Thorne was hooked, and his interests outgrew the solar system. We took out a long tape measure, and the shocking thing was to find that Mars was down on the next block Pluto was out in the next town!” “The plan was to draw the sun as a four-foot diameter circle on the corner, then the planets, running down the street, to scale. “Afterwards, she suggested we make a model of the solar system on the street where we lived,” Thorne recalls. When Thorne was eight, though, his mother took him to an astronomy lecture that threw those snow-drifts into severe perspective. “When you grow up in the Rocky Mountains, like I did, you see the snow drifts piled up six feet high and you’re two feet, so it’s impressive.” “As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a snowplow driver,” the Utah native says. Kip Thorne, the 74-year-old theoretical physicist whose ideas provided the original inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Interstellar, is in his home office in Pasadena, drinking a Diet Sunkist and discussing the moment, as a kid, when he decided to become a scientist.
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