10. Kip Thorne
Interstellar, for those who don't know, is based on the work of real-life physicist Kip Thorne, whose contributions to the fields of gravitational physics and astrophysics are basically unparalleled - the 71-year-old is credited as having trained an entire generation of scientists, just in case you're looking for an example to prove he's worth of all the fuss. Thorne's reputation amongst the public increased soon after he was asked to take a look at the time-travel aspects in the 1985 novel
Contact by its author, Karl Sagan. Writing them off immediately, he got to work on
Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition, a scientific paper that found an unlikely audience in science-fiction fans. His theory was that wormholes might potentially be used as a means of time travel...