Interstellar Review

Welcome back, everyone! This is the second post on this blog, and today I'll be giving a short review of interstellar, and talking about some of the concepts in the movie. This movie does border on the edge of science, and fiction, but it is quite realistic compared to other sci-fi movies, which was a goal of the writers. Keep in mind there will be spoilers!

Interstellar is a sci-fi movie that explores intergalactic space travel, wormholes, more dimensions, and many other topics! It starts in a dystopian version of Earth, with food shortages and large dust storms. Humanity needs to find some way to fix the problem, and a logical one is to find some other home than Earth. Cooper, the protagonist, is a former NASA pilot. However, NASA was seemingly shut down. Despite this, one day he finds a set of coordinates that lead to NASA's secret headquarters, where they've been working on a solution to Earth's problems. Cooper is sent on a mission by NASA to enter a wormhole that will take them to another galaxy, perhaps with habitable planets.

This review will be more about some of the scientific things from the movie, and not really the plot, but I can say that the story, acting, visuals, and all of that type of thing were really good. The music was good, the plot twists were great, and overall it was a great movie, and I recommend it to all of you to watch as well. Another great thing about the movie was that there was actually a physicist who worked on it to ensure it was realistic. His name is Kip Thorne, and he actually wrote a book about all the science that went into the movie. Of course, most of the things that happened in the movie are things we haven't been able to do yet, but all of it is hypothetically possible. Today I just wanted to tell you all about some of the things I noticed in the movie that seemed interesting.

First, I wanted to talk about wormholes, the thing NASA sent the main characters through to transport them to the new galaxy. The concept of a wormhole is the idea that there could be a way to connect two points in space, essentially making a shortcut. If it is possible to have a wormhole, it will allow for high-speed space travel. One of the most significant limiting factors of space travel is the speed of light. From our perspective on Earth, the speed of light seems extremely fast. Given that you were moving at the speed of light, you could go around the world's diameter over 7 times a second! However, as you zoom out to a cosmic scale, this hard speed limit becomes a great barrier. In order to get to the closest star to us, it would take over 4 years at the speed of light, and to the nearest galaxy, it would take 25,000 years! However, with a wormhole, you could cross that distance in almost no time, and you wouldn't even need to go at the speed of light. Wormholes also seem theoretically possible, but we've never found or made one. Theoretically, a wormhole would be like a 3d connection made between two points on a folded 2d plane, but it would be a 4d connection, in a 3d space. (see image below)

Second, I wanted to talk about the use of time dilation in the movie, and the planets orbiting a supermassive black hole. After the crew comes out to the new galaxy, they find a planet called Miller that is orbiting a black hole. Due to the gravity of the black hole, there are massive waves on the planet, similar to how the moon causes waves on earth, but many many times larger. Also due to the extreme gravity, time flows differently on Miller. For every hour spent on the planet, 7 years will pass for an outside observer on a spaceship or earth. The reason why this happens is an extremely complicated topic, and I still don't really understand it. If you've ever heard of Einstein's theory of gravity, also known as general relativity, this is it. In part, it is due to the effect of gravity to curve spacetime, but that's as far as my knowledge really goes. Point is, the more gravity there is, the slower time will pass. However, when I was watching the scene where they describe how close the planet is to the black hole, I sort of wondered how it was even possible for a planet to be as close as it is and not get swallowed by the black hole. According to the book Kip Thorne wrote, the black hole is actually spinning at almost the limit of how fast it could spin, and due to the planet being at the perfect distance from the black hole, the centrifugal force (the force from the spinning that pushes the planet away) and the gravity somehow perfectly cancel out. A crazy coincidence, but the movie is hypothetically possible, not realistic.

These were some of the topics in the movie that interested me the most, but there were so many more things in the movie that were fascinating, confusing, and much more. I really couldn't begin to explain everything, and I really recommend watching Interstellar for yourself if you haven't. Even if you have, you might want to watch it again, because there is so much detail and specifics, and you'll probably notice more every time you watch it!

‍