71–80 of 109 posts
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>I don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics I do. At least I think I do. Kip Thorne has published a book named "The Science of Interstellar". I am sure that book is quite scientific and reasonable. However, the most hyped up attribute of art-science relationship in Interstellar is its "real" physics. If Kip Thorne declares that movie does violate known ph…
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>I don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics I do. At least I think I do. Kip Thorne has published a book named "The Science of Interstellar". I am sure that book is quite scientific and reasonable. However, the most hyped up attribute of art-science relationship in Interstellar is its "real" physics. If Kip Thorne declares that movie does violate known ph…
"In the end, magic tesseract creatures and love of the protagonists saves the day, not scientific method." It's worse than this! Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I got a strong anti-scientific, anti-rational vibe from the movie. Consider this: the movie's two top scientists are scheming liars. The professor who ran the whole show lied to everybody because he's smarter than all the dummies on his team. And the guy fro…
Did you notice how lots of people after the movie were like "Wow, I've got an epiphany, I've understood something." Did that something was about physics? No. It was about philosophy.
And damn, Interstellar philosophy is awful. Postmodernism at its worst.
Happy to share why.
Postmodernism is deeply suspicious of academia and academics. Who were the negative characters? Dr. Mann("the best of us") and Prof. Brand. "Do not go gentle in the dying light" A poem written for the poet's father losing his vision. Who was his father? Literature professor.
Postmodernism rejects reason as a epistemological foundation and states that rationalism is just another narrative. Who was right about the planet? Amelia Brand was. What did she say? "Maybe we've spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love is the one thing that transcends time and space".
Postmodernism is dismissive of science. Did Romilly's data that he collected during the years of scientific pursuit help anyone from the crew or humanity at large? No. Scientific method of trial and error was useless, but "magical tesseract pixies" powered by love saved the humanity and the protagonist.
Millions and millions of movie viewers "understood" that science and reason is not as important as love and magic. My hypothesis is when people were watching this movie they had a bit of postmodern values imprinted in their minds. That was their epiphany.
Christopher Nolan made an dystopian world he pictured a little closer. That is if you agree that modernism or super-modernism philosophy is more conductive to development of humanity than a postmodernism one...
But you know what really gets to me?
Nolan knew all of that. His Memento movie is an example of postmodernist film in the Wikipedia! He was perfectly aware what he was doing.
This citation must be included in the discussion.
-- On a deeper level, Jessica Chastain may have said it best when telling Entertainment Weekly that “Interstellar” is a love letter from Nolan to his daughter, Flora. The film’s production title was “Flora’s Letter.” Underneath it all, that's what "Interstellar" really is — a father-daughter story reflected in the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murph (MacKenzie Foy), the two lead characters at the center of the film. --
A love letter. Now the movie makes perfect sense as an educational content for a child. Question the authority. Promote love. Instill hope and faith.
But at what price for humanity at large? For me, a price that was too high. That's why I consider Interstellar to be harmful, irrational postmodernist trojan horse that supposedly promotes science but actually does the opposite.
Thank you, Christopher Nolan for making humanity a little bit less rational, thank you so much.
The only thing I've been able to think of was that they used some kind of exotic propulsion, like antimatter, therefore there was no sense wasting such a precious commodity to leave Earth if you had a rocket available.
But nothing in the movie seemed to explain it.
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>I don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics I do. At least I think I do. Kip Thorne has published a book named "The Science of Interstellar". I am sure that book is quite scientific and reasonable. However, the most hyped up attribute of art-science relationship in Interstellar is its "real" physics. If Kip Thorne declares that movie does violate known ph…
"In the end, magic tesseract creatures and love of the protagonists saves the day, not scientific method." It's worse than this! Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I got a strong anti-scientific, anti-rational vibe from the movie. Consider this: the movie's two top scientists are scheming liars. The professor who ran the whole show lied to everybody because he's smarter than all the dummies on his team. And the guy fro…
The main professor lied to everyone in order to create the will to work on "Plan B", the frozen embryos. He thought folks would never work on that if they all thought they were doomed.
The evil scientist turned bad because of the extreme isolation and thought that he would never see anyone again. It's a variation of the "space madness" trope from 100 science fiction plots--tired, but not anti-science, in my opinion.
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I believe it is possible to set the rules at the real physics level, take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example. But not if you are forced by Hollywood producers to put all the little pieces that follow inner feelings of the masses. This is what I believe happened to Matrix movies, progressively keeping worse and worse grip on their own rules.
To be fair, though, 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't explore nearly as many exotic phenomena as Interstellar did. It was a lot easier for that movie to remain mostly accurate.
One thing I cannot understand is... Sure, this movie was very "accurate", all these explanations can make sense, the calculations fit but.. why is nobody talking about the major obviously impossible/inconsistent problems in the plot? INTERSTELLAR SPOILER BELOW For example, how did he survive inside a black hole, how did he pass through the Schwarzschild radius with his simple spaceship, why was there no time dilation…
SPOILER ALERT The science was basically non-existing: controlling a distant device with gravitational waves? Which can only be controlled whenever it is in a specific room? Which stores the information transmitted and repeats it endlessly (otherwise, how is the daughter able to gather all information transmitted)? How long does he spend inside the black hole transmitting what must be like lots of information in morse…
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Wait what? What about sending "quantum data" back from the black hole? The point is that no information can leave. Also, from what I learned in high school physics, the body of a human would completely fall apart if it's falling to the black hole, because of the difference in gravity between proximal and distal parts. These are just the 2 things I noticed and I'm far from a physicist. Basically, it got a couple of th…
I don't know why you're being downvoted, so I'm going to give you a proper reply instead. Actually, the 2 things you noticed are not that hard to resolve: - The quantum data was most likely never going to get out of the black hole. They executed the plan on the off chance that TARS was able to figure out how to do it if he had the quantum data. It's not impossible that there is a way to do it, we just don't know it y…
The science used in sci-fi movies is not about the science - it's about the myth of science; the things we wish science could do or lead us to do. But more than that, it's about telling a story. We are not relating facts here, we're off into Joseph Campbell territory.
Even the most scientifically accurate movie is going to do some jazz hands once in a while just to keep things interesting/heroic/funny/whatever because: failure is not an option - the movie has to make money.
It's not a science movie. It's fiction. Science is a passenger, not the vehicle. You want science - go watch a Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan (and don't get too wound up about how they gloss things over - the kind of science they're doing is too complicated for an hour long show). The science used in sci-fi movies is not about the science - it's about the myth of science; the things we wish science could do or lea…
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The thing about their energy budget was not well done. Why did they need rockets back on earth when they can mount the gravity well of a black hole and multiple planets afterwards? About your point with the order of visits though: I could see them using Gargantua for a slinghot maneuver after the first planet, which should work given the right constellation. It wasn't shown this way though.
Even with a ship capable of overcoming the gravity wells present in the movie, it would likely still make sense to launch from Earth with boosters/staging to increase the amount of fuel/energy available to the ship for the rest of the journey.