Kip Thorne

Kip Thorne, the man who made black holes less terrifying and more Nobel-worthy, spent his career proving that the universe is just as weird as Einstein thought it was. A Caltech fixture for decades, he practically wrote the textbook on gravitational physics before physics got trendy with things like gravitational waves, which he, of course, predicted and helped detect.

Before he was busy helping interstellar travelers find wormholes (figuratively, mostly), Thorne was nurturing a new generation of physicists and generally making the cosmos a slightly less mysterious place for everyone. His collaborations with Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan alone secure his place in the pantheon of scientific rock stars, even if he didn't quite achieve Sagan's level of sweater-vest-wearing ubiquity.

He even served as a scientific consultant for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, presumably to ensure the wormholes were scientifically plausible and not just an excuse for Matthew McConaughey to cry in space. His work on the LIGO experiment, confirming gravitational waves, was, naturally, the culmination of decades of theoretical heavy lifting, finally earning him a well-deserved trip to Stockholm.

So, while his contributions to humanity are undeniably monumental, earning him a top Kvell-worthiness score, Kip Thorne himself appears to be about as Jewish as a ham sandwich on white bread. No gefilte fish at his family Seders, we'd wager.