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21 " The French translation of ‘a black hole has no hair’ is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail. "
― Kip S. Thorne , The Science of Interstellar
22 " Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein’s relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It’s somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself. "
23 " The first planet that Cooper and his crew visit is Miller’s. The most impressive things about this planet are the extreme slowing of time there, gigantic water waves, and huge tidal gravity. All three are related, and arise from the planet’s closeness to Gargantua. "
24 " If we begin with the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity and then discard the fluctuations, we must obtain Einstein’s well-understood relativistic laws of physics. The fluctuations we discard are, for example, a froth of fluctuating, exquisitely tiny wormholes (“quantum foam” that pervades all of space; Figure 26.3 and Chapter 14). "
25 " The environment near Gargantua will become more dangerous for individual life forms, including humans, promoting faster evolution if enough individuals survive. "
26 " so matter as we know it gets stretched and squeezed out of existence. "
27 " Time, he realized, must be warped by the masses of heavy bodies such as the Earth or a black hole, and that warping is responsible for gravity. He embodied this insight in what I like to call “Einstein’s law of time warps,” a precise mathematical formula that I describe qualitatively this way: Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there. "
28 " First, a weird claim: Black holes are made from warped space and warped time. Nothing else—no matter whatsoever. "
29 " singularities, he asserted, “are a place in which the fiery marriage of Einstein’s relativistic laws with the quantum laws is consummated. "
30 " If we know the mass of a black hole and how fast it spins, then from Einstein’s relativistic laws we can deduce all the hole’s other properties: its size, the strength of its gravitational pull, how much its event horizon is stretched outward near the equator by centrifugal forces, the details of the gravitational lensing of objects behind it. Everything. This is amazing. So different from everyday experience. It is as though knowing my weight and how fast I can run, you could deduce everything about me: the color of my eyes, the length of my nose, my IQ, . . . "
31 " Matthew Choptuik, a postdoctoral student at the University of Texas, carried out a simulation on a supercomputer that he hoped would reveal new, unexpected features of the laws of physics; and he hit the jackpot. What he simulated was the implosion of a gravitational wave.47 When the imploding wave was weak, it imploded and then disbursed. When it was strong, the wave imploded and formed a black hole. When its strength was very precisely “tuned” to an intermediate strength, the wave created a sort of boiling in the shapes of space and time. The boiling produced outgoing gravitational waves with shorter and shorter wavelengths. It also left behind, at the end, an infinitesimally tiny naked singularity "
32 " If the imprint is really due to gravitational waves from the big bang, then this is the type of cosmological discovery that comes along perhaps once every fifty years. "
33 " The science of Interstellar lies in all four domains: Newtonian, relativistic, quantum, and quantum gravity. Correspondingly, some of the science is known to be true, some is an educated guess, and some is speculation. "
34 " As the Ranger carries Cooper deeper and deeper into the bowels of Gargantua, he continues to see the universe above himself. Chasing the light that brings him that image is an infalling singularity. The singularity is weak at first, but it grows stronger rapidly, as more and more stuff falls into Gargantua and piles up in a thin sheet (Chapter 27). Einstein’s laws dictate this. "
35 " Can you identify in your own life speculations that became educated guesses and then truth? Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life? "
36 " Cooper, entering the tesseract, falls down a channel between beams, dazed and confused, "
37 " There is a maximum spin rate that any black hole can have. If it spins faster than that maximum, its horizon disappears, leaving the singularity inside it wide open for all the universe to see; that is, making it naked—which is probably forbidden by the laws of physics "
38 " Einstein's law of time warps says that Everyting likes to live where it is going to age more slowly, and gravity pulls it there. "
― Kip S. Thorne
39 " The nuclear force holds neutrons and protons together more tightly when they form iron nuclei than when they form any other kind of atomic nucleus. "
― Kip S. Thorne , Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy
40 " The giant black holes in the cores of galaxies, a million to 20 billion times heavier than the Sun, therefore, cannot have been born in the death of a star. They must have formed in some other way, perhaps by the agglomeration of many smaller black holes; perhaps by the collapse of massive clouds of gas. "