Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist, helped push Caltech to build LIGO in 1976, leading to the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 and earning him a share of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Thorne spent decades pursuing the ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein, despite many scientists considering the field a dead end. He co-founded LIGO in 1984 with Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever, and the observatory detected waves from colliding black holes on September 14, 2015. Thorne wept upon seeing Einstein's image while receiving the Nobel medal. After retiring from Caltech in 2009, he collaborated on the 2014 film Interstellar to inspire public interest in science.