Daniel Kennefick interview with Kip Thorne

0:00 Then we actually seem to have started, and I seem to be coming through, so you might say something as well. Okay, testing, I think about three seconds. Okay, we seem to be fine. So I can take off these headphones and just begin. So, this, as I say, was the topic which I meant to bring up when I met you last, but I didn't, stupidly. So, basically, I'm thinking, I'm sort of, I started writing a paper about The whole debate over Wilson and Matty is a star-crushing effect. And I guess I'm interested in topics like... Well, as an example, since a lot of the papers written by people in the Caltech group rebutting their arguments have been analytical or certainly not full numerical relativity calculations, it's sort of interesting to look at how you go about comparing results gotten by very different methods and so on. And even, I suppose, on the numerical side, that's a different issue, you know, how you actually compare different numerical codes and see if they're working the same way. So, one of the topics I suppose I might as well begin with is, at the beginning, I think my impression was a lot of people suspected the spatial conformal flatness assumption itself as a likely culprit for... Well, what people viewed as a surprising and perhaps incorrect result. And I was wondering if that was a view that you shared to begin with, and if it's still a view that you'd share. Let me back up and say, I don't think that was the key. I think the key issue was... If you had doubts about, is it the kind of, be successfully left to the experiment, you know, see later on whether neutron star binaries really behave this way, or is it more the kind of thing that you see the theorists really have to...

17:30 The difference between secular and dynamical is that once you can show that the body is secularly stable, arguments are going to appeal.

27:30 That's what I was going to say, which I think is about it.