If you could pass through a wormhole and fast-forward to November 2014, odds are many people will be talking about Kip Thorne and the possibility of time travel.

Hollywood's publicity machine will be in overdrive promoting a blockbuster film, Interstellar, which draws on research by the theoretical physicist.

Christopher Nolan, who directed the Dark Knight trilogy, has assembled Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine to star in what has been billed as "a heroic voyage to the farthest borders of our scientific understanding".

The real star, however, will be Thorne and his planet-sized brain. The 73-year-old scientist is already revered among peers for advancing some of Albert Einstein's most intriguing theories about relativity and gravity fields. The film will splash one of Thorne's big ideas – traversable wormholes through space and time – across popular culture.

"Closed timelike curve is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past," he said in an interview this week, seated in a sun-dappled courtyard at the California Institute of Technology. "Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity. We are several decades away from a definitive understanding, 20 or 30 years, but it could be sooner than that."

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