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Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#81

Post by nilkn »

snowwrestler wrote: post #75
nilkn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2001 explored some pretty darn exotic phenomena, it just didn't both to try to explain them scientifically.

Admittedly it's been some time since I watched the full movie, but I don't recall anything in it, other than the highly abstract ending, that would be considered exotic by today's standards. Maybe they were exotic at the time, but they were still quite well understood at the time of the film's production, whereas the interactions near the singularity of a black hole, say, are very much not understood even at the present day.

Did you have some specific examples in mind? I still feel as though 2001, excluding its ending, stayed much further away from speculative topics of theoretical physics than did Interstellar (which in fact has explicit references, in its dialogue, to "the bulk" -- a term from brane cosmology; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology).

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#82

Post by xxxyy »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #78

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…

This. I could summarize the movie as follows: Science? Check. A guy that wasn't given fair chance, now saves the world? Check. Little girl experiences "ghosts", nobody believes, turns out true? Check. Two main characters fall in love? Check. And so on.

It is all a matter of pleasing the viewer by giving him exactly what he wants. Science is just sexy right now, and that's actually good.

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#83

Post by kuschku »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #41
TorKlingberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also love the movie, but there one thing with the time dilation I suspect does not add up. If the first planet is so deep into Gargantua's gravity well that it has such time dilation, would the energy required to get a spaceship out of the gravity well not be ridiculously huge? Given that they had limited energy, did it make sense to visit that planet first?

Yeah this is indeed true, but sadly most movie plots treat distances badly for practicality reasons. The fact that they were able to leave the gravitational field of the planet they visited just using their "space shuttle" was also highly unrealistic, since that planet had about the same mass as Earth, whose gravity well they had to leave using a conventional rocket earlier in the movie. So this part definitely does…

Wasn't the shuttle part of the older tech that was built on air decades ago, but the rocket on earth built out of the last pieces of scrap parts?

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#84

Post by ceejayoz »

snowballsteve wrote: post #62
ThePhysicist wrote: post #17

Accuracy aside, from a scientific point of view Interstellar was one of the most interesting movies in a long time, and it really made me think about Physics a lot again. It's really cool to see how much you can actually learn about the universe of Interstellar by making use of some Physics knowledge and the information given to you in the movie. An example: The first planet they visit orbits Gargantua (the supermass…

The wormhole was perfect, except the travel bit bugged me. They use the 2d analog with paper. The second you pass through the hole in one location you emerge from the hole in the other location. In the third dimension, as they touch the sphere near Saturn they would be leaving the surface of the sphere on the other side. From their point of view they should be about to hit the 'ball' then all of a suddenly then are t…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole would seem to indicate that there's a non-zero travel time through one.

> However, in 1962 John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe, and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region.

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#85

Post by ceejayoz »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #77
chton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That was what bothered me, there would be a zone of high energy particles that you could not pass without severe damage to your ship and your tissues.

They did show his ship being shredded by a bunch of glowing particles...

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#86

Post by stillsut »

What was the deal with "the blight"?

At one point, they mentioned it had to do with the ability to fix nitrogen?

Also, wouldn't any pestilence as widespread as that be transported on the cargo ships with the people and their plants to the new planet?

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#87

Post by magicalist »

rufb wrote: post #59
ThePhysicist wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting point! The fact that our current theories suggest that no information can ever leave a black hole entails a paradox which is known as the "Black hole information paradox" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox ). In the movie they resolve this by resorting to gravitational waves, which can "permeate" through space and time by a mechanism not explained in the film. In real…

They glossed over the tidal force in the movie and I assumed it was a deus ex of sorts (in fact, I assumed the whole final act of the movie was more concerned with resolution of the story than with proper Physics). Thank you for this explanation, this is fascinating stuff.

It's still a gloss over, but one of the characters does mention it early on, which I took as indication that it was going to end up being important.

I remember having a similar thought process to all of the above, but they even explicitly call it out as "gentle" with maybe a single really simple sentence on why it was. I don't remember if they made the direct connection to it being supermassive (like they did with its rotation), but it was in the same bit of dialog.

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#88

Post by mindcrime »

Tycho wrote: post #30

Does he explain the glaring paradox of the time travel storyline? Someone said it is permissible as a 'closed timelike curve' but smells like BS to me.

The thing is, you don't really have to explain that, exactly because we don't know what the "rules" of time-travel are, IF it were even possible. We talk about "grandfather paradoxes" and "ontological paradox" in sci-fi, and speculate about what would happen in "real life" if some of these things happened, but the paradox might be completely irrelevant for all we know.

Anyway, for my money, this issue falls well into the "willful suspension of disbelief" category - and didn't affect my appreciation of the movie at all.

I mean, yeah, it was billed as a "scientifically accurate' movie, but it's still science fiction at the end of the day, with the emphasis on "fiction".

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#89

Post by arikrak »

It sounds like he's just discussing certain aspects of the film, while ignoring much more glaring issues. It's not ice clouds that are the issue, it's the entire story.

[Spoiler alert] Here's the whole plot of the movie, does any aspect of it make sense?

Earth is dusty so the simplest solution is to transport all of humanity through a wormhole to another planet. The main characters go through a wormhole and walk around on a planet where 1 hour = 7 years of Earth. Later, to help the mission succeed, the main character detaches from their main spaceship into a blackhole and he ends up in a multi-dimensional space where he sends Morse code messages to his daughter in the past by moving her books and watch. How does he do that? Because love. And gravity. She understands the message which contains gravity data from the blackhole that lets them get everyone off earth. The main character then pops out of the blackhole thing near Saturn and is re-united with his daughter just before she dies.

Re: Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar

#90

Post by timdiggerm »

arikrak wrote: post #89

It sounds like he's just discussing certain aspects of the film, while ignoring much more glaring issues. It's not ice clouds that are the issue, it's the entire story. [Spoiler alert] Here's the whole plot of the movie, does any aspect of it make sense? Earth is dusty so the simplest solution is to transport all of humanity through a wormhole to another planet. The main characters go through a wormhole and walk arou…

>he ends up in a multi-dimensional space where he sends Morse code messages to his daughter in the past by moving her books and watch. How does he do that?

Because the multi-dimensional space was set up by higher-dimensional creatures, who also created the wormhole, specifically so he could accomplish all this (right down to preventing him from going on the earlier missions by causing his craft to crash with a gravitational anomaly at the beginning of the film).

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