
On the Science of Interstellar - ibrahimcesar
http://ikjyotsinghkohli24.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/on-the-science-of-interstellar/
======
noobermin
I had no idea Kip Thorne was a producer for this. For non-physicists, Thorne
is one of the authors of _the_ general relativity book for graduates,
_Gravitation_ [1]. It's this huge telephone book sized tome that was published
in 1973, and while it has fallen behind the times with respect to experimental
data included in it, it is still unparallelled in scope and depth today in
covering Einstein's theory.

I certainly enjoyed the movie, and I really loved the visualizations of a
wormhole and of the large spinning black hole, things you usually have to
imagine as a physicist without ever seeing with your eyes.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Physics-Series-Charles-
Mis...](http://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Physics-Series-Charles-
Misner/dp/0716703440)

------
metaphorm
pretty cool to see some of the math of this spelled out. I appreciate the
effort the author has put into this.

unfortunately, my issues with Interstellar have very little to do with whether
or not the black hole was portrayed realistically.

edit: why was I downvoted? for saying I didn't like the movie? come on guys.

~~~
Frafrared
Care to share your criticism of the movie? I really enjoyed it compared to the
usual superhero sequel

~~~
SkyMarshal
Overall I'd say it was worth seeing, especially on big screen, the effects
were great and the exploration of relativistic time dilation was generally
really cool in a mass market movie, but there were a number of absurdities.

SPOILERS:

1\. Thousand foot high waves don't move across 2ft deep water without
breaking. Also, lame camera tricks prevent the astronauts from simply scanning
360d and realizing there's a huge wave bearing down on them. Also, there was
no reason whatsoever for Doyle to die on the water planet.

2\. Too emo. Too much bawling and crying, too much emotional decision making,
the actors weren't convincing as trained scientists or disciplined test
pilots. The audience actually burst out _laughing_ when Mann and Cooper got
into the fight on the ice planet, and when Cooper just let Mann bash his
helmet in a couple times instead of pulling away like normal person would. See
_2001: A Space Odyssey_ and _The Right Stuff_ for how such people should be
portrayed. Artistic integrity sacrificed for artful, faux emotional appeal,
SOP for Hollywood these days.

3\. When Mann crashed the shuttle into the mothership, then Cooper and Brand
saved the mothership, one second it was over a planet, and not the first
planet they visited that was really close to the black hole but the next one
out. The next instant they were in danger of falling into the black hole.
Months or years worth of distance traversed in seconds.

4\. Cooper saved Brand by dropping both TARS and himself into the black hole,
giving Brand on the mothership enough velocity/lack of mass/whatever to escape
the black hole. The time dilation effects of him dropping into the black hole
should have meant he and Brand diverged greatly in age, yet the end of the
movie showed him taking off to go find her, same age.

5\. The premise of the movie is that future, advanced, five-dimensional
humanity was using its power over gravity, time, and higher dimensions to help
humanity of the past survive the dying and 'Marsification' of the earth. But
the paradox was never resolved - if humanity of the past couldn't survive on
its own, how did it ever become humanity of the future? I suppose they did
that on purpose to let the audience have fun debating it afterwards.

There were a few others I can't remember atm, but you get the gist. Some of
these, like #3, I suppose have to be done to cram the whole story into a
2hr45m movie (another cool thing about it - nice and long), but others were
just annoyingly pointless.

But again, overall it was good, worth watching, and having Kip Thorne co-
produce helped a lot. Just don't expect perfection, even with his name in the
credits.

~~~
NolF
1\. It was a largely uniformly flat planet. It was only 2ft deep due to the
tidal wave borrowing water ahead of it. See videos of Tsunamis doing the same
thing

4\. I thought this one was explained by the baseball scene at the end as the
ball falls upwards when it crosses some sort of mid point.

5\. You are thinking of time linearly moving forward, cause and effect. I
think the library scene and their explanations of the 5th dimension aimed to
explain that time is another dimension that can be altered. "Whatever can
happen will happen".

~~~
calvin_c
The ball scene at the end happened because the ball hit the 'escape velocity'
of the spherical habitat, which allowed it to break the gravitation pull of
centrifugal force and get caught by the other side. I don't see how this
references the fact that being sent near and even into the black hole didn't
cause some massive time differences between the two scientists as it did
earlier in the film.

~~~
justifier
my understanding was the station at the end had true localised gravitation,
thanks to the 'quantum data' TARS collected, rather than psuedo gravity
induced by centrifugal force

with the baseball the ball left the gravitation of the field's surface and
entered the gravity on the other side of the column station's interior surface
that held the house

~~~
calvin_c
Interesting, it certainly gives an explanation to the not very clear "Why do
we need this equation to get people off the planet" question, but then why
build the ship as a cylinder (which by design takes advantage of centrifugal
force) if they're going to use localized gravity to keep things on the ground?
I assumed they had taken advantage of gravity manipulation to save on immense
fuel costs of getting the giant payload out of Earth's gravity well, and used
centrifugal force while en route.

~~~
justifier
though unable to answer explicitly a hypothetical of a hypothetical of a
fiction.. it is a fun, and arguably healthy'productive exercise to dream on
it..

from the perspective of the film makers it seemed like a shout out to the
colony art nasa published a while back(i), similar to the shout out to event
horizon: 'your explanation opened my mind, bending space time like a piece of
paper and passing through it like a pencil.. i'll take it to the next level,
what is a hole in three dimensions? open the paper and look at the hole as a
circle forming a sphere' fun stuff

if we want to examine the practicality of a cylindrical colony i think we
could come up with something.. maybe as a safety measure from space debris?
maybe as an engineering consideration: it was easier to build an
accommodatingly sized colony like this? easier to maintain a controlled
climate? maybe as a lighting'photosynthesis consideration? perhaps it's a 'so
preoccupied with whether they could' punchline? perhaps the other side of the
column is also utilised space: imagine almost doubling the surface area of the
planet by colonising both the surface and the interior of the planet with an
inverted zenith; and the film only showed us inside the column, again, as a
wink at the audience

(i)
[http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArt/art.html](http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArt/art.html)

------
geuis
Visual and practical effects were nicely done. Really liked the depiction of
the Saturn colony at the end. It's a proposed style from the 60's that has
never gotten a proper cinematic representation.

The bad parts of the movie were mainly editing, non rational emotionalism
(main characters making obviously bad choices for shallow emotional reasons),
and a giant paradox.

With editing, the drone scene was interesting but did nothing to advance the
story. School scene was ok but too long.

The entire "power of love" scene was just dumb. People in that situation would
not act like that.

The biggest problem was the paradox. Earth is becoming uninhabitable. Future
humans must influence the past to save humanity. But there are no future
humans in the first place since the Earth is dying. This is the biggest plot
hole in the movie and it's the size of a black hole. Even slightly changing
the story so that humans do survive, then are reaching back to make the
survival process easier would be fine. Kind of a Redemption of Christopher
Columbus type of story.

~~~
baddox
I loved how these brilliant astronauts can't see how loving deceased people
could possibly have social utility or could otherwise be explained without
resorting to "love is supernatural magic." That is a particularly strong
example of how bad the screenwriting is in this film.

------
chulk90
If you're on the fence of reading it, I'd say read it. He really put it nicely
in laymen terms.

------
zeynalov
Ok, this is very well written article explaning some problematic parts that
people don't understand. But there is one more paradoxal point I didn't get it
why and how the writers could not figure it out that, if a nation can't
survive in itself and needs help from aliens (later cooper finds out that
these aliens are actually us, who are already in 5 dimensional universe) to
solve the equation for their existence and if people would die without help of
outside, how could their descendens survive and then live in 5 dimensional
world to save their ancestors?! This is pure paradox and not possible. And
it's very well known that one can be in the future but can't go or change
things in the past, even in 5 dimensional universe.

~~~
jfoutz
Murph figured the physics out by herself. Her father knew plan A was a pipe
dream, and he did abandon her.

She couldn't bear hating her father. The movie is her elaborate fantasy about
her father telling her the answer. So elaborate, she hallucinated him on her
deathbed. Her father never came back through the wormhole.

~~~
zeynalov
Eureka! Thank you!

------
cthalupa
Fascinating read. I'm generally not too concerned with science being 100%
accurate in my sci-fi movies, but to find that it is all grounded in real
science - even the far out, funky, stuff of the last act - is pretty cool.

I personally loved the movie, and the cinematography brought me back to the
same feeling I had as a kid watching 2001 for the first time. I grew up
completely enamored in space and all of the things in it, and some of the
shots produced a very visceral reaction. Almost enough to make me regret that
I didn't follow the oh so ubiquitous dream of trying to become an astronaut.

------
TheCoreh
How does one explain the frozen clouds? Are those actually possible? How do
they remain afloat if they're more dense than the atmosphere?

~~~
austinz
Apparently the clouds are not all that plausible, but they were left in
because they were so visually impressive.

[http://news.sciencemag.org/people-
events/2014/11/physicist-w...](http://news.sciencemag.org/people-
events/2014/11/physicist-who-inspired-interstellar-spills-backstory-and-scene-
makes-him)

------
justifier
i'd love a binary where i can have complete control of the camera in these
visualizations

