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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I worked at Double Negative (the VFX company mentioned) during the production of Interstellar and had the pleasure of sitting in on an in-house lecture he did for the artists and R&D teams - incredibly good teaching skills. He was able to explain some very complex subjects in a 90 minute session.

For any non-scientists that are interested in this subject, he published a book about his work on the film that was quite interesting.

he gently tossed the tip of his nose?

Maybe he tossed the table.

That was missing an eraser.

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."

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.

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.

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