Kip Thorne (BS '62), the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus; Caltech Distinguished Alumnus; and Nobel laureate, delivered the keynote address at Caltech's 132nd Commencement Ceremony on Friday, June 12.
Welcome, families and friends of the graduates of 2026. I will address my remarks to our graduates directly:
Congratulations! You Did It!! In the next hour you will become graduates of this amazing institution, Caltech, with a bachelor's or master's or Engineer's or PhD degree. So let's all give cheers and applause for our 2026 graduates!
You, our graduates, have contributed in many ways to making Caltech the remarkable, supportive, and intellectually vibrant community that it is. I have been a member of our community for nearly 70 years. (That's twice the age of most of you, but who's counting?) I thank you, on behalf of myself, the faculty, the staff, the administration, your fellow students, and our alumni – I thank you for your contributions to our community.
And please, graduates, join me in thanking your parents, your partners, and your friends and family members, many of whom are with us today, for their roles in supporting you during your years here — and, before you came to Caltech, for helping you develop into the wonderful people that you are. Let's give them cheers and applause!
In preparation for this Commencement Address, I have talked with many of you. You have shared with me how you view your future, as you contemplate leaving our cloistered and supportive environment, and heading out into the external world.
At Caltech some of you have struggled, academically, as did I in my freshman and sophomore years here. We came here from high schools where we were thought of as intellectual giants, and upon arriving here we felt like dwarfs among taller giants.
What you may not realize is this: When you emerge into the external world you will find far more elbow room than here. There you may be the intellectual giant in your core area of focus. And whether you are or not, with your Caltech education you will contribute greatly and thrive.
And as you navigate challenges in the external world, Caltech alumni can be of great help. Reach out to them. They are members of our supportive community, too, and they will be receptive. We look out for one another.
As you head into the external world, many of you are excited and enthusiastic. But for others, your plans have been dashed, at least temporarily — dashed by external forces beyond your control: dashed by an upended job market, or dashed by chaos in government funding for science, which this year has forced large cutbacks in graduate admissions.
If your hopes were dashed, then you are making alternative plans — for some of you (as I know from conversations with you): attractive and novel plans. But for others, just holding-pattern plans such as a gap year before graduate school.
If your hopes were dashed, then a tool I call peripheral vision for unexpected opportunities may help, perhaps a lot. Let me explain:
While you focus on your current career path, whatever that may be, I urge you to set aside 10 or 15 percent of your time to create and maintain a wide peripheral vision — a vision that reaches into adjacent fields of endeavor and beyond. From time to time in that periphery you will discover unexpected opportunities.
And when you see one that is sufficiently promising, try to transform it. Restructure it into a form optimal for you. It might boost you onto a new career path, a joyous one that you had not dreamed of.
That was the case for France Córdova, whom I will introduce to you shortly. Upon graduating from Stanford in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in English, Córdova cruised into a career as a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, which was her chosen career path. But then in her periphery she was inspired by – among other things – a documentary film about neutron stars. She fell in love with physics and astronomy and yearned for a new career, one for which she was woefully unprepared at that time.
So, in fact, with much help from our Caltech Community, Córdova crafted for herself a transition from English undergrad to physics graduate student and emerged from Caltech in 1979 with a PhD in Physics. Then, bouncing from one unexpected opportunity to another she became, among other things, an astronomy department chair, NASA's youngest and first female chief scientist, and the Director of the National Science Foundation. She was Caltech's 2019 Commencement Speaker and she is an active member of our Caltech Board of Trustees — and a treasured member of our Caltech community. Please stand up, France. And let's give a loud round of applause for France Córdova and her career, crafted from unexpected opportunities!
The LIGO Project, with its goal of opening the gravitational-wave window onto the universe, was for me an unexpected opportunity that I snagged from my peripheral vision in the early 1970s.
But rather than describe the details of that snagging, I will use LIGO to introduce a second major theme of my talk: Cautious optimism.
When my colleagues and I embarked on LIGO, its challenges were enormous: technical challenges, political challenges, and sociological challenges. Thousands of things could have gone wrong. However, we assumed, optimistically, that we would succeed. And with great caution we struggled to identify every possible show stopper, proactively, as early as possible. And for each show stopper, we struggled to tame it, before it could slow our progress. Remarkably, this worked, and to my embarrassment I have become one of the icons for the thousand person LIGO team who actually made it work.
Turning in another direction: In 1979, I was single in Southern California. And so to widen my peripheral vision, I dated in Hollywood. Lynda Obst, an upcoming movie producer was too intense for me and I was too nerdy for her, but we remained friends and two decades later, Lynda asked me if I would like to brainstorm with her for a movie — an unexpected opportunity that I quickly grabbed. That movie, in the hands of the Director, Christopher Nolan, became the cult film Interstellar. And it radically changed my own career trajectory:
I had been a conventional Caltech professor until then, for nearly a half century. I decided that, for my next half century, I would transition into projects at the interface of science and the arts, projects that are great fun for me, and inspire people, especially young people, about science.
There are many such arts and science projects that I'm eager to pursue. Central to my ambition is my cautious optimism. I assume, optimistically, that I can live and remain mentally strong and continue my projects to age 100, or beyond. But, day to day I'm cautious: I watch for threats to my health, and I'm proactive about dealing with them before they become serious.
I shall now pivot to an elephant in our midst. When I mention the elephant's name I will ask you to get your booing finished quickly, if you are tempted to boo: Artificial Intelligence — AI. [A few in the audience boo, mildly] That's pretty meager booing, much less than other commencement speakers have met in recent weeks.
Now, I'm not an expert on AI. I know just enough to get in trouble. – So – I'll now get myself into trouble:
AI, of course, is a very complex subject. Its power, in some sectors, is phenomenal. If we were to stop its evolution cold, today, and use it for several months or a year in its present form, then almost all of us would come to love it quickly. It is AI's accelerating evolution that unsettles many of us — and that I have discussed in depth with many of you, our graduates, over the last few weeks.
Let me focus for a few minutes, on that accelerating evolution.
AI, and AI-based technologies, such as robotics, are changing so fast that we humans have trouble keeping up. Before we have learned to use one generation, it has been superseded by the next, and maybe even the generation after that. And this may soon be the case with several other technologies. Biotechnology and genomics, as driven by CRISPR and mRNA, are evolving at an accelerating pace. And quantum computing may soon begin to do so, too, if the new Caltech startup, Oratomic, lives up to its most optimistic potential.
How can you and I deal with this accelerating evolution? If we choose careers in the realm of accelerating technologies, then we must learn to adapt rapidly. The key to rapid adaptation is continual self-teaching, with the help of whatever resources we can find. Continually teach ourselves to use the evolving technology, as it evolves. And as several of you graduates have said to me, "Caltech has trained us well to self-teach."
Where is this accelerating change taking us, as a society? I'm not an expert in AI or CRISPR or mRNA, or even quantum computing. But the thoughtful experts whom I talk to say -- they don't know. Pessimists speak of The Wave and The Singularity — sci fi like ideas that I have trouble understanding.
But I am not a pessimist. When contemplating the long-range future of AI and other accelerating technologies, I advocate the same cautious optimism as we used in LIGO and as I have chosen for my arts-and-science career:
Assume, optimistically, that AI will not drive us humans apart from each other, like many fear it will. Assume that we will emerge from the coming epoch as a thriving, strong, and ethical human society — one in which each human being values and respects all other human beings, regardless of our disagreements, and in which human-to-human interactions are central to our well-being.
But while adhering to long term optimism, be cautious day to day: Watch for threats to our optimistic goal. And proactively deal with the threats. This proactive caution may entail, for example, devoting great energy to the humanities and the arts. It may entail major societal programs to retrain human workers in areas where AI is changing the nature of human work. And it may entail demands that AI be ethical — in other words, demands that the AI industry deeply embed respectful human ethics into its AI products and services.
In my conversations with you, today's graduates, I have been impressed by how many of you share my optimism about the future. You are optimistic because you are confident, as am I, that Caltech has prepared you well to deal, in the long run, with whatever you may meet in the external world. And as you move into that world, I encourage you to exchange guidance and help with others in our Caltech community. It is a community in which you, as alumni, will continue to be treasured members, indefinitely into the future.
The world today has many problems, some so intractable that resolving them may seem hopeless. But science and engineering, if wisely and humanely applied, have the potential to make the world a far better place. With your Caltech education, you have the potential to contribute to this in major ways. Embrace your peripheral vision and discover unexpected opportunities to contribute to making the world better. Embrace cautious optimism.
You have wonderful lives ahead of you.
Congratulations on your graduation!