All in the (Scientific) Family

Scientists often talk about the people who mentored them, and the students and postdocs they supervise, in ways that sound like a family. Today, in the second of a two-part conversation, we listen in on two members of a well-known scientific lineage: Bill Press, a professor of computer science and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin and his former doctoral adviser, Kip Thorne, one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves. Missed the first part of the conversation? Thorne and Press talked about what it’s like to be a scientist advising on a major Hollywood movie such as Interstellar (which just so happens to star UT Austin alum Matthew McConaughey)? Check it out here: https://cns.utexas.edu/news/bringing-real-science-to-the-big-screen Special thanks to the family of Bryce DeWitt and Cécile DeWitt-Morette for their involvement in bringing Dr. Thorne to Austin for the inaugural Cécile Dewitt-Morette Memorial lecture in 2018. Watch a video of that lecture: https://youtu.be/0ypzGfHXHlw Music for today’s show was produced by Mike Arnoult, Adrian Walther, Finn’s Fandango, and Sounds Like Sander. Photo: Kip Thorne surrounded by students and other members of his lab at Caltech—his scientific family—circa 1972. At bottom left is Bill Press, Thorne’s former PhD student and now professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Other notable scientists include David Lee (bottom right), founder of Global Crossing Ltd. and current Board Chair of Caltech, and Alan Lightman (behind and to the right of Thorne), a physics professor at MIT, essayist and novelist. Photo courtesy of Bill Press.