Kip Thorne

Physical laws that govern the birth and evolution of black holes were deciphered in the 1960s and 70s, from Einstein’s General Relativity theory, by Stephen Hawking and others.  Around the year 2000, I promised Hawking that those laws would be tested by observations of gravitational waves.  I will describe the first great success in this testing quest, announced about a year ago, and the great richness of black holes and of their generation of gravitational waves that has underpinned that success