Kip Thorne (BS '62)—theoretical astrophysicist, distinguished alumnus, and Nobel laureate—will deliver the keynote address at Caltech's 132nd annual Commencement ceremony on June 12, 2026.
Thorne was a seminal figure in the discovery of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time that provide an unprecedented window into the physics of some of the most energetic events in the universe involving black holes and neutron stars.
Focusing his career on the "warped side of the universe," a phrase he coined while at Caltech, Thorne was critical in helping conceive and develop the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), a collaboration between Caltech and MIT funded by the National Science Foundation. He also led theoretical studies to estimate the frequencies of the waves that would be produced by massive objects in our universe, predict the strongest sources of gravitational waves, and explore the information that might be extracted from the waves. The most sensitive instrument ever built, LIGO now detects and characterizes several black hole mergers each week!
"Kip's extraordinary career is a testament to his intellectual passion and capacious vision," said President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. "He is a generous colleague, dedicated to Caltech students and faculty alike. Kip's agreement to speak at the Institute's 2026 graduation ceremonies, my last, could not provide a more significant statement about the values of scholarship and humanity to which we all aspire."
Thorne was born and raised in Logan, Utah, a valley in the Rocky Mountains with heavy annual snowfall that initially inspired him to become a snow plough driver. He fell in love with astronomy when his mother took him to a lecture about the solar system. As a young teenager, he read One Two Three…Infinity by George Gamow and turned his attention to theoretical physics and cosmology.
Thorne attended Caltech from 1958 to 1962, receiving his BS in physics. He went on to earn his PhD from Princeton University, where he studied under the guidance of physicist John Archibald Wheeler. During his graduate studies, Joseph Weber, a scholar from the University of Maryland, inspired Thorne to focus on the search for gravitational waves. The phenomena were first proposed by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity, and their detection would be a groundbreaking achievement that would open up a new "window" onto the universe.
In 1967, Thorne returned to Caltech as a faculty member, establishing a research group focused on black holes, neutron stars, and gravitational waves. With Rainer "Rai" Weiss from MIT—who proposed a design for a laser interferometer gravitational-wave detector—and Ronald W. P. Drever, professor of physics at Caltech, Thorne co-founded LIGO. After five decades and contributions from more than 1,000 international scientists and engineers and LIGO directors Robbie Vogt, Barry Barish, Jay Marx and David Reitze, the ambitious endeavor was successful.
On September 14, 2015, LIGO made the first-ever observation of gravitational waves, which resulted from the collision and merger of two black holes a billion light years from Earth.
This major accomplishment launched a new era of exploring the universe. Thorne also advanced the field by creating, in partnership with Saul Teukolsky, the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project. It focuses on computational simulation of gravitational-wave sources, an endeavor that is critical for extracting the information carried by gravitational waves.
In a new chapter of his career, Thorne has collaborated with artists, musicians, and filmmakers as a means of inspiring people to engage with science. In collaboration with composer Hans Zimmer and visual effects artists Paul Franklin and Oliver James, he has created multimedia concerts about the warped side of the universe. As executive producer and science advisor for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, he worked with Nolan to embed real science deep into the film and then described it in his book The Science of Interstellar. With painter Lia Halloran, he conceived tightly coupled paintings and verse as a medium for communicating the essence of science in their book The Warped Side of Our Universe.
Among many accolades, Thorne was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Together with Weiss and Drever or Barish, he received the Kavli Prize, the Shaw Prize, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
For more information about Caltech's 132nd annual Commencement, and Thorne's personal and professional accomplishments, visit the Commencement website.