'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.
We're going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.
We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.
When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.
I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.
We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age.
If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.
Our universe - it's three-dimensional, but we can pretend it's two-dimensional so it's like this sheet of paper - and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it's thousands of miles from Pasadena to London.
It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.
I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough to make your brain mushy and go to sleep.
If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.
I do hope that 'Interstellar' and this kind of science in film will catch the public fancy and help to reignite an interest in science - and a respect for the power of science in dealing with the problems that society has to deal with.
I got a lot of notoriety early on. Much of my career I was just trying to prove I was as good as the world thought I was.
I can't imagine not being in a phase where I'm trying to understand something or create something. That's the essence of life.
When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.
The essential point is that, although coordinates are a powerful, and sometimes essential, tool in many calculations, the fundamental laws of physics can be expressed without the aid of coordinates; and, indeed, their coordinate-free expressions are generally elegant and exceedingly powerful.
We're born with a curiosity about the universe. Those people who don't have a curiosity don't have it because it's gotten beaten out of them in some way.
I'm a real klutz computationally, so Mathematica is just ideal for me.
Black holes do not emit light, so you visualize them through gravitational lensing - how they bend light from other objects.
The jury is not in, so we just don't know. But there are very strong indications that wormholes that a human could travel through are forbidden by the laws of physics. That's sad, that's unfortunate, but that's the direction in which things are pointing.
