"A serious Man" is "fully based on the concept of Schrodinger's Cat" , what? It is a post-modern retelling of The Book of Job, not sure other than the main character being a physics professor. At one point a failing student states that he understands Schrodinger's Cat, to which he is immediately admonished, for the analogy being pop-physics, and without understanding the math it is useless.
I liked the scene in which a student complained to the teacher because he did not get a good grade. The student try to convince the teacher that he might get the math wrong but understands the story of the cat. The teacher reply that the physics is all about math and that he himself don't understand the cat.
This list is fun movies that have some kind of physics theme.
Coherence was a really fun movie shot an absolute shoestring budget but it's about like a magic comet that unlocks parallel universes at a dinner party. It's high-concept sci-fi and not realistic at all.
Yeah, I didn't get that comment either and even tried to do a web search on it. I've seen A Serious Man numerous times. It's one of my favorite movies.
But it isn't about physics. It's overall theme is somewhat cryptic but it is making statements. It is less cryptic than Coen's other films like Barton Fink.
If you haven't seen the Coen Brother's filmography, start with A Serious Man. It's the kind of movie that gives you nostalgia for loneliness. It probably could have helped me in my teenage years. It's undoubtedly a cathartic movie for those who have had unfortunate luck or feel misunderstood.
There is a pretty big theme throughout the movie of not knowing what's going on though. Although not really being about physics directly, there is also another theme of anecdotes and stories being (often comically) useless as ways of explanation.
I didn't mean the theme. I just meant a theme. Also, if I recall correctly, the phrase "what's going on?" is muttered throughout the film as well. So I think it's a little of both (and more), where the more global theme is one of trying to understand understanding.
Although, I think a lot of the analysis of Coen brothers can sometimes fall flat. Coen brothers films are hilarious, often in extremely dark and non-obvious ways, so oftentimes their films are overanalyzed. I often think answers to "why did the Coen brothers put this in the film?" are simply "because they thought it was funny".
I don't get the love for Interstellar either. Their black hole rendering was about the only interesting thing about that movie. The rest of it was predictable and generic right up until the end at which point is felt like a jumping the shark movement with its ridiculousness.
Actual physicist here. Don't get me started on Interstellar. There is so much needlessly dumb crap in this movie that I don't even know where to start, and the fact that people think it's realistic is just a kick in the pants.
Just for one example...
The crew being sent to save the Earth blasts off in a big ol' chemical rocket with stages. Yeah, fine. I guess rocket tech hasn't advanced all that much in this future. Then they land a ship on a planet in a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences (Note: the gravity alone should have killed them). Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is? The energy to get off Earth is nothing compared to getting out of a gravity well that deep! I guess Nolan thought an oldschool staged rocket looked cool.
The SFX people did some actual science to figure out the black hole visuals but, other than that, this is a far worse movie than Gravity as far as science is concerned. The new age emotions resolution was just a big ol' F U to the crowd. Lazy, sloppy writing.
There are plenty of unrealistic movies on this list, and that's fine. Some are just damned fun movies (e.g. Back to the Future). Interstellar sticks out from the pack for it's pretensions and underlying ridiculousness.
> Then they land a ship on a planet with a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences
Pedantically, no, they don’t.
They land on a planet deep enough in a black hole’s gravity well to cause significant relative time differences.
(Obviously, this doesn’t change the issue of delta-V to get back to the mother ship, though the difference is relevant to your “the gravity alone should have killed them” comment, since that would only occur of there was a hard surface not in free fall with respect to the gravity well for them to be crushed into.)
> Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is?
Maybe because the super drive it uses would have adverse environmental impacts used in Earth’s atmosphere, and Earth has enough of that to deal with, but they cut the exposition-that-doesn’t move-the-plot-forward about that because they were making a movie, not a technical report on the mission’s decisionmaking.
The sci-fi author David Weber said something in an interview I read ages ago that stuck with me. It was something to the effect of: "don't spend paragraphs describing how a light switch works in the future." There's a place for true hard sci-fi, but it is niche. The bulk of sci-fi is quite justifiably going to be more or less accurate in places in relation to how well it services the overall combined goals fo the film.
It also somewhat bugs me that pretty invariably the folks that crap all over these movies are huge Trek or Babylon 5 fans, shows that have endless literal magic in them, and they're just fine with it. It's hard not to see this as another form of nerd sniping (note: not directed at you personally, just talking about a dynamic I've seen with many friends).
I'll agree about pretentiousness, but I do think Intersteller should be given credit for working to get more right than the vast majority of flims, but more importantly for doing an original concept where in many ways, GR itself is a main character. That was a bold bet in a world where we have 9 Fast and Furious movies.
I think the reason people can be happy with something like Trek but nitpick on more realistic attempts is that you hit a sort of uncanny valley. I know space flight in Trek or Babylon 5 is utterly made up, so you accept it and what stands out is the things you are shown that work within that made up framework. But if you show me space flight that’s close to being right then the ways it isn’t are what will stand out.
Yeah, I've thought the same thing and generally agree, but it still bugs me, because more often then not, it's not "uncanny valley" that's driving the distinction in category in my opinion but rather "mass popularity vs nerd cult." The reason I put Bab 5 in there and not Star Wars is exactly because it did work hard to get a lot more of the science stuff closer to right, but equally as flawed as anything in gravity or interstellar. The portrayal of B5's O'Neill cylinder is highly flawed but escapes this same sort of criticism.
I didn’t ever really bother about how well the station actually worked in B5, it and the larger human ships rotated because the humans didn’t have artificial gravity, and that was enough. It fitted in the world they had built. Similarly I never minded that the design of DS9 is non sensical in real terms, it fits with the other things we see in trek so it feels okay.
In contrast I bounced off Gravity because it was trying so hard to be accurate but had characters doing fairly long range orbital maneuvers by eye, and those two things didn’t feel like they fit.
Something like B5 isn’t centrally concerned with things like orbital mechanics, they aren’t the focus of its plots and the way ships behave is more a way to contrast the differing levels of tech. Gravity has a plot centered round how things orbit so when the plot cheats on that it’s jarring.
Likewise when B5 had an episode centered round a character who had been Jack the Ripper, but got the area of London where the murderer had been active completely wrong that felt jarring because the nature of that character felt so central to that episode.
I would humbly submit that Gravity was also not centrally concerned with the parts of orbital mechanics that would make it an utterly boring movie. I continue to fail to see the big distinction here, and why only one of these is described as "cheating."
> It also somewhat bugs me that pretty invariably the folks that crap all over these movies are huge Trek or Babylon 5 fans, shows that have endless literal magic in them, and they're just fine with it.
Interstellar was heavily hyped as being "realistic".
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is a good starting point. Written by an author that knows how to write pop-thrillers with a very keen attention to the details in his books. It deals with the aftermath of the moon spontaneously breaking apart. No explanation is ever given to the reason. The first line of the book is:
> The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
If you're looking for something even harder there's one author to stands out. Greg Egan. Most of his books are created by modifying some part of relativity and seeing what kind of world would be the logical conclusion from that modification. From the blurb for his book "Orthogonal".
> In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy.
> On Yalda’s world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky.
Every one of his books are this weird, and he has books worth of education material and graphics to help explain the mechanics of each universe he creates. He has also done some novel discoveries when it comes to superpermutations.
If you don't want to go quite that deep into it all, you could take a look at "The Martian". The movie is a fine piece of work, but the book is really amazing. It goes into a lot more details. Andy Weir, the author, even made sure the phases of Earth and Mars matched up so closely that you can figure out when the book is happening by inferring the travel times and communication delays.
Generally, you won't find much of this genre. Writing space opera (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) doesn't require too much. You have to have good characters exploring an interesting scenario, and then write it competently. Proper hard Sci-Fi on the other hand is incredibly difficult. It requires intimate knowledge of things like orbital physics and being able to infer what is and isn't possible within the next ~20 years. This is where most hard Sci-Fi is set because it grounds it the most. An analogous issue is that hard Sci-Fi often "expires". Stories written 30 years ago suddenly start sounding silly because technology developed in a new and at-the-time unexpected direction.
Great recommendations here. One pet peeve I have is that the term science fiction is used a lot in these types of discussions when the more accurate term in my opinion would be speculative fiction, sometimes with some real world science bits thrown in for either convenience or broader appeal.
Particularly in regards to Greg Egan since his books are really out there. I personally recommend Permutation City and Diaspora which I found both amazing (although most of his books are also very good). Seveneves is still on my to-read list, from a lot of reviews I got the impression that the first part of the book is very good while the second part goes a bit downhill. I'll still probably read it someday.
Another recommendation that's a bit more mainstream is the Expanse series which seems to really try to portray some of the real effects of space flight and gravity effects while, again, also throwing some more "out-there and not so realistic" stuff into the mix.
Yes, the movie isn't perfect scientifically, but a) it's extremely entertaining, b) gets people interested and listening to me talking about GR and c) saying Gravity is a better movie (in ref. to science) is imo ridiculous (imo Gravity is a pretentious "sciency" piece of drama set in space, but w/e).
My interpretation, Murph solved the gravity equation all by herself. Plan A was a success. She never really got over her father leaving her.
Probably he couldn't take it and just left. Maybe, they flew into the black hole and died. But she's a genius and needed closure. On her deathbed she had a fantasy or hallucinations about what could have happened. In any case, her super logical mind came up with a story that let her come to grips with the loss of her father. It's a bit grim, but gives enough room (for me) for lots of silliness. that's not what happened. they all died. But maybe, that could have happened. And that's enough for her to find some peace.
Thank you. I've been ranting about the "let's use a big rocket to provide visual impact but then forget about it when it's inconvenient to the plot" thing since the movie came out. Interstellar is the type of movie that gets worse the more you think about it.
> fact that people think it's realistic is just a kick in the pants
The story is science...fiction. not a documentary on space travel. The realistic bit is obviously hyperbole, no one thinks you can take off a planet that easily. But it was good to move the plot forward. The part people like about that it felt like science anyone who has read popular mechanics (and heard about Hawking-
'S work and something about general relativity & time dilation) can nod their head during scenes that have payoffs that are "intellectually" satisfying.
Now now. Satisfying in that with space travel there are no free lunches and the universe in general is a pretty grim and hostile place.
And the black hole visuals were cool AF. That's a good movie.
You are projecting your beliefs. The popular science crowd thought it was incredibly realistic [1-3]. As you say, the movie is ingratiating to the people who have heard something about time dilation. But even the movie itself gets it horribly wrong. I remember there is a scene of a crew in the orbit of the planet growing old while those on the surface don't because "it is near a black hole" which is true, but the distance between the surface of the planet and the orbit to cause such massive time dilation would imply the humans should liquefy in their suits. Overall, I found Interstellar to go out of the way to use science to explain events in the movie and then asked the viewers to ignore applying the same principles to other parts. I have no problem with science fiction, but if you try to explain the fiction, you have to keep the universe consistent.
An actual incredibly realistic film would be very very boring. Now let's follow Bob as he runs vibration testing on a small sensor in the rocket for the 12th time.
And now the crew spend 12 years travelling through space with nothing happening.
Maybe we can show some people debugging the AI code for the robot
Nolan's typical output is films that are a little smart, but seem to believe themselves to be very smart, while delivering a few really cool scenes, moments, or visuals, but not much else. Interstellar's firmly in that category.
> The crew being sent to save the Earth blasts off in a big ol' chemical rocket with stages. Yeah, fine. I guess rocket tech hasn't advanced all that much in this future. Then they land a ship on a planet in a gravity well so intense that it causes big relative time differences (Note: the gravity alone should have killed them). Then they blast off with the same ship and no big clunky chemical rocket stages. Why didn't this ship just blast off of Earth as is? The energy to get off Earth is nothing compared to getting out of a gravity well that deep! I guess Nolan thought an oldschool staged rocket looked cool.
For some reason I thought they mention it in the movie, but perhaps not and I simply read it elsewhere: fuel. The chemical rocket allowed them to take a large(r) payload into Earth's orbit and dock with the primary ship all while conserving the fuel that the landers had up there. Resources that were not easy to come by.
> The new age emotions resolution was just a big ol' F U to the crowd. Lazy, sloppy writing.
The writing did vary wildly between overly vague and overly explaining things, but I blame the trailers for people thinking this was what the movie was about. The only person making this argument turned out to be wrong (everyone left on earth would have died if they listened to her at the time) and she was making it out of desperation, not from logic.
The resolution was sufficiently advanced technology (no different than transporters or Ringworld construction). Love only transcended time and space in the sense that love is what drove the characters to do what they did.
I doubt there is much advancement in a time where the moon landing is considered fake as stated in the school scene in the movie.
And maybe the ship could blast of earth without the rockets but why wasting fuel at that time in the mission? They can't refuel later on so every unnecessary fuel consumption is bad.
It's one of the few realistic scifi movies out there. No aliens eating your face. No sound in space. No unobtanium. No gravity plating. Etc...
It was made by someone with attention to detail. When Cooper looks out the window, it looks exactly like the real footage of Apollo astronauts looking out the CM window.
The music is great. That can't be understated. The organ music lends a gravitas that's missing in other scifi movies.
But most importantly, it goes to the core of what I want from science fiction: it changed my world view, permanently.
Remember Doctor Mann, and his desperation to return to Earth? No other piece of fiction has made me feel that way. That utter, unspeakable, unbearable isolation of being the only human on this side of the universe. To be so far from everything that it's hard to wrap your brain around it. And if you do... you experience a Lovecraftian horror that drives you mad.
That's why I like Interstaller. It's proper, classic science fiction!
Interstellar had plenty of unphysical/unrealistic/fantastical content. Five-dimensional descendants of humans tearing open an Einstein-Rosen bridge in the outer solar system to screw with causality? Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth, but taking off without similar assistance from subsequent planets? "Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it"??
I think the point we'd agree on is that sci-fi definitely doesn't need to adhere slavishly to known physics to be good.
> I think the point we'd agree on is that sci-fi definitely doesn't need to adhere slavishly to known physics to be good.
This is my biggest pet peeve.
So many people dont get it. Its a movie, not a physics book readout. Smart-asses on twitter pointing out this or that being incorrect is boring and they ruin a movie for themselves.
Gravity is a little silly sci-fi movie and I enjoyed. I understand enough of orbital physics to chuckle at an astronaut flying on an extinguisher from a space station to another space station.
>> But ISS and Chinese stations could not be so close
>> But in the opening the debree from the original crash has different relative V therefore it would completely miss the station on second pass
Who cares? Just enjoy the movie. If you can't - read a physics book.
What you're talking about is the difference between hard sci-fi and pop sci-fi. The pop stuff is intended to have fun Hollywood physics and not taken too literally. But hard sci-fi is intended to be more theoretically plausible.
The issue with Interstellar was it set itself up as a hard sci-fi with some Hollywood sugar with the way it depicted a future Earth, black hole physics (for the most part) and time dilation. But then it took a dramatic left turn into ridiculousness at the end. This really broke immersion of the film for me. Whereas films like Guardians of the Galaxy (and it's ilk) make it clear from the outset that it's a fun distraction from reality. So it's easier to suspend disbelief while watching.
I think people expect movies to make sense. If a character dies in the third scene and is alive in the fourth without any explanation, it's bad story telling. If rain falls up instead of down for no reason, that's also jarring. If a man is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and uses a table saw to build himself a shelter, with no explanation of where the table saw came from or where he plugged it in, that's similarly problematic.
Stories that rely on magic or nonexistent technology to tell a story are fine, as long as the rules governing the magic or technology are applied consistently. Stuff that's just blatantly wrong or contradictory I find distracting. Some people aren't bothered by that, and anything science-fictiony is generally operating far enough outside the realm of ordinary experience that most people won't notice incongruities.
An interesting case is the movie The Wandering Earth, which I watched recently. A plot point relies on unexplained "gravity fluctuations" while attempting a gravity slingshot causing catastrophic failure of a bunch of important machines. This is nonsense, and made it hard for me to take the movie seriously. Later, though, I realized there's a (probably unintentional) sensible interpretation. The machines failed for an unrelated reason, but the world government can't bring themselves to say that they screwed up so they make up a story that doesn't make sense and everyone knows is a lie, but no one is willing to say so because they're afraid to or want to be "good citizens". This could be interpreted as a commentary on modern China (which is where the movie was made), while retaining plausible deniability.
I haven't read Cixin Liu's short story that The Wandering Earth is based on; I don't know if the gravity fluctuations are present in the original or are given a plausible explanation.
The problem is that most people don't want hard sci-fi, so no hard sci-fi movies get made (although some are falsely advertised as hard sci-fi, as someone else mentioned), and the small number of hard sci-fi fans (like me) are annoyed they have nothing to watch. Saying "soft sci-fi can be good too" doesn't help much.
The fiction can the plot, not the physics. And you'll find there's plenty of hard sci-fi novels out there. Some of those novels even get made to movies, like I Robot. Unfortunately it often gets heavily watered down.
The problem with movies is the cost of production is much higher than publishing a book. So movies have to appeal to a greater audience in order recoup their costs. And that usually means taking the "hard" out of "hard sci-fi".
Different things are made different so that people looking for different things can have the thing they want. Yeah, 5000 years ago we only had berries, animals we could catch, and plants we could grow. Today, in the future, we can have so many more things and we don't have to settle for what just happens to be available.
> So many people dont get it. Its a movie, not a physics book readout.
Movies used to be in black and white and without sound. So many people don't get it.
Movies used to be made where the actors were all familiar with stage performance techniques and didn't know how to perform for a camera. So many people don't get it.
Movies used to have really wooden camera shots because the camera weighted 500 pounds. So many people don't get it.
> Who cares? Just enjoy the movie. If you can't - read a physics book.
Somebody has a preference that you don't share, but instead of just ignoring them you had to tell them that they're wrong. Without any proof. And while enjoying movie improvements that have been going on for over a century.
That person just wants movies to be better. If you think that movies shouldn't be better why don't you go back to watching black and white moving pictures?
They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.
Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
Why is Dr Stone in space? What's she running from. What killed her child? (Gravity). What do humans do to survive, and how is that related to evolution?
And most importantly in the 3d version, why do things fly out in front of the screen, yet also hit an implied camera lens in a different shot?
> They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.
I really love it when movies set out to explore an alt universe. They're fun. But Gravity didn't do that.
> Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
No, I think you miss the point of sci-fi there. Sci-fi is literally just fiction where science is the major plot directive. It could use that platform to discuss ethics (as Star Trek often set out to do), it could use it do explore loneliness and survival (as The Martian did), it could be a platform to scare people (like Alien) or it could just be using it as a canvas for something totally made up and fun (like Guardians of the Galaxy). But there's absolutely no reason what-so-ever why sci-fi can't be about predicting the future. And in fact a great deal of sci-fi does set out to do just that.
The real problem with many of the comments in this thread is they assume "sci-fi" is this single entity in which all content assumes the same goals. But it's not. Different writers will have different stories to tell and different emotions they want to leave with the audience.
Furthermore, movies are not the only platform from which sci-fi exists. If you take a look at novels you'll see that sci-fi is actually a massive genre to which cinema only scratches the surface of. I'd wager that's probably true of most genres when comparing books to movies though.
>"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it"??
I don't understand why this is often held up as a valid criticism of the authenticity of the movie. This quote is a character speaking and not the filmmaker. The movie isn't necessarily saying Anne Hathaway's character's reasoning for her actions is any more sound than Matt Damon's character's reasoning. The plot of the movie does not rely on her character's reasoning being right.
> I don't understand why this is often held up as a valid criticism of the authenticity of the movie.
It’s weird the degree of overlap between “people who want absolute realism in their movies” and “people who want everything a character says in a movie to be a reliable description of the reality of the fictional context”, given the inconsistency of those preferences.
Don't get me started on the people who listed among their complaints about The Last Jedi that "Rey's parents are nobodies and that's lame and I don't like it".
Setting aside whether or not that being true would be a good move for the franchise: the film didn't say that's true. It had one character say it to another. In a franchise that has a history of having one character lie to another about exactly this kind of thing. In an entry in that franchise that is explicitly playing with point-of-view and subjective experience of events.
Is that not how a human's perception of love is? Even if you think you're the most logical person in the world you find it hard to explain why you feel so much for a random person. Seems very realistic
> Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth
Might have to watch the movie again but I think it’s implied that it’s an insane fuel burden to get them off the planet; additionally only a small part of the ship actually goes down to the surface, I believe the main bulk stays in orbit.
The taking off from Earth in multiple stages but not other planets is actually pretty realistic. Earth is big. For example, Starship plans to do exactly this: using the super heavy booster to take off from earth but single stage from mars or the moon.
> Their ship requiring multiple-stage launch from earth, but taking off without similar assistance from subsequent planets?
I haven't watched Interstellar, but this would certainly make sense given Earth's escape velocity (11.19km/s) is over 2x that of Mars (5.03km/s), and nearly 5x that of the Moon (2.38km/s).
No unobtanium? The whole thing is premised on wormholes! Yes GR supports wormholes---sort of. They are dramatically unstable. Nobody knows how to make one, if such a thing is even possible.
There are a bunch of planets, and they choose to visit the one with the absolute worst time dilation first?
Doctor Hugh Mann and the whole narrative around him was one of the most cringe-worthy moments I've seen in a movie of that caliber/budget.
The motives behind the characters (Anne Hathaway's character deciding to sacrifice humanity to see her boyfriend, Caine's character withholding physics advancements for years, Murph's whole behavior... and so numerous others) was, objectively, bad writing. Of the kind that you really wonder how it got out in the public and into such a high profile movie. I can't think of a single person in that movie that acts realistically. To the point that I kind of believe that the "plot" was just a pretext for Kip Thornes awesome work on the visualizations of the wormholes.
The plotholes... well way too many. That was the movie that ruined Nolan for me. Up to that point I was a very big fan.
And here I am, recognizing some of the plot holes existing but Interstellar is one of my favorite movies of all time. I've watched it several times, watched the first 30 minutes 10 times, and cry most times I watch it all the way through.
Let go of trying to analyze the realistic-ness of the physics (even if it's in this list) and immerse yourself in the story, the moment, and I think the characters are actually very realistic.
I am not analyzing the realism of the physics, I'm not qualified for that. Physicists say it's realistic enough and I believe them.
But realism in the science aspects of a movie shouldn't be an excuse for a lack of a coherent story or bad character development.
I respect your take and what that movie means to you, but don't think that I didn't want to immerse myself in it or anything like that. I was highly anticipating this movie for years. It just didn't do it for me.
Hathaway's Brand didn't want to sacrifice humanity, she just had a conflict of interest around a decision in a VERY information-limited environment. Her non-love-related argument about the black hole capturing things that would be needed to create planets more capable of supporting life - that Cooper thought was probably just rationalization - made sense and would have led them to a better decision than going down to Mann's planet did. Where we got exactly the sort of sterile environment she was predicting, like the water planet before.
Brand-on-earth's "withheld physics advancements" was sorta the reverse - he withheld his failure because his math hadn't enabled the advances NASA hoped they would and so releasing them would've been telling everyone on earth they were doomed. He decided to put the fate of the species ahead of releasing useless results that he believed would ruin the only chance the species had. (Even without that, not publishing negative results is common anyway!)
Not sure about your complaint with Murph, since you aren't specific, but both kid Murph and adult seemed consistent to me.
I HATED the magic black hole deus ex machina on first viewing, and still don't love it, but found everything up to that amazing. I think a bleaker story of founding a colony on a new planet without the magic trip back to earth at the end could've been even better, though.
> Caine's character withholding physics advancements for years
But he didn’t do that. He and Mann had determined there was way forward and they were right. Without the new data from the black hole physics had gotten as far as it ever would.
EDIT: and Hathaway’s character didn’t intend to sacrifice humanity. One option was as good as any other. She even turned out to be right and most of the crew would have survived if they listened to her from the start.
I don't really agree with all of your specific complaints but I do agree that Nolan's movies tend to have uninspired writing.
It's almost like an uncanny valley where the truly expert film-making delivers all the tone, gravitas, and emotion you could want from a script that feels bland and incomplete.
I love Interstellar despite some of the liberties it takes. For me the number one thing Interstellar did so well was communicate clearly that the universe does not care about us.
We are infinitesimally small and insignificant. I felt the scale of space and the unforgiving progress of time, as characters dealt with the emotional impact of time dilation on them, their colleagues, and family. And we, as viewers, get to experience it as we see minutes pass from our POV only to return to Endurance and realize Romilly has aged over 20 years in orbit, all alone; and Cooper’s kids have suddenly grown up without us noticing.
And as others have noted about the film before, it also relates to the phenomena we experience as we age and our perception of time accelerates. If you’re a parent, you feel yourself slipping farther and faster away from your children with each passing year. Chances are if you watched Interstellar as a parent, you felt the film deeply on another level.
I enjoy re-interpreting the movies by taking them at face value and assuming what happened happened but not for the reason we were told. This can sometimes mean burning things: a character is wrong about the gravity of a planet. It can also have more interesting results: Kowalski didn’t have to die and he knew he didn’t have to die and chose to die anyway while encouraging Stone to keep going.
I enjoyed some of Interstellar, but disliked the anti-scientificism. When they need to pick planet, probably humanity's last hope, you know there will be two options -- the scientifically sensible option and the "go with your heart" one -- and of course the latter is the right one. When scientists follow the scientific method they end up making a mistake, because science is cold and uncaring but nothing can stop the power of the heart, I guess.
I would really like a scifi movie that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" mislead you, and sometimes you just have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
That's because films are about people, not science.
I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Actually most science is intuition, followed by checking if it's correct.
Intuition misleads people all the time, and letting people in the spaceship after the xenomorph has infected them is illogical, and really bad.
I don't agree with this. Scientists are people too, and science is a human endeavor after all.
I really, really dislike when Hollywood portrays scientists and science as fundamentally blind and cold, and that what will really save you is The Power of Love. The good old "leave your cold facts and numbers and follow your heart" trope, which tends to triumph in movies because Hollywood thinks audiences are uninterested in science (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).
In Interstellar this is manifested in that the "logical" choice of planet (i.e. the one we would have wanted this group of people to pick, were this a real situation) was wrong (because obviously a scientist lied), and the right choice was following your heart all along.
As for xenomorphs: I utterly love Alien and Aliens (a pity they never made any sequels, right?) but they aren't examples of realistic movies, and the characters often make movie-logic decisions, and that's fine: these are horror-scifi and action-scifi movies, respectively, and don't try to be anything else.
> I would really like a scientific paper that showed instances where intuition, common sense and "love" don't mislead you, and sometimes you don't have to follow the more methodical procedure and check your blindspots.
Those exist. Unlike with movies often ridiculing science and scientists, science doesn't downplay the usefulness of emotions and intuition.
People love making fun of the bad orbital mechanics in Gravity, but Interstellar is no better. In the beginning they need a Saturn V-size rocket to leave earth orbit. Later they simply decide to leave the laws of physics behind and start zipping around earth-size planets in a tiny scifi-shuttle. Not to speak of the impossibility of kilometer-tall waves in knee-deep water and the ridiculous spinning spaceship scene.
>the impossibility of kilometer-tall waves in knee-deep water
FWIW I think those were supposed to be some sort of extreme tides due to the black hole. Maybe still impossible, but I don't think it was just "Big waves are cool lol".
Yeah, the whole planet was essentially an ocean, but the gravity of the black hole was such that it was pulling all the water to one point. With the spinning of the planet, it was essentially a wave.
Basically, the water was acting as a comet's tail does. But backwards.
FYI, The world's largest tidal range of 16.3 metres (53.5 feet) occurs in Bay of Fundy, Canada. Tidal forces in extreme gravity and with the right subsurface geometry could be huge.
I mostly agree about Interstellar, but I think it was the first time a lot of people encountered the idea of time dilation.
It’s old hat in written SF, of course, but hadn’t come up much in major movies before (or at least that’s the impression I get from reactions and reviews by people who don’t read SF).
Time dilation is a great and underutilized storytelling device. Far and away the best example I know of is Gunbuster. Most Western audiences don't want to sit through two and a half hours of 80s anime, regardless of the quality.
Time dilation is used to great effect in the Ender series by Orson Card, though not in the first book (Ender's Game). Highly recommend reading the rest of them if you've only read the first (or seen the movie).
I consider time dilation to be an inherently literary format, and Forever War is where the idea is turned up to eleven. There's also a short comic adaptation if you like.
There's a movie called Time Trap that sort of uses this as a plot device. While the time slipage isn't caused by the effects of a black hole, it is still an interesting sci-fi. Not a big budget film that I had never heard of, but the pandemic has allowed me to watch a lot of stuff I probably wouldn't have had time for before.
I loved Interstellar, but not for the physics. I thought it was a great story about the human spirit, the power of love across time and space, etc. and the sci-fi elements were there to help make it more interesting and to provide explanations for a lot of the events like how Cooper got the messages that lead to the events of the movie in the first place.
I liked the picturisation of the different planets and of course, the time dilation effects. I think they're great for a general audience, who may not be exposed to the latest developments in astronomy.
It's also the 9 millionth sf movie/series about exploring an unknown frontier and finding your father there. I have a feeling these are just wish-fulfilment portraits of the mental state of a certain type of high-achieving dude i.e. succeeding in something that no other humans have yet, and finally seeing daddy's approval for the first time.
And even the black hole rendering was defective, because although they did GR ray tracing, they suppressed the doppler beaming effect which makes the side of the black hole moving towards the observer much brighter than the side moving away. So the image they produced was not very realistic.
Yes, I know that (Kip Thorne commented about it publicly), but still in my opinion it was a stupid choice. What would be so bad about trying to actually show what the BH would look like, if you're going to go to all the effort of GR ray tracing? My comment is being downvoted, but I stand by it. Why include lots of the physics, but not one of the most important effects?
While true, Gravity was an incredible spectacle when viewed in IMAX 3D. I would argue seeing it in a normal theatre or at home would be such a lesser experience, it would be as if you were watching a different movie.
The IMAX 3D movie conveyed the black emptiness of space, the splendor of Earth from orbit, the velocity of moving objects, and the inertia of a human body in a way that dazzled the viewer. It was astonishing.
True, the physics was wrong. By not as wrong as other films.
Watching this after Planates anime (2002) was so underwhelming. Its about an underequipped team tasked with retrieving space debris. It featured a kid born on moon with accelerated ageing, risk of cancer, inequitable fight for resources, token compliance of environment cleanup. Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igmZSI3kILY OP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeBPzoilfQk
The first episodes (5-6 I think?) aren't spectacular. I hate the type of humor they use (which is actually quite common for anime of the same era). But when the main story gets going, it really is one of the best hard sci-fi shows I've seen.
The trailer you linked is quite good and representative of what to expect.
Planetes is great, although I felt the ending cheapened the themes a bit. But the reintroduction of seemingly one-off characters to tie up loose ends and advance the plot, coupled with the fairly hard science fiction, was excellent.
Though yes like the other comment says be aware that not all anime kicks off well, a few bad episodes at the start are pretty much expected at this point.
For anyone looking for a documentary on the Manhattan Project, I'd highly highly recommend The Day After Trinity, a documentary by Jon Else with a bunch of interviews of the original participants (it was made in 1980). Really fantastic look at the personalities behind all the science.
This is a list of movies that would be interesting to people who like physics, not movies that accurately depict physical phenomena. As someone with a physics degree, I've enjoyed almost every movie on this list, so I would say it has something going for it.
People watch movies for the fantasy element, including physics lovers. Some of us watch gravitational simulations all day long as part of our work. We don't go to the movies to watch them in cinematic form when we're off the clock. It's fine if they get the physics wrong imo, and again, I say that as someone who invested a lot of time and money in understanding physics.
"Contact" could be seen as interpretation of General Relativity. On earth, to the outside observer, it appears like the space travel took no time. On board the spaceship the time lasted much longer. I guess the space ship curved the the space-time.
Contact is the film every single one of my astronomy professors have recommended at some point. It may be fantasy but seems to really resonate with scientists.
Turns out LEO is about 18000 mph, not the 25,000 I estimated... so the max closing speed should be less than 36,000 mph for opposite direction objects.
There isn't much "science" in it to hold together. Obviously the entire wormhole machine, the wormhole trip, what was on the other side, etc. was fantasy, and what's left is just receiving signals.
Almost all science fiction has some leap of imagination to make the story work. The Expanse tv show (and books) have the Epstein Drive and the protomolecule stuff. Obviously Star Trek is even more fantastical, so is Dune, or almost any space science fiction. Maybe Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars is an exception (one has to assume fully terraforming Mars in a couple centuries is in fact doable), but there's no movie or tv show for those books.
i still maintain that the most interesting read on contact is as hard sci-fi. there aren't any aliens. the machine was a trans-cranial magnetic induction rig designed by hadden to punk the world's preeminent atheist with a religious experience, and by extension, punk humanity.
Wormhole devices in movies keep puzzling me for quite some time - why does a significant number of them look like rings rotating around each other?
Contact is one example, another is Event Horizon. The Terminator also had a similar looking time machine.
Currently, our sole way of manipulating spacetime is by cramming a heck of a lot of matter in one spot, which is to say that we don't really do much of it. Any way short of crushing down mountainsful of matter into a thimble would necessarily be more complex, with more moving parts. I can only think that rotation would come into play, and if one dimension is good, three would have to be better if you want to shred spacetime.
I don't think it's doable but in the sense that you want something to visually convey it, it may as well be the equivalent of lightning to stand in for electricity.
Not sure if there's some pseudo-physical explanation, but I've imagined it has something to do with visualizing the three dimensions that are manipulated.
Interestingly both Event Horizon and Contact (movie) are from 1997...
A list of Physics movies, without mentioning the most accurate depiction of Graduate School? No list is complete without the glory that is Real Genius. "Self-realization. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/?ref_=tt_ch
A bunch of movies suggested in this list actually suck and not really scientifically accurate either, as many others have already pointed out.
On a side note, if you go through the comment section on the blog, it's quite evident that the author have used paid commenters to increase its rating/impact.
Wow, I was unprepared for how incredibly obvious and embarrassingly fake that comments section is lol.
"Thanks for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, would you mind updating your blog with more information? It is extremely helpful for me."
Complete with spam link I've removed for safety. What a farce. How does content like this make it onto Hacker News? Probably bought fake votes too. Posted by an account with no history, created today. hmmm....
Those kind of comments are not paid comments, but just a way to get spam links on a site. My personal website (which has comments hidden, but clearly the API still works) is completely filled with comments like that.
I wish we could do the same for Computer Science/Software. Movies like "Travelling Salesman" or "Pirates of Silicon Valley" or "Imitation Game" would be great suggestions but typically things like the Matrix or Ghost in the Shell are recommended which for me are great movies but poor examples of the discipline.
Hello cm2187 what's happening. I'm gonna need you to go ahead and not recommend movies while at work. So if you could go ahead and get back to it.. that'd be great.
I'm probably a minority in this but I always thought "The Net" with Sandra Bullock was prescient about technology and its dangers, even if the wrapping was hokey.
I re-watched Hackers recently and it isn't that bad. They clearly did the research, and then spiced things up for more enjoyable viewing. It's not accurate, but it wasn't trying to be, and I think they got the main points across perfectly well.
Eg, there's a lot of social engineering, and taking sensible precautions like not using your own connection. The villain's plot of hijacking a control system and extorting money is perfectly modern.
Sure, there's a bunch of colorful graphics they put on top of that, but it's arguably a visual representation of "being in the zone", and something that's done in virtually every other piece of media ever. Any real job includes lots of boring work that never ends up on the screen, and you just get the highlights.
I'm not sure why, but the two hackers fighting to get control of a tv station's tape robot is simultaneously the greatest and most ridiculous thing in that whole movie.
Even that is sort of sensible, actually. Just not in the exact manner depicted.
In say, an Unix system, a tape robot is going to be hooked up to some sort of SCSI device, and probably nothing prevents two people from commanding it at once in conflicting ways.
Two people logged into the same system trying to figure out who the other one is and kill their login process or to disable whatever way the other guy used to get in -- also possible.
Even two people typing at each other is a thing. Linux has the 'write' and 'wall' commands, and there even was a realtime chat program:
So yes, the entire scenario of two people breaking into the same computer, sending conflicting commands to the tape robot, trying to kick the other one out, and even sending chat messages at each other is very much something that's plausible on an Unix system. Just without the colorful graphics.
Sneakers is about perfect for those kinds of movies. The major hacking facets are all represented by various specialists and it is all just barely plausible.
My 6 & 8yr old kids adored that when I showed it to them recently. Ben's character more than a little out of place these days: he's used entirely as an object of comedy (and that as a target rather than a source), does nothing for the story, and his casting would definitely not be acceptable in 2021. The rest of the movie is fun and warm though, and the robot is endlessly quotable by little voices.
yeah that's a sad point about Ben's character. I'm going on about 35 years of memory since i last saw it and then just looked up a few quotes on rotten tomatoes. I like the dilemma facing engineers working on military weapons. Then also the theme around AI and those implications.
Yeah it's all good except for that, and definitely touches on some pretty cutting edge concerns as you mention.
I didn't remember the Ben stuff either. I hadn't seen it since I guess age of 10? Put it on for the kids to watch with them a couple months ago and I spent most of it praying that Ben wasn't the thing they'd remember. If you have a reason to watch it again then I'd do so, it's amazing how uncomfortable it'll make you feel with modern eyes!
I think the filmmakers recognized how crap that was anyway, he's barely in it and does nothing for the story.
He's the main character in the sequel though. So while he was Steve Guttenberg's comic sidekick in the first movie, I don't think we can deduce that the filmmakers thought Fisher Stevens's character was "crap".
We're just going to have to accept that we were a bit tone-deaf back then. No one blinked twice at Fisher Stevens dipped in bronzer and doing his best Ghandi impression.
The sad thing is that I do like both movies. I was at the right age for that whole quirky robot comes alive schtick to really hit. I try to rationalize it by saying that Ben isn't really a negative portrayal. The dude is smart, witty, kind, and all around a good dude.
The Social Network would be on the list for me. I remember grinning from ear to ear in the theater seeing Perl and wget on the big screen during the Harvard scenes. Great movie.
I would count the Social Network as well. Still lots of suggestions I wouldn't agree with below my comment. The problem is many are conflating great movies that involve software/computer concepts rather than movies based on software/computer concepts.
Wargames is a great hacking movie. The ending is a little meh, but the old-school tech is fantastic. It inspired the video game DEFCON.
Sneakers is another great movie. It seems a lot more faithful to how hacking works in real life: as you said it's mostly about social engineering, not how fast you can type. And the device in the movie is at least somewhat plausible. A mathematician could in theory discover a critical vulnerability in cryptography and build it into a standalone electronic device.
Hackers is awful. I don't get the appeal at all. I'll never understand why this movie is so popular. I'd put it right up there with Swordfish in terms of nonsensical computer voodoo.
> Wargames is a great hacking movie. The ending is a little meh, but the old-school tech is fantastic.
There were a few great things about that movie: the technology was grounded in reality, rather than fantasy (except for the WOPR); the hacking was plausible, rather than magical; not only was there commentary on the geopolitical situation of the time, but it was plausible.
The end was incredibly disappointing, but I do not know how I would improve upon it since it is pretty much the consequence of the fantastical WOPR. It would have been a much darker movie if the WOPR was replaced with a more realistic computer.
Yeah, you pretty much have to accept that you have this somewhat fantastical scenario simulation computer running your production nuclear missile controls. But if you can get past that, it has a real feeling to it and was a lot of fun besides.
Hackers had a lot of influence from the scene and the vibe from 2600 meetups and even one of the characters is named Emmanuel Goldstein. The soundtrack was so good they released a second soundtrack with songs which were not even in the movie.
Sneakers works great for the era, if you just imagine the "magic box" as a fast DES cracker. It even makes the comment at the end about how "it only works on US crypto, not Russian" make sense !
The Matrix has one huge plot hole: There is nothing sacred or special about the way humans extract energy from food. You can do the ATP cycle in a vat and get the same results but you never break even or get a net energy gain. If a post-singularity AI needed to assure a continuous energy supply, that has to be among the worst possible ways to do it.
The explanation given in the 1st movie is quite the interpretation of the humans and far from the truth. In the 3rd movie the Architect explains why the humans are bred and why Zion exists.
I'm not sure I'd call it a plot hole but it's a pretty weak explanation. Something like using humans for processing capacity or something like that would have made more sense at least in a handwavy SF context.
> Something like using humans for processing capacity or something like that would have made more sense at least in a handwavy SF context.
ISTR reading that that’s the original explanation, and it is what the depiction of the programs-as-people (and agents specifically actively replacing people) is grounded in. The exposition—but just the exposition—was changed at studio direction based on test audience feedback.
(Personally, I think the change to in-character exposition is an improvement, not because it is plausible, but because it foreshadows and underlines that the “free” humans understanding of the Matrix is ultimately grounded in deception intended, as later made explicit, a system of control.)
Of course, I don't accept the reality in which the sequels exist :-) I admit I was pretty much in the school that The Matrix was a cool film and didn't really dive into the sequels and what they meant too deeply.
"Halt and Catch Fire" seems more like something every tech-startup worker should watch, but totally agree on the recommendation -- it is literally the most real, most reflective TV series on the industry, focusing on the average/typical experience through the industry and life.
I think as a programmer I'm way more easy going about realism when it comes to computers in movies. I get way more picky about physics, biology, sports, and other topics where I'm just a gee-whiz dilettante.
I would say "Anything that offers insight in to the world way software is" -- since Mr. Robot is entirely fictional so wouldn't qualify for me but I would add that it at least tries to be faithful to what software is. Terminology seems appropriately used it forgoes many cheap Hollywood software tropes.
Trinity used an actual exploit (ssh IIRC). This sets it apart some movies like Jurassic Park with the girl looking at some UI made of 3D shapes and says "unix, I know it).
Or NCIS - of which I copied for an awareness training the part where the two geeks "go though the firewall" both on the same keyboard.
Also, the Jurassic Park scene to which you're referring was a real picture of SGI IRIX's 3D file manager. It was visual fluff, but functional visual fluff.
Jurassic Park: That was the Button Fly Demo UI from SGI IRIX. So at least it wasn't a complete mockup. (But nor is it the same as "knowing unix". If she knew unix, she would've been complaining more.)
I would add "The Arrival", which I enjoyed a lot (rare for a movie based on a story I love). Even though it dropped the crucial physics reference, which was the turning point in "The Story of Your Life".
Still, physicist or not, if you are interested what is time, I couldn't recommend a better writer than Ted Chiang.
Yeah, my #1 problem with Arrival was that it completely sidestepped basically the entire point of the short story - free will doesn't exist and how the characters come to grips with that (or don't) as they start thinking as the aliens do.
The single most crucial part of it was the way her daughter died. In the story, she dies in a (very preventable) climbing accident, to make the point that her mother knew about it and could have just told her not to go (or go a bit later), whereas in the movie she died of cancer, which just completely invalidates the entire point.
In the story this climbing accident is a powerful example.
It is preventable in the case of not knowing the future (yet it this case we have no idea that it will happen). If we are in the state of knowing the future, it is a part of the reality fabric, it IS, just separated by an interval of time.
The presence of time vs free will is present in a few other stories by Ted Chiang. However, I read it somewhat differently. (Even though myself I am agnostic when it comes to free will.)
It is not that free will does not exist. It is that free will is a perspective (i.e. not something true or false), one mutually exclusive with knowledge of the future. It is like the rotation of an object, which one we can see only one of its facets. In "The story..." Louise learning the different perspective is gradual.
To some extent, it matches some other tropes like Lovecraftian that learning about the Great Old Ones brings insanity. Or maybe it's not that it fries one's mind, but rather - give a perspective incompatible with everyday human thinking.
Strangely enough the Charlie Sheen "The Arrival" is also a really good physics movie. I've yet to see a movie do the SETI/Astronomy/physics stuff better :-).
I love him building a radio telescope control in his attic, using local people's roof satellite dishes as the array !
The scene with the mountains and the cloud was really cool. After that, there was some build up but kind of just went nowhere. "Here's some circles, now you can hallucinate the future" was overall a pretty underwhelming drift into fantasy.
While they took some liberties, the gist of the story is very close to actual events. There is also a companion podcast that goes in depth on where they deviated from actual story.
Chernobyl is a fantastic show. They portray the disaster as having more far-reaching consequences than it did, which is a bit annoying, but it's extremely well-made and great to watch.
Man, Contact is excellent. It gives me a bit of a "Seinfeld" effect where in the modern day it feels like it leans heavily on tropes but the movie itself is likely one of the founders of those tropes, if that makes sense
I also like Contact, which I think of as Sagan’s struggle with reconciling religion and science for himself. Also, I nlike what the article mentions, I recall the book being based on the script.
IMHO that was a fatal weakness to both the book and movie
Spoiler Alert
The book went further by accusing Arroway of engineering a fraud instead of the "you want us to have faith" bit from the movie. But that made no sense in the context of the story. The radio signal unequivocally came from Vega and the message contained instructions for technology completely unknown on Earth. It made no sense to dispute that contact was made and something happened.
My favorite physically-based sci-fi is “The Expanse” (TV show on Amazon). The physics and constraints of space travel are not only accurately depicted, but also used to drive the story forward in interesting ways.
Totally agree, it's a great show that gets a lot of the physics right (not totally but that's ok), but also biology. For example, people living in the belt going to Ganymede to conceive because it has a magnetic field that protects them from harmful radiation is one of those small nice touches.
I'd definitely also highly recommend The Expanse. Although I highly doubt the space physics are accurate. Ships can't just turn and change direction like how they're often shown to do.
Actually, the Expanse portrays how ships can turn and change directions basically perfect. Where it takes liberties is that ships can't turn and change directions as much as they do. The engines and propellant in the Expanse is way way WAY efficient -- probably much more efficient than our physics allows. In the real world, you'd either be manoeuvring with 1,000 times less zest, or having to refuel about 1,000 times more frequently, or some combination of both.
But apart from that, its physics are pretty close to 100%.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic.
Not sure if you’re seriously claiming that the “blurb” for any book or movie should never mention anything outside of the first fifteen minutes.
Eg, would you promote Harry Potter as nothing more than a story about “a bullied boy struggling with his adoptive family who make him sleep in a cupboard” because the revelation of magic is a major spoiler?
Primer sets up the big reveal as a mystery. It intentionally obfuscates what's going on while dropping hints.
Knowing too much basically makes this part of the story structure a waste of time, and I don't see why the writers and directors would have sculpted such misdirection unless it was to surprise the viewer.
I loved primer. If you like time travel movies (and if you are on hackernews the chances are high you do), definitely give this one a watch. It is definitely among my favorites. It is an awesome film which goes to show low budgets can go a long way with a great script.
If you enjoy time travel movies, Dark on Netflix is an incredible series. Easier to follow then Primer, but I still needed diagrams once the second season really got going
I don't know I thought it was kind of dumb. People discover an honest to God time travel cave but instead of getting world leaders and scientists involved they're all using it to get back at their exes and stuff.
Fair warning about Dark: I personally found the first season to be... well, not as good as the next two. It is very slow paced and does that modern TV show thing where basically nothing seems to happen in any given episode.
yeah the first season was too slow - it picks up about eps 8 - I tried to watch it 3 times, and quit, but finally, after so many people saying it was worth a watch, got through those first episodes, and enjoyed it. It's worth watching, but in season 3 gets a little laggy for a bit, but finishes very strong.
