This article contains spoilers.
Oscar nominated science fiction film Interstellar goes where no man has gone before: On a journey through a wormhole to a foreign galaxy. The characters search for a planet habitable for human life after Earth dries and is no longer sustainable. The three planet candidates exist in a solar system orbiting a giant black hole.
The film was co-written, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan and stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway.
The film kept true to science and used fiction with clear references to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In an interview on the Science Friday podcast, executive producer and science advisor for Interstellar Kip Thorne shared his ideas as a theoretical physicist. He said what influenced the Interstellar was the idea where science was embedded in the movie. The movie is set in what he likes to call the “warped side of the universe,” where objects and phenomena are made from warped space and time — black holes, wormholes, beings that inhabit higher dimensions, warped time.
“In this movie, there is well established science and there’s also speculative science. Much of the movie deals with physics that is beyond the frontiers of firm knowledge,” said Thorne.
Thorne wrote the book Science of Interstellar, an in depth look at the physics behind the film.
On NPR, Nolan talked about working with Thorne.
“I wanted a character to travel faster than the speed of light and he [Thorne spent] about two weeks beating me down and explaining to me it’s absolutely not possible,” Nolan said. “And I finally had to sort of concede.”
Throughout the movie there were references to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity in which he predicts black holes and wormholes and proposed a new idea on gravity. Einstein proposed that space-time woven is a flexible fabric. Massive objects, such as the Sun, warp space and time, creating gravity.
Space.com suggests imagining the fabric of space-time as a trampoline. If you sit on the trampoline, your weight causes a dimple in the fabric. If a marble is place on the edge, it would spiral around the trampoline to the body in the middle, just like the gravity of a planet pulls a rock from space.
In Interstellar, Hathaway’s character says, “Time is relative, it can stretch and squeeze, but it can’t run backwards. The only thing that can move across dimensions like time is gravity.”
In the movie, wormholes are explained with a piece of paper. An astronaut draws a dot on each end of the paper. He explains that it may take a lifetime to get to A to B, then folds the paper in half, aligning the two dots and jabs a pencil through the two dots, creating a hole.
A wormhole is just a shortcut between A and B. The journey that could have taken years, will now take only seconds. The astronaut unfolds the paper, revealing the hole is three dimensional. The wormhole appears to be a sphere of distorted space-time and can be entered at any angle.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and the TV series “Cosmos” discusses our four dimensional world on Business Insider. Tyson says we can jump up and down and move side to side. We access all points of three dimensional space, however we are a prisoner to time, the fourth dimension. We can only be in the present, forever transitioning from the past to the future.
Hathaway’s character describes time as being of five dimensions; the past might be a canyon they can climb into, and the future a mountain they can climb up.
On Fox 5 New York, Tyson talked about the problems with the first planet on Interstellar, made entirely of water with mountainous waves. Tyson says he read Science of Interstellar and learned the wave is actually a bulge of water surrounding the planet, created by strong tidal forces which in this case, is black hole Gargantua. The solid planet rotates in and out of the wave. It looks like the wave is coming to you, but you are being rotated towards it. Tyson said real tidal bulges are more round and not as climactic as what was portrayed in the film. But he grants movies creative latitude, provided they start with the right idea.
“I’m a fan of Mark Twain, who said, ‘First, get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure,’” Tyson said.
What are the odds of Interstellar happening to us? Tyson says we have a thousand planet candidates in our catalog, none of which are orbiting black holes and many look better than the ones on the movie. Tyson says a planet orbiting a black hole is in what is called the gravitational well of the black hole. The deeper the planet is in the gravitational well, the slower time ticks relative to planets away from the black hole, much like the time slippage that happened on the first planet in Interstellar.
Twenty out of the 715 planets discovered using the Kepler space telescope are in the habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone, according to NPR. Goldilocks planets are the perfect distance away from a star. Just right, where the water is not too hot to boil and evaporate and not too cold where water will freeze.
Maybe we are meant to leave this planet eventually after all.
