6 ms·

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in the Movie Interstellar (2015)

103 points by techrich 8y ago

techrich 8y ago
The correct title that didnt fit! Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar
jacobsenscott 8y ago
That movie has certain black-hole like properties I guess. For example when you are stuck in the theater watching it it feels like you've been there for 30 hours. But you come out and it has only been 3 hours.
moh_maya 8y ago
An interview with Kip Thorne [1] (who recently won the Nobel Prize for physics [2]) on the science in the movie and a book about the science in the movie that he has written [3] And a slightly breathless account of how working on developing the visuals for the film drove development of new code and led to new insights [4] Needless to say, I'm a fan of the film.. :D [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-the-science-of-interstellar-with-physicist-kip-thorne/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-th... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2017/press.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/20... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar [4] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...
- southern_cross 8y ago
  Someone admitted later than there was actually little or nothing "new" here - maybe a somewhat slicker and more cinematic visualization of expected effects around a black hole, but correct visualizations had already been done before. So the "papers" that came out of this were probably largely just a waste of ink. I was quite disappointed in the movie myself. It claimed to be quite "sciency" but it was mostly just science fiction, IMO. I kind of liked the robots, though.
  - hyder_m29 8y ago
    How could it not be science fiction if it's set in the future?
    - setr 8y ago
      Not all of the science needs to be fictional... presumably gravity will comtinue operating as it does today, tomorrow. Black holes will operate the same as well, unless the story gives it reason not to (black hole combobulators). The "fiction" is only necessary for the stuff that doesn't exist today.
    - garmaine 8y ago
      "Science fiction" admits a wide variety of classifications. Interstellar is clearly science fiction so I don't like the grand parent's wording (I also don't like yours: what does 'science' have to do with being in the future?). But trying to generously interpret the GP's and your comment, Interstellar was heavily promoted, and portrays itself as an accurate representation of a potential future, with correct physics and details rigorously fact checked, etc., a sub-category called "hard science ficiton." In reality there are numerous flaws in its physics, too many to count really. These aren't nits either--the most ridiculous physics-defying nonsense is in fact fundamental to the plot. That's only the beginning of the problems. Interstellar was a terrible movie all-around, with plot holes you could fly a starship through. But it is why I think someone might say "It's not [the type of] science fiction [it claims to be]".
      - tialaramex 8y ago
        Science Fiction (sometimes "Speculative Fiction") asks "What if?" questions. One common formula for the question is, "What if ... in the future X?" but the "alternate history" sub-genre asks questions like "What if Germany had won in WW2?" and some asks about alternatives to the present. When we tell stories that don't ask a "What if?" but are just set in space without asking too many awkward questions about how space works, like Star Wars, that's just called Space Opera. In Hard SF it's inevitable that some of the specifics will be wrong. For example Greg Egan's "Schild's Ladder" relies on a completely fictional set of fundamental physics theorems concerning a "graph theory" for quantum state. In the story one element of this theorem is wrong, but of course in reality the whole theory is made up. What matters, as in most of fiction, is verisimilitude, not truth, but _plausibility_. The fictional "quantum graph theory" feels like something that theoretical fundamental physics might come up with, the proposed experiment to verify it has the sort of "If we're wrong we might all die, but we aren't wrong" vibe of many real experiments like the first test explosions of a nuclear bomb or the LHC. Sometimes a piece of fiction might seem like bad SF but it actually wasn't intended as SF at all. Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" is like that. It's astonishing to me that this was put forward for SF awards. If you assume that whatever has been done/ will be done with these children makes sense, and are on board with the story on that basis, finding out what's really going on is a huge disappointment. But if you go into this knowing Ishiguro has no interest whatever in medical ethics, genetics, cloning etcetera, then you can embrace it as a metaphor about mortality (We are unable to truly accept our own inevitable death, it's explained to us but it never really sinks in, even when we see others die we always believe we're special) and it works fine. Yes, Interstellar is a mess. It's a spectacle, I'll give it that, but well, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". It has at least 50% more Hans Zimmer than it needed, the plot has vast holes left in it for no apparent reason, and the larger story seems a bit aimless and underwhelming considering the setting.
dreamcompiler 8y ago
Part of the reason I love this movie is that Kip Thorne was a technical advisor. And as this paper shows, some new science resulted from the movie-making process.
- ajkjk 8y ago
  The abstract specifically says that no new physics resulted from the movie-making process: "There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting."
- trgv 8y ago
  That seems like a strange reason to love a movie. I liked the visuals, but I think the script was a disaster, and the movie itself was only middling.
  - dreamcompiler 8y ago
    I thought the script to Interstellar was lovely and profound, while that of Gravity (a movie with which it's often compared) was ridiculous and obviously written by someone who had no idea how physics worked. To each their own.
- nieve 8y ago
  Thorne's teaching abilities really get ignored. He used to TA a session of first year physics at Caltech every year and he was amazing when I had him. To teach accelerating frames of he clambered onto a table, saying "Define a frame of reference centered on the tip of my nose", then tossed it gently forward as he stepped off. It was a perfectly intuitive demonstration and he got us to laugh in the process.
  - jsweojtj 8y ago
    he gently tossed the tip of his nose?
evo_9 8y ago
Here is a video that covers this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR4U3h5wSxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR4U3h5wSxg
- rapnie 8y ago
  for some explanation in layman's terms see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pAnRKD4raY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pAnRKD4raY
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
khazhou 8y ago
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdJRjihJpCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdJRjihJpCs (longer version of the one posted by evo_9)
duxup 8y ago
Related question. Could a habitable planet exist in orbit around black hole? At least habitable as far as humans go? I didn't think there was another star that those planets had to feed them light and energy, and could they get enough light and energy, keep an atmosphere, and etc in orbit around a black hole?
- moh_maya 8y ago
  [1] suggests, even if it were possible for life to exist on such a planet, it may not be conducive for a civilization such as ours.. [1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19032/how-life-could-survive-in-a-planet-orbiting-a-black-hole/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19032/how-life-could...
  - duxup 8y ago
    Thank you. That made a lot more sense than I thought the movie did. At least in my layman's brain, it didn't make sense that you could get enough energy from a black hole and at the same time ... survive as a habitable planet, at least not one we'd recognize / could use for long.
- garmaine 8y ago
  There is absolutely nothing weird about a black hole in that sense. If you were to counter-factually replace our Sun with a black hole, absolutely nothing would change in terms of orbits, time dilation, spatial geometry, atmosphere, etc. It would suddenly get very dark and cold though! The black-hole-Sun wouldn't be putting off any visible light, except for the occasional bursts of energy as things impact the event horizon, bathing nearby objects in very deadly gamma rays. So no, it wouldn't be very habitable. Everything would be cold, atmospheres frozen, and any surfaces regularly sterilized with lethal doses of gamma radiation. But you wouldn't observe any of the things you traditionally associate with black holes and which were used as plot points in Interstellar (warped space-time, funky time dilation, etc.).
  - raattgift 8y ago
    > But you wouldn't observe ...(warped space-time, funky time dilation, etc.). A survivor on Earth wouldn't notice it locally, but the presence of a very strong Einstein lens subtending ~ 100 sr on the sky would be unmistakeable. Essentially, we'd get to observe many photons that would have crashed into the sun's surface (roughly each photon frequency having its own) travelling instead through the space between where that surface would be and very close to the event horizon. We would also see rocky and icy objects that crash into the sun (or are vapourized near some value of its surface) instead passing through a similar near region between each such object's former periastron and very close to the event horizon. Surviving Earthlings could readily test many general-relativistic predictions. The major observational problem would be that dim rocky/metallic/carbonaceous objects are already hard to see even when hot from direct illumination close to the sun, and comets would no longer throw off extremely visible tails. > lethal doses of gamma radiation I'm unsure this would be the case -- what would be the source? If it's matter being drawn into jets, why would those be oriented towards the Earth, when the sun's rotational axis does not point at Earth now? Also, what gets drawn into the jets other than matter in the relic fields and whatever bits of rock and ice happen to fall right in on an extremely lucky trajectory, the horizon area being so small? Do you expect a busy accretion structure? Why? And what suppresses visible light if the accretion structure is the source of gammas?
lolptdr 8y ago
Can anyone recommend books/videos/lectures/courses that give insight or go beyond the astrophysics in Interstellar?
- tbabb 8y ago
  Black Holes and Time Warps, by Kip Thorne himself: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763 https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/d...
sova 8y ago
Incredible. Thanks a lot for making one of the most moving films I've ever witnessed, and being true to the science as we know it best in 2015 <3

103 points by techrich 8y ago

The correct title that didnt fit! Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar

jacobsenscott 8y ago

That movie has certain black-hole like properties I guess. For example when you are stuck in the theater watching it it feels like you've been there for 30 hours. But you come out and it has only been 3 hours.

moh_maya 8y ago

An interview with Kip Thorne [1] (who recently won the Nobel Prize for physics [2]) on the science in the movie and a book about the science in the movie that he has written [3] And a slightly breathless account of how working on developing the visuals for the film drove development of new code and led to new insights [4] Needless to say, I'm a fan of the film.. :D [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-the-science-of-interstellar-with-physicist-kip-thorne/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-th... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2017/press.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/20... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Interstellar [4] https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...

southern_cross 8y ago
Someone admitted later than there was actually little or nothing "new" here - maybe a somewhat slicker and more cinematic visualization of expected effects around a black hole, but correct visualizations had already been done before. So the "papers" that came out of this were probably largely just a waste of ink. I was quite disappointed in the movie myself. It claimed to be quite "sciency" but it was mostly just science fiction, IMO. I kind of liked the robots, though.
- hyder_m29 8y ago
  How could it not be science fiction if it's set in the future?
  - setr 8y ago
    Not all of the science needs to be fictional... presumably gravity will comtinue operating as it does today, tomorrow. Black holes will operate the same as well, unless the story gives it reason not to (black hole combobulators). The "fiction" is only necessary for the stuff that doesn't exist today.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    "Science fiction" admits a wide variety of classifications. Interstellar is clearly science fiction so I don't like the grand parent's wording (I also don't like yours: what does 'science' have to do with being in the future?). But trying to generously interpret the GP's and your comment, Interstellar was heavily promoted, and portrays itself as an accurate representation of a potential future, with correct physics and details rigorously fact checked, etc., a sub-category called "hard science ficiton." In reality there are numerous flaws in its physics, too many to count really. These aren't nits either--the most ridiculous physics-defying nonsense is in fact fundamental to the plot. That's only the beginning of the problems. Interstellar was a terrible movie all-around, with plot holes you could fly a starship through. But it is why I think someone might say "It's not [the type of] science fiction [it claims to be]".
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      Science Fiction (sometimes "Speculative Fiction") asks "What if?" questions. One common formula for the question is, "What if ... in the future X?" but the "alternate history" sub-genre asks questions like "What if Germany had won in WW2?" and some asks about alternatives to the present. When we tell stories that don't ask a "What if?" but are just set in space without asking too many awkward questions about how space works, like Star Wars, that's just called Space Opera. In Hard SF it's inevitable that some of the specifics will be wrong. For example Greg Egan's "Schild's Ladder" relies on a completely fictional set of fundamental physics theorems concerning a "graph theory" for quantum state. In the story one element of this theorem is wrong, but of course in reality the whole theory is made up. What matters, as in most of fiction, is verisimilitude, not truth, but _plausibility_. The fictional "quantum graph theory" feels like something that theoretical fundamental physics might come up with, the proposed experiment to verify it has the sort of "If we're wrong we might all die, but we aren't wrong" vibe of many real experiments like the first test explosions of a nuclear bomb or the LHC. Sometimes a piece of fiction might seem like bad SF but it actually wasn't intended as SF at all. Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" is like that. It's astonishing to me that this was put forward for SF awards. If you assume that whatever has been done/ will be done with these children makes sense, and are on board with the story on that basis, finding out what's really going on is a huge disappointment. But if you go into this knowing Ishiguro has no interest whatever in medical ethics, genetics, cloning etcetera, then you can embrace it as a metaphor about mortality (We are unable to truly accept our own inevitable death, it's explained to us but it never really sinks in, even when we see others die we always believe we're special) and it works fine. Yes, Interstellar is a mess. It's a spectacle, I'll give it that, but well, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". It has at least 50% more Hans Zimmer than it needed, the plot has vast holes left in it for no apparent reason, and the larger story seems a bit aimless and underwhelming considering the setting.

dreamcompiler 8y ago

Part of the reason I love this movie is that Kip Thorne was a technical advisor. And as this paper shows, some new science resulted from the movie-making process.

ajkjk 8y ago
The abstract specifically says that no new physics resulted from the movie-making process: "There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting."
trgv 8y ago
That seems like a strange reason to love a movie. I liked the visuals, but I think the script was a disaster, and the movie itself was only middling.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  I thought the script to Interstellar was lovely and profound, while that of Gravity (a movie with which it's often compared) was ridiculous and obviously written by someone who had no idea how physics worked. To each their own.
nieve 8y ago
Thorne's teaching abilities really get ignored. He used to TA a session of first year physics at Caltech every year and he was amazing when I had him. To teach accelerating frames of he clambered onto a table, saying "Define a frame of reference centered on the tip of my nose", then tossed it gently forward as he stepped off. It was a perfectly intuitive demonstration and he got us to laugh in the process.
- jsweojtj 8y ago
  he gently tossed the tip of his nose?

evo_9 8y ago

Here is a video that covers this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR4U3h5wSxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR4U3h5wSxg

rapnie 8y ago
for some explanation in layman's terms see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pAnRKD4raY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pAnRKD4raY

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

khazhou 8y ago

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdJRjihJpCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdJRjihJpCs (longer version of the one posted by evo_9)

duxup 8y ago

Related question. Could a habitable planet exist in orbit around black hole? At least habitable as far as humans go? I didn't think there was another star that those planets had to feed them light and energy, and could they get enough light and energy, keep an atmosphere, and etc in orbit around a black hole?

moh_maya 8y ago
[1] suggests, even if it were possible for life to exist on such a planet, it may not be conducive for a civilization such as ours.. [1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19032/how-life-could-survive-in-a-planet-orbiting-a-black-hole/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19032/how-life-could...
- duxup 8y ago
  Thank you. That made a lot more sense than I thought the movie did. At least in my layman's brain, it didn't make sense that you could get enough energy from a black hole and at the same time ... survive as a habitable planet, at least not one we'd recognize / could use for long.
garmaine 8y ago
There is absolutely nothing weird about a black hole in that sense. If you were to counter-factually replace our Sun with a black hole, absolutely nothing would change in terms of orbits, time dilation, spatial geometry, atmosphere, etc. It would suddenly get very dark and cold though! The black-hole-Sun wouldn't be putting off any visible light, except for the occasional bursts of energy as things impact the event horizon, bathing nearby objects in very deadly gamma rays. So no, it wouldn't be very habitable. Everything would be cold, atmospheres frozen, and any surfaces regularly sterilized with lethal doses of gamma radiation. But you wouldn't observe any of the things you traditionally associate with black holes and which were used as plot points in Interstellar (warped space-time, funky time dilation, etc.).
- raattgift 8y ago
  > But you wouldn't observe ...(warped space-time, funky time dilation, etc.). A survivor on Earth wouldn't notice it locally, but the presence of a very strong Einstein lens subtending ~ 100 sr on the sky would be unmistakeable. Essentially, we'd get to observe many photons that would have crashed into the sun's surface (roughly each photon frequency having its own) travelling instead through the space between where that surface would be and very close to the event horizon. We would also see rocky and icy objects that crash into the sun (or are vapourized near some value of its surface) instead passing through a similar near region between each such object's former periastron and very close to the event horizon. Surviving Earthlings could readily test many general-relativistic predictions. The major observational problem would be that dim rocky/metallic/carbonaceous objects are already hard to see even when hot from direct illumination close to the sun, and comets would no longer throw off extremely visible tails. > lethal doses of gamma radiation I'm unsure this would be the case -- what would be the source? If it's matter being drawn into jets, why would those be oriented towards the Earth, when the sun's rotational axis does not point at Earth now? Also, what gets drawn into the jets other than matter in the relic fields and whatever bits of rock and ice happen to fall right in on an extremely lucky trajectory, the horizon area being so small? Do you expect a busy accretion structure? Why? And what suppresses visible light if the accretion structure is the source of gammas?

lolptdr 8y ago

Can anyone recommend books/videos/lectures/courses that give insight or go beyond the astrophysics in Interstellar?

tbabb 8y ago
Black Holes and Time Warps, by Kip Thorne himself: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/dp/0393312763 https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Time-Warps-Commonwealth/d...

sova 8y ago

Incredible. Thanks a lot for making one of the most moving films I've ever witnessed, and being true to the science as we know it best in 2015 <3