Interstellar 5 Dimension Scene
Willy Aucoin
If you've seen the film Interstellar, you may now find yourself with many new questions about the laws of the universe. Kip Thorne served as executive producer and lead science consultant for the film; Oberlin Assistant Professor of Physics Rob Owen was a student in Dr. Thorne's research group when the movie project was in the first stages of development seven years ago, and the science in the film aligns closely with his current area of research.
It absolutely did. The central vision, as Kip described it from the very beginning, was to produce a movie where issues in general relativity (the science of spacetime, black holes, and wormholes) were central to a compelling story, and were communicated accurately. I think they met that goal spectacularly well. Somebody actually sat down and calculated how massive the black hole would need to be, and how rapidly it would have to spin, for the time dilation effects in the movie to come out right. The special effects team actually rewrote the software underlying the computer graphics to trace the paths of light rays in curved spacetime, to give accurate visual images of what the black hole and the wormhole would actually look like to the eye.
Also, as someone who lectures to introductory physics students about rocketry, escape velocity, and related phenomena, I get a little queasy seeing a little star-trek-style shuttlecraft simply taking off from a planet like an airplane and reaching into the interplanetary space above. With current technology, it would take a very substantial rocket to blast off of a planet like the ones in the movie. But I must admit, I haven't thought it all through deeply enough to be sure whether the depiction in the movie is completely impossible.
The idea of space looping around on itself hopefully isn't too surprising if we think about it a bit. For example, if I walked due East, and never stopped (and helpful people provided me with boats whenever I needed them), then I would eventually come back to where I started, moving in from the west. I would have simply walked around the Earth (not an easy task, by any means, but certainly consistent with the laws of physics).
This possibility leads to a slew of time-travel paradoxes, and to interesting questions about how the fundamental laws of physics might intervene to enforce a self-consistent history of events. How that might happen is not fully understood at this point.
The idea seems purposely designed to throw our usual sense of causality off kilter. And when paradoxes like this one appear in other time-travel stories the reason is usually either lazy writing or some kind of empty mysticism. In this case, however, I would bet that the apparent paradox was quite intentional, because one of the physicists who has been preeminent in the exploration of these issues of causality is Kip Thorne.
There is a long history (going back at least to the 1920s) of trying to explain deep questions in physics by positing that the universe might "fundamentally" have more (or perhaps fewer!) dimensions than we see in everyday experience. Our ordinary experience might make the world appear four-dimensional because the extra dimensions are curled up so tightly that we can't see them. For example if you see a piece of string from across the room it might look like a one-dimensional object (length but no width or depth). Getting up closer, though, you can see an intricate three-dimensional structure. This is the way the extra dimensions were presumed to work, for example, in the early days of string theory.
When McConaughey falls into the black hole, we enter a scene that is obviously pure fantasy. Any thoughts on what one might actually experience in that situation? (That is, assuming one is not immediately compressed into a singularity.)
The standard answer from general relativity is that not much changes until you start to approach the singularity. Relativity theorists have shown that no experiment can be designed that would establish whether the experimenter is inside or outside of an event horizon. We could be inside a black hole right now and not even know it!
Now, as for the time dilation effects: wormholes aren't just shortcuts through space. They're shortcuts through spacetime. If the two ends of a wormhole move relative to one another, they get out of sync, causing even more exotic time dilation effects. Kip Thorne pioneered the study of these effects with a series of papers in the late eighties and early nineties.
My family attended your talk a few weeks ago and mentioned that you have quite a talent for programming simulations. Do you have one or two you'd be willing to share with our readers?
Some more impressive videos, some a bit technical, some a bit less so, can be found on a youtube channel created by my research collaboration. If anyone would like more information on the research that I and my collaborators do, we have a public website.
As a theoretical physicist, what is your take on the film's question of love as a force? Does love have a role to play in the laws of the universe, as the film implies? Or is that just Hollywood being Hollywood?
And once you have seen the film, come back here and read my in-depth, unnecessarily long thoughts on it below. This is not a film I have any interest in tackling without getting into plot specifics, so please be aware this analysis contains spoilers for the entire picture. Only read further if you have seen the film.
Moreover, what Interstellar does well it does so well that those problem points hardly seem to matter. It is entertaining, thrilling, and transporting, but also intimate, rich, and beautiful, and the way those disparate elements almost always work in tandem with one another is what makes the film great. It will take time and multiple viewings for a full analysis of this film to emerge, and I think response will remain mixed towards it for a time; whether one finds the movie good, bad, or mediocre at first blush, it is not a film built to process in one sitting.
For me, Interstellar is the kind of film I walk out of deeply shaken, while simultaneously high on the power of cinema, drunk on what I just saw, elated, enlightened, inspired and made better by the three hours I spent sitting in a dark room, watching light flicker past on a screen. I love that movies can do that, and I love that even as he has long-since been absorbed by the studio system, Christopher Nolan still dreams big enough to create works of this potential power. No matter where one falls on the film, that kind of ambition is undeniably admirable. We need movies like Interstellar, just as we need filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, using their cache to push cinema to its limits. With Interstellar, I believe he has succeeded wildly. If this is what he can do only sixteen years into his film career, I look forward to pushing those boundaries right alongside him for decades to come.
Christopher Nolan\u2019s Interstellar has finally arrived in theaters around the country this week, expanding from its initial run in 35mm and 70mm IMAX formats to a broader digital rollout. My quick recommendation: I feel this is a brilliant and beautiful film, a major evolution for Nolan\u2019s craft and storytelling that, while imperfect, is positively awe-inspiring and life-affirming nearly every step of the way. I cannot recommend it enough, and I urge viewers to seek it out on film, whether that\u2019s IMAX or good old 35mm. I really do imagine the experience will be diminished in digital projection, so if you have the opportunity to see Interstellar on film, take it.
There is a scene, about halfway through Christopher Nolan\u2019s Interstellar, that tested the thematic, narrative, and logical strength of the entire film for me. After astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his team lose 23 years\u2019 worth of Earth time exploring a doomed planet, Cooper and crew member Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) debate which planetary prospect they should journey towards next. She argues for visiting the planet explored by her former lover, and when Cooper accuses her of having compromised judgment, Brand posits a theory that love might not be impairing her thinking, but heightening it \u2013 that the strength of the love she feels, across time and space, may not just be the answer to this particular navigational problem, but the key to all the major metaphysical questions these characters are saddled with as they strive to find a new home for the human race. In essence, Brand \u2013 and, by extension, Christopher Nolan \u2013 is arguing that the single most unknowable, enigmatic, painful, and euphoric element of the human condition \u2013 the bonds of human relationships \u2013 might unlock the scientific keys to our species\u2019 salvation.
If Interstellar had not been good enough up to that point to earn some patience \u2013 had not provided so many wonderful character moments, and so many great performances, and such immense technical prowess \u2013 I might well have rolled my eyes at Brand\u2019s speech, because it is a big, potentially cheesy, possibly catastrophically silly sort of thing to ask the viewer to buy into, especially in a film that is so overwhelmingly concerned with getting the science of its storytelling right (or, as right as such things can be in service of a cinematic narrative).
The single best thing I can say about Interstellar, then \u2013 a film that is flawed and imperfect, but also beautiful, inspiring, and masterfully made \u2013 is that by the end, I believed wholeheartedly in the nonsense Nolan was selling me. I went from nearly rolling my eyes at Brand\u2019s \u2018love\u2019 theory to spilling copious, embarrassing amounts of tears from them at the suggestions being made about the limitless capacity of mankind\u2019s ability to feel. The film is, in essence, about the power of love. When I type those words, it sounds silly \u2013 but while watching Interstellar, such a notion seems vital. Because while Interstellar is a film about so many things \u2013 wonder, thrills, family, fatherhood, daughterhood, exploration, scientific possibility, human ambition, etc. \u2013 it is ultimately about how love, that one thing that makes us great and which we can be unambiguously proud of, even as it confuses and tortures us on a daily basis, may be our only salvation. It is a film grounded in hope, and the key source of hope the film identifies is the unbreakable bonds we feel for one another across time and space. If we can feel love, and be hurt by it, and be elated by it, and fight harder than we ever thought we could because of it, then maybe we can, when the chips are down as far as they will go, be able to hold on to that emotional strength, and reach further than we ever have before.
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