5 ms·

The Science of Interstellar [video]

62 points by spark3k 12y ago

antimora 12y ago
Here is an article on this "Interstellar animators make physics breakthrough during work on Hollywood film" http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/interstellar-scientists-make-physics-breakthrough-during-work-on-hollywood-film/ http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/interstellar-scienti...
- readerrrr 12y ago
  Given their motivation, which is to promote the movie and the book, I'm skeptical that this is a real discovery and not just something visualized that was previously in a mathematical form. If this is a real breakthrough, then where is the paper?
  - sp332 12y ago
    http://www.mathnet.ru/php/archive.phtml?wshow=paper&jrnid=ufn&paperid=4922&option_lang=eng http://www.mathnet.ru/php/archive.phtml?wshow=paper&jrnid=uf...
    - readerrrr 12y ago
      That is nice, but I'm afraid the primary motivation was money. Which in the perfect world shouldn't be the case. I guess the end result is still better than most movies, a paper, and some science promotion for the general public.
      - sp332 12y ago
        I really don't understand this comment. First, science generally is profitable. Medicine, materials research, etc. And in a perfect world, wouldn't it be great if science was profitable? If people would invest in massive research projects, and scientists could bankroll themselves without begging for grant money?
        readerrrr 12y ago
        Science is not profitable, its application is. And in a perfect world, wouldn't it be great if science was profitable? No, that would make it vulnerable to abuse, look at what happened to lawyering, college fees, private health care. Capitalizing it only makes it worse. Science shouldn't be influenced by money. Imagine if it were, and compare it to politics. Do you want scientists to make decisions while funded under young earth creationists or big oil?
wunki 12y ago
The book is only 10 bucks if you buy the Kindle version on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne-ebook/dp/B00NUB4EVC/ http://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne-ebook/...
3pt14159 12y ago
Interstellar is one of the best movies ever made. If you like scify just see it. It's up there with The Matrix, Primer, and Inception.
Perseids 12y ago
If, like me, you have wondered about the strange form of the accretion "disk" shown around the black hole, here [1] is a video, showing that it is actually still a disk, which is distorted by gravity though. Btw, little of the science besides the depiction of the wormhole and black hole is accurate. E.g. how they need massive amounts of fuel to get off from earth, but just use their tiny craft to launch twice into orbit from the two planets they visit, or how these "frozen clouds" just stay in the air. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNepC_zvk9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNepC_zvk9E
- mkagenius 12y ago
  Kip Thorne says that much tough "frozen clouds" were violation of physics.
- wffurr 12y ago
  The inconsistency introduced by the magic shuttle craft ruined the movie for me. Using retouched Saturn V footage for the first take off is such a huge bait and switch. Worse, the technology implied by the shuttle craft damages the entire premise of the movie. If they have that kind of power source and propulsion, they could build a huge orbital infrastructure, not just the one ship. A significant portion of Earths population could emigrate. They could build huge arcologies on the Earth. And that was just the first problematic thing with the movie. The level of life support, the magic solar panel plane, and so on.
  - brownbat 12y ago
    I struggled with the basic conflict: terraforming some marginally hospitable world? Ok. Rehabilitating this one? Impossible. (Alternatively, building an arcology in space? Easy once you can just get stuff up there. Building a few biodomes on earth? Not worth the effort.) I can imagine situations where that might be the case, (unavoidable massive impacts maybe), but blight and lack of crop diversity don't seem solved by moving all the crops through space. (Or if they are, they could be solved by moving them into a biodome on Earth with far less effort / risk.) And it's not like there had to be a choice between science and story. A discussion of super-habitability might have bought some science cred while waving off some of the above.
swframe 12y ago
I think there is an 'uncanny valley' aspect to the science. The movie seems serious in its attempts to portrait the science (the cgi is very well rendered) but also has so many things wrong that it is upsetting (what is rendered makes no sense). I want to suspend my disbelief so I could enjoy it but it is so hard to accept anything about it except that it looks nice.
- rohandhruva 12y ago
  Can you share what things it gets wrong? I have been trying to look that up even since I watched the movie, but can't find anything useful.
  - flohofwoe 12y ago
    Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) has been writing about where the science is off (he got a few things wrong in the first blog post though and followed up with another): http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/07/interstellar_ba_movie_review.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/07/interste... And some corrections: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interstellar_followup_movie_science_mistake_was_mine.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interste...
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    To get a time dilation of 1 hour = 7 years, the planet would have to either be moving extremely fast or be very deep in the black hole's gravity well (or both!). Either way, a dinky little shuttle craft is not going to have the power and fuel to get there and back. Supposedly the signal from this planet had just been saying OK over and over again. We learn that is because of the time dilation--in local time, the probe just landed there a few hours ago. But in reality the time dilation would produce a Doppler shift on the probe signal. Instead of hearing "ok" over and over, they'd hear one super-slow "ok" signal at a super low frequency. What did the guy on the Endurance eat for 23 years while he was waiting for them? If the "frozen clouds" are dense enough to walk and land a spaceship on, how are they staying in the air? Etc.
- deleted 12y ago
hrasyid 12y ago
What's https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/ https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/ ?
brianmcconnell 12y ago
I think people are missing the point of the story. The ship in the film is The Endurance (see Ernest Shackleton). Set off for Antarctica, at the time might was well have been setting off for a black hole. Bad things happened, was presumed lost, then years later, makes it back to civilization. At face value, it's a sci-fi movie, and that eye candy got people into theatres, but I think it's better compared to stories like The Life of Pi or All Is Lost. Nitpicking on how accurate the science is in a fictional story sort of misses the point that it's a story. TL;DR - paid to see it in IMAX and was thoroughly entertained knowing it was a made up story.
32faction 12y ago
SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW Some people asked me what the 5th dimension entailed and how Cooper was able to talk to himself in the tesseract. I'll explain the dimensionality below: The zeroth dimension is a point . The 1st dimension is a line __________ The 2nd dimension is a plane. Imagine a piece of paper The 3rd dimension is a cube. The 4th dimension is time. We perceive the 4th dimension in cross sections or frames. Imagine a movie reel. On the reel there are single images that project a movie when played together. The 4th dimension sees the entire movie all at once. Now consider this, a line can connect two points. A plane can connect a line, a cube connects planes. The 4th dimension sees the cubes from all iterations of time. Or if the cube was a flower instead, it would see it from seed to flowering all at once. I dont really know what the 5th dimension entails but those beings can traverse time and space. Since a higher order being can move around in a lower dimension. (A line, a 1D object, connects points, which are in the zeroth dimension) So this means that Cooper, as a 5D being in the can traverse time and space like was shown in the Tesseract scene. So essentially 5D beings "always exist" in time and have no birth or death. SPOILERS ABOVE SPOILERS ABOVE SPOILERS ABOVE

62 points by spark3k 12y ago

Here is an article on this "Interstellar animators make physics breakthrough during work on Hollywood film" http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/interstellar-scientists-make-physics-breakthrough-during-work-on-hollywood-film/ http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/interstellar-scienti...

readerrrr 12y ago
Given their motivation, which is to promote the movie and the book, I'm skeptical that this is a real discovery and not just something visualized that was previously in a mathematical form. If this is a real breakthrough, then where is the paper?
- sp332 12y ago
  http://www.mathnet.ru/php/archive.phtml?wshow=paper&jrnid=ufn&paperid=4922&option_lang=eng http://www.mathnet.ru/php/archive.phtml?wshow=paper&jrnid=uf...
  - readerrrr 12y ago
    That is nice, but I'm afraid the primary motivation was money. Which in the perfect world shouldn't be the case. I guess the end result is still better than most movies, a paper, and some science promotion for the general public.
    - sp332 12y ago
      I really don't understand this comment. First, science generally is profitable. Medicine, materials research, etc. And in a perfect world, wouldn't it be great if science was profitable? If people would invest in massive research projects, and scientists could bankroll themselves without begging for grant money?
      - readerrrr 12y ago
        Science is not profitable, its application is. And in a perfect world, wouldn't it be great if science was profitable? No, that would make it vulnerable to abuse, look at what happened to lawyering, college fees, private health care. Capitalizing it only makes it worse. Science shouldn't be influenced by money. Imagine if it were, and compare it to politics. Do you want scientists to make decisions while funded under young earth creationists or big oil?

wunki 12y ago

The book is only 10 bucks if you buy the Kindle version on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne-ebook/dp/B00NUB4EVC/ http://www.amazon.com/Science-Interstellar-Kip-Thorne-ebook/...

3pt14159 12y ago

Interstellar is one of the best movies ever made. If you like scify just see it. It's up there with The Matrix, Primer, and Inception.

Perseids 12y ago

If, like me, you have wondered about the strange form of the accretion "disk" shown around the black hole, here [1] is a video, showing that it is actually still a disk, which is distorted by gravity though. Btw, little of the science besides the depiction of the wormhole and black hole is accurate. E.g. how they need massive amounts of fuel to get off from earth, but just use their tiny craft to launch twice into orbit from the two planets they visit, or how these "frozen clouds" just stay in the air. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNepC_zvk9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNepC_zvk9E

mkagenius 12y ago
Kip Thorne says that much tough "frozen clouds" were violation of physics.
wffurr 12y ago
The inconsistency introduced by the magic shuttle craft ruined the movie for me. Using retouched Saturn V footage for the first take off is such a huge bait and switch. Worse, the technology implied by the shuttle craft damages the entire premise of the movie. If they have that kind of power source and propulsion, they could build a huge orbital infrastructure, not just the one ship. A significant portion of Earths population could emigrate. They could build huge arcologies on the Earth. And that was just the first problematic thing with the movie. The level of life support, the magic solar panel plane, and so on.
- brownbat 12y ago
  I struggled with the basic conflict: terraforming some marginally hospitable world? Ok. Rehabilitating this one? Impossible. (Alternatively, building an arcology in space? Easy once you can just get stuff up there. Building a few biodomes on earth? Not worth the effort.) I can imagine situations where that might be the case, (unavoidable massive impacts maybe), but blight and lack of crop diversity don't seem solved by moving all the crops through space. (Or if they are, they could be solved by moving them into a biodome on Earth with far less effort / risk.) And it's not like there had to be a choice between science and story. A discussion of super-habitability might have bought some science cred while waving off some of the above.

swframe 12y ago

I think there is an 'uncanny valley' aspect to the science. The movie seems serious in its attempts to portrait the science (the cgi is very well rendered) but also has so many things wrong that it is upsetting (what is rendered makes no sense). I want to suspend my disbelief so I could enjoy it but it is so hard to accept anything about it except that it looks nice.

rohandhruva 12y ago
Can you share what things it gets wrong? I have been trying to look that up even since I watched the movie, but can't find anything useful.
- flohofwoe 12y ago
  Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) has been writing about where the science is off (he got a few things wrong in the first blog post though and followed up with another): http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/07/interstellar_ba_movie_review.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/07/interste... And some corrections: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interstellar_followup_movie_science_mistake_was_mine.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interste...
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  To get a time dilation of 1 hour = 7 years, the planet would have to either be moving extremely fast or be very deep in the black hole's gravity well (or both!). Either way, a dinky little shuttle craft is not going to have the power and fuel to get there and back. Supposedly the signal from this planet had just been saying OK over and over again. We learn that is because of the time dilation--in local time, the probe just landed there a few hours ago. But in reality the time dilation would produce a Doppler shift on the probe signal. Instead of hearing "ok" over and over, they'd hear one super-slow "ok" signal at a super low frequency. What did the guy on the Endurance eat for 23 years while he was waiting for them? If the "frozen clouds" are dense enough to walk and land a spaceship on, how are they staying in the air? Etc.
deleted 12y ago

hrasyid 12y ago

What's https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/ https://interstellar.withgoogle.com/ ?

brianmcconnell 12y ago

I think people are missing the point of the story. The ship in the film is The Endurance (see Ernest Shackleton). Set off for Antarctica, at the time might was well have been setting off for a black hole. Bad things happened, was presumed lost, then years later, makes it back to civilization. At face value, it's a sci-fi movie, and that eye candy got people into theatres, but I think it's better compared to stories like The Life of Pi or All Is Lost. Nitpicking on how accurate the science is in a fictional story sort of misses the point that it's a story. TL;DR - paid to see it in IMAX and was thoroughly entertained knowing it was a made up story.

32faction 12y ago

SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW SPOILERS BELOW Some people asked me what the 5th dimension entailed and how Cooper was able to talk to himself in the tesseract. I'll explain the dimensionality below: The zeroth dimension is a point . The 1st dimension is a line __________ The 2nd dimension is a plane. Imagine a piece of paper The 3rd dimension is a cube. The 4th dimension is time. We perceive the 4th dimension in cross sections or frames. Imagine a movie reel. On the reel there are single images that project a movie when played together. The 4th dimension sees the entire movie all at once. Now consider this, a line can connect two points. A plane can connect a line, a cube connects planes. The 4th dimension sees the cubes from all iterations of time. Or if the cube was a flower instead, it would see it from seed to flowering all at once. I dont really know what the 5th dimension entails but those beings can traverse time and space. Since a higher order being can move around in a lower dimension. (A line, a 1D object, connects points, which are in the zeroth dimension) So this means that Cooper, as a 5D being in the can traverse time and space like was shown in the Tesseract scene. So essentially 5D beings "always exist" in time and have no birth or death. SPOILERS ABOVE SPOILERS ABOVE SPOILERS ABOVE