LOGAN — Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, who graduated from Logan High School, will return to Cache Valley to present a lecture titled “My Journey through Space and Time: The Big Bang, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves.”
The presentation, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 4 p.m. Thursday, July 19, at Logan High School, 162 W. 100 South.
Thorn, who received an honorary doctorate from Utah State University in 2000 when he served as the university’s commencement speaker, will be in town to attend the 60th reunion of Logan High School’s Class of 1958. His parents, D. Wynne Thorne and Alison Thorne, were professors at USU, an agronomist and an economist, respectively.
A native of Logan, Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize with fellow American physicists Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish for their work on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. The longtime professor at the California Institute of Technology also received acclaim for this significant contributions to the production of the 2014 film “Interstellar.”
Thorne left Logan after high school and earned his bachelor's degree from Caltech in 1962 and his doctorate from Princeton University in 1965.
He returned to California Institute of Technology as an associate professor in 1967 and became professor of theoretical physics in 1970. About a decade later, he was named the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor.
In 1991, Thorne was appointed the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. Lastly, he was named the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, in 2009.