UMass Dartmouth will host physicist Dr. Kip Thorne on March 29. Dr. Thorne is the originator and guiding hand of the 2014 blockbuster movie Interstellar, which is based on black holes, spatial wormholes, and other concepts at the forefront of theoretical physics.

Dr. Thorne recently received international acclaim for a different achievement beyond Hollywood. He, along with Dr. Rai Weiss of MIT, led a collaboration to build the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). On Feb. 11, the National Science Foundation, which funded LIGO, announced the breakthrough detection of gravitational waves from the merger of massive black holes in a distant galaxy. This historic news came 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves.

Two screenings of Interstellar have been scheduled on the day of Dr. Thorne’s visit to the Dartmouth campus in the Claire T. Carney Library at 4:30 p.m. for a reception followed by a series of talks at 5 p.m. and a panel discussion at 6 p.m. on the science of Interstellar.

This event is sponsored by the UMass Dartmouth Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCVR), Mathematics Department, and Physics Department.