Instellar turned out to be okay. I'm not going to go to any further extremes with my choice of adjective here because I honestly felt like I didn't completely waste my money watching it in theatres…so that's nice. At the same time, as a huge 2001: A Space Odyssey fan, I must admit that I carry a heavy bias against the film for being, in my mind, a poor rehash of the greatest sic-fi classic of all time.
But regardless of my opinions on the movie or on the overrated Christopher Nolan, one thing I can discuss objectively is the science presented in Interstellar. Just how accurate are the different elements of physics in the movie? We'll analyze each one:
Drought/Crop Blight
The entire plot of the movie relies on a premise that is a bit shaky in my opinion: all of earth is in the midst of a crop blight that apparently will only deteriorate. (Note: A crop blight is basically the sudden, widespread "death" of crops). Now, the problem with this is that, though the film does not specify what year the characters are living in at the beginning, it doesn't seem to be too distant in the future. It is perhaps a few decades at most. From our present circumstances, it seems extremely unlikely that a crop blight of this magnitude could have possibly developed. Even if we are to give the directors some creative leeway here and allow them to accelerate the deterioration of the planet, it also seems very improbable that all of earth would be facing this problem to the degree that moving to another planet is the only real viable option!
Wormhole
The wormhole is an important component of this film as it is the mechanism by which the astronaut crew is able to traverse galaxies (a feat that is absolutely unfeasible at the present moment and for the forceable future). While wormholes have been popular in science fiction for a long time, they also happen to have a solid foundation in physics.
Now, it would be stated that they are still merely theoretical. I say this because although Einstein's theory of General Relativity does indeed allow wormholes to exist, we don't have the experimental means to make them a reality in the foreseeable future (also, they take a crap ton of energy to create and maintain - energy we just don't have at our disposal). Regardless, with our given understanding of the theory behind wormholes, there is a right way to at least portray wormholes….and Interstellar does it very well!
Wormholes are kind of like shortcuts through space. On a piece of paper, they're typically represented by a hole (kind of like a portal you could go through to immediately pop out in some other area). Taking this idea up to our world, the 3-dimensional equivalent of a circle is a sphere, and that is exactly how a wormhole should appear to us. This is how the movie decided to visually represent the wormhole - a kind of lucid sphere with a distorted image of the destination on the surface.
Relativity and Time Dilation
This is another area of physics that Interstellar did a very good job with. Einstein's theories on the warping of space and time were crazy on their own - it's about time a movie played with it! Interstellar uses relativity in their explanation of time dilation - a phenomenon by which time passes slower for one person relative to another person. In the movie, when the main character and the female astronaut go down to one of the planets to gather data, 1 hour for them is equivalent to 7 earth years. After all is said and done, upon getting back up to their spaceship (which is under "regular" earth time), 23 earth years have passed!
So, is this legit? Give the circumstances presented in the movie, absolutely! The planet in question was very close to a supermassive black hole (called "Gargantua") and according to General Relativity, time slows down in the presence of masses with large gravitational fields (and black holes definitely have significant gravitational influence). Kip Thorne, theoretical physicist at Caltech was working on the film and it is said that he even ran through the calculations to make sure the amount of time dilation was also accurate! It was a great job all around with respect to relativity!
Oh and while we're on the topic of relativity, I'd just like to say kudos to the film people for not breaking the speed of light (it was rumoured that Christopher Nolan really wanted to use faster-than-light travel in the movie but Kip Thorne adamantly refused - good on ya Kip!) . That would have been extremely frustrating and would have compromised the scientific integrity of the entire film.
Black Holes
Once again, black holes are often used in science fiction with varying degrees of accuracy. In Interstellar, they are depicted as accurately as possible and everyone working on the film (mainly Kip Thorne and his group) should be commended for the detail put into the sciences with black holes.
First, some people may have noticed that the black hole "Gargantua" was actually very bright. Despite the word "black", black holes can often shine extremely brightly! This can often be a result of matter emitting energy in the form of light and heat as it gets stretched near the black hole.
Moreover, the visual representation of the black hole was also extremely accurate and should be appreciated. Kip Thorne and the visual effects crew actually sat down and calculated how exactly each light beam reflecting off of the black hole should bend and morph. All of the distortion and warping of the space around the black hole is exactly what Einstein's field equations say they should look like! In fact, some individual frames involved the black hole took up to 100 hours to produce! Now that is some insane attention to detail. Props to Thorne and the visual effects crew (i.e. NOT Christopher Nolan).
Now, one minor addition here: many people may have found it odd that Cooper and his computer were able to survive entry into the black hole. Shouldn't he have been "sphagetti-fied" as soon as he crossed the event horizon (i.e. the "point of no return" for a black hole)? Well, the black hole in the movie is actually a supermassive black hole (yes, that's what we actually call it) and the forces that one would experience around the edge of a supermassive black hole are, ironically, much, much weaker than the forces they would experience around the edge of a "regular" sized black hole. This is because the forces are more concentrated towards the centre in supermassive black holes. In fact, since Gargantua is about 100 million solar masses (i.e. as heavy as 100 million of suns), the forces that Cooper experienced just at the edge of the black hole would be weaker than the forces he'd experience just standing on the surface of the earth! That's crazy, isn't it? So, theoretically, that sequence is absolutely legitimate and possible. Well done.
A Brief Commentary on Scientific Funding in the Movie and Plot Structure
This is just a bit of an aside (and it's more of a quip at the plot, which has more holes than a sponge…wait, sponges have holes, right?): why on earth was the society in this movie so eager and willing to adamantly fund manned space flight and exploration? It just doesn't make much sense. Their world is devoid of resources, living conditions are awful and crops are dying….yet it seems that money is really put towards fixing the crops problem (which seems like a very achievable feat). Instead, they pump what must have amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars on space exploration.
I say this because even if this is in the future where new discoveries have made space flight cheaper, getting multiple humans to Saturn, then through a wormhole, then through another solar system, then onto the planets, and then off of those planets, is going to cost a crap ton of dollars! Economically and logically, it just seems weird that they would pump so much money into space seeing as all of this relied on some scientist guy figuring out a B.S. "gravity equation" (whatever the heck that was supposed to be).
Overall, pretty good job on the science. Terrible plot, but it still doesn't change the fact that Kip Thorne and company put a great amount of detail into the scientific aspects of the film. Also, the fact that the entire movie was able to get by (mostly) on real science (with some speculation) was admirable.
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