Kip Thorne: The science of Interstellar
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
The point is: don't claim that you're scientifically accurate. Usually, a good sci-fi movie will set up rules for itself, and follow those rules appropriately. If you make your ruleset "real world physics", you have to be extremely accurate if you still want to make it believable. The rules set up expectations, and breaking your own rules is an instant turn-off for science fiction fans.
The movie shows other cases where it doesn't follow its own rules: they have spaceplanes that can get to orbit from a planet with 1.8 times earth gravity, but not from earth without huge boosters?
For the record: I like Interstellar a lot. It was a great film, and I'll definitely be buying it when it comes out on DVD. I just have my gripes with the lofty claims of accuracy that Hollywood films so love to make.
Normal fuel is just less expensive.
But here's another one: They set up this nice system with pings to know what planets might be suitable, but they can't detect when a ping is being repeated instead of actually sent by a person? They couldn't put a timestamp in it, or some minor variation? They couldn't figure out that it's impossible to receive a ping every hour if the relativistic effects mean an hour takes 7 years?
There are other issues like this, I'm sure I could come up with a load more if I had the time :)
Wouldn't that be yet another reason to avoid that planet like the plague? Even if they set up a colony there, at any time the planet could run into an orbiting black hole or neutron star, or get slingshotted by one of them into an unfavorable orbit or into Gargantua itself.
I agree on the Matrix movies, but they had much more of a free pass already, because the core concepts are so flexible.
Did you have some specific examples in mind? I still feel as though 2001, excluding its ending, stayed much further away from speculative topics of theoretical physics than did Interstellar (which in fact has explicit references, in its dialogue, to "the bulk" -- a term from brane cosmology; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology).
Maybe 2001 just did a better job than Interstellar of drawing lines for the audience between "known science" and "alien technology so advanced it looks like magic." So that 2001 still has a great reputation for scientific accuracy despite the fact it contains elements at least as fantastic as Interstellar does.
That is true, but it is not enough. A lot of Interstellar criticism comes from the fact that events described as scientifically feasible were in fact not. I will not describe what particular problems can be found in Interstellar because other posts in this thread already touched virtually every possible issue.
FTL travel is "possible" too, if quantum gravity provides some loophole for violating GR on scales where GR is currently assumed. It seems like there's a reasonable basis for excluding it from the plot without declaring it impossible: if Earth technology was that advanced, they wouldn't need to travel to Gargantua's system.
I think Nolan's insistence on the extreme time dilation for the first planet in the plot is a mistake, because if they thought about what time dilation would mean for the readings sent back, they never would have investigated that risky planet first.
What's great about Interstellar, though, is that it gets viewers talking and thinking about physics. On that point, it's far better than Gravity.
In terms of the literal events of the film, it's the last planet they should have visited, given the urgency they have to find a place for the people back home - a few months round trip to come back and check it is only a few months back home, but a couple of hours at the known 'time dilation' is decades back home. Doesn't make internal sense... except for 'plot'.
The crew knew about the time dilation before deciding to try that first planet. They should have realized the data they were getting was only about an hour old. Didn't they say something about not getting any communication from the scientist, just automated transmission of probe data? Only an hour's worth of data and no communication from the scientist should have easily put that planet in the last resort category.
I do. At least I think I do. Kip Thorne has published a book named "The Science of Interstellar".
I am sure that book is quite scientific and reasonable. However, the most hyped up attribute of art-science relationship in Interstellar is its "real" physics. If Kip Thorne declares that movie does violate known physics in a direct and unambiguous manner the hype instantly decreases. Lots of sci-fi got science very wrong and Interstellar is considered different in that regard by general public. Less hype -> less sales.
Though, this "interstellar science is real" meme may be a trojan horse and it is ripped apart in the book. I know nothing of that as I haven't read the book.
I am not sure if Interstellar is net benefit to the rational and scientific worldview of an average viewer or not. In the end, magic tesseract creatures and love of the protagonists saves the day, not scientific method.
It's worse than this! Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I got a strong anti-scientific, anti-rational vibe from the movie.
Consider this: the movie's two top scientists are scheming liars. The professor who ran the whole show lied to everybody because he's smarter than all the dummies on his team. And the guy from the second planet is the most brilliant scientist among the astronauts, and turns out to be an egocentric asshole who develops a sinister plan that endangers the whole mission for his personal gain. Lesson learned: never trust a scientist, they're up to no good!
Second: Rational decision making is for the birds. Our hero decides on an order in which to visit the planets based on the available evidence. Meanwhile, the girl who's allegedly a scientist but who uses "love" as her compass had intuitively favored the "right" planet all along. In fact, things don't start going right until people start doing crazy things based on fuzzy hunches. Lesson learned: Love is a better basis for decisions than evidence and reason.
I get the impression this attitude is "trending" in the US, and it worries me. There's a worrisome anti-science sentiment afoot, apparent in denial of evolution and global warming, opposition to vaccination, a hysteric fear of various foods and distrust of "conventional" medicine.
Did you notice how lots of people after the movie were like "Wow, I've got an epiphany, I've understood something." Did that something was about physics? No. It was about philosophy.
And damn, Interstellar philosophy is awful. Postmodernism at its worst.
Happy to share why.
Postmodernism is deeply suspicious of academia and academics. Who were the negative characters? Dr. Mann("the best of us") and Prof. Brand. "Do not go gentle in the dying light" A poem written for the poet's father losing his vision. Who was his father? Literature professor.
Postmodernism rejects reason as a epistemological foundation and states that rationalism is just another narrative. Who was right about the planet? Amelia Brand was. What did she say? "Maybe we've spent too long trying to figure all this out with theory. Love is the one thing that transcends time and space".
Postmodernism is dismissive of science. Did Romilly's data that he collected during the years of scientific pursuit help anyone from the crew or humanity at large? No. Scientific method of trial and error was useless, but "magical tesseract pixies" powered by love saved the humanity and the protagonist.
Millions and millions of movie viewers "understood" that science and reason is not as important as love and magic. My hypothesis is when people were watching this movie they had a bit of postmodern values imprinted in their minds. That was their epiphany.
Christopher Nolan made an dystopian world he pictured a little closer. That is if you agree that modernism or super-modernism philosophy is more conductive to development of humanity than a postmodernism one...
But you know what really gets to me?
Nolan knew all of that. His Memento movie is an example of postmodernist film in the Wikipedia! He was perfectly aware what he was doing.
This citation must be included in the discussion.
-- On a deeper level, Jessica Chastain may have said it best when telling Entertainment Weekly that “Interstellar” is a love letter from Nolan to his daughter, Flora. The film’s production title was “Flora’s Letter.” Underneath it all, that's what "Interstellar" really is — a father-daughter story reflected in the relationship between Cooper and his daughter, Murph (MacKenzie Foy), the two lead characters at the center of the film. --
A love letter. Now the movie makes perfect sense as an educational content for a child. Question the authority. Promote love. Instill hope and faith.
But at what price for humanity at large? For me, a price that was too high. That's why I consider Interstellar to be harmful, irrational postmodernist trojan horse that supposedly promotes science but actually does the opposite.
Thank you, Christopher Nolan for making humanity a little bit less rational, thank you so much.
The main professor lied to everyone in order to create the will to work on "Plan B", the frozen embryos. He thought folks would never work on that if they all thought they were doomed.
The evil scientist turned bad because of the extreme isolation and thought that he would never see anyone again. It's a variation of the "space madness" trope from 100 science fiction plots--tired, but not anti-science, in my opinion.
(SPOILER) Rather interestingly, I've seen very little discussion about the christ story in the film - the 33-year-old man, who is also the 'father', who is also the 'ghost'; who disappears presumed dead, only to return; who has the only information that can save humanity (the 'quantum data') and also sacrificed himself to save humanity; and who was helped along by 12 others - one being the questionable [Dr] Man[n] who is weak of spirit. There's a few more other parallels, but the gist is there.
The parallels between "quantum data" and the Logos of Gnostic Christianity are also apparent.
Thorne is aiming this at people who've never even heard of time dilation. He's aiming this at people who, when they hear about the time dilation on Miller's planet due to its presence in a gravitational field, will say that this is all just made up for the plot, having no idea that this has been known since Einstein's general theory was published nearly 100 years ago in 1915.
I also think that the writing of the movie consisted of the following process:
- Nolan proposes something completely outlandish.
- Thorne explains why it won't work.
- Nolan says it's "non-negotiable" for plot purposes.
- Thorne insists it's not possible.
- Nolan says to make it possible.
- Thorne either figures out a set of exotic circumstances in which it's possible (e.g., a time dilation factor of 1 hour = 7 years), or continues to insist that it's just too far fetched (astronauts traveling faster than light -- something that Nolan originally had told Thorne was non-negotiable but eventually agreed to scrap).
Overall, I think this quote from Thorne really sums up the goal behind the movie's science:
> To a great extent, my motivation here was to try to use the movie as a lure to get people who might otherwise not have much interest in science curious about it, by exposing them to strange, exotic phenomena like wormholes. The film is the bait, and the book is the hook I want to use to draw them in even further, to get them to dig in and learn something new. If they are young, maybe they will consider careers in science rather than in finance or law. If they are older, I still think it’s tremendously important that larger fractions of our citizenry possess enough understanding of science to appreciate its powers and its limitations.
It reminds me of something Feynman said before he delivered his famous lectures at Caltech. The students there at the time were getting bored with the curriculum, and Feynman had observed that it's because none of the new and exciting ideas of modern physics were being presented to them. So he designed his lectures to cover relativity and quantum mechanics, even if it meant leaving out a lot of details to fit it into an undergraduate level. I feel like Thorne and Nolan wanted to present a few of the more exciting ideas of modern physics to viewers who otherwise might think they're made up, and when they insist the science is realistic, that's the perspective they're coming from.
Isn't that storytelling? The impossibly ridiculous plot works only when all the pieces fall exactly as the author wants. Depending on your point of view, all the circumstances that brought intelligent beings into existence on our planet are themselves an extremely rare situation.
It's really cool to see how much you can actually learn about the universe of Interstellar by making use of some Physics knowledge and the information given to you in the movie.
An example: The first planet they visit orbits Gargantua (the supermassive black hole mentioned in the movie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole) at a distance very close to its Schwarzschild radius (or event horizon). In the movie, they say that the time dilation there is such that one hour passed at the surface of the planet corresponds to 7 years (!) on Earth. Interestingly, with that information alone we are already able to calculate how close the planet is to the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole by using a really simple formula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius (here we have to assume that the black hole is not rotating very fast).
Making some assumptions about the mass of the black hole then allows us to see how large the actual Schwarzschild radius is in fact, and if the time dilation shown in the movie is possible (it is). Similarly, if we use the information they give us about the gravity constant on the planet (about 1.3 times Earth gravity if I remember correctly) as well as an estimate of the height of the tidal waves they find there (maybe 200 meters?), we could even estimate the rotation period of the planet.
There are many more examples of clues like this in the movie, which offer great 'Fermi problems' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem) and allow us to learn many things about the universe presented to us in Interstellar.
Of course I also have to mention the absolutely stunning rendering of the black hole, which incorporated the gravitational lensing effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens) that make the accretion disk of the black hole appear like a halo surrounding it. Also, the rendering of the wormhole as a four-dimensional "hole" embedded in three-dimensional space was absolutely gorgeous.
Amazing movie, amazing science, amazing universe.
From the article: "The black hole needs to be spinning very fast"
Citation needed.
It's been said repeatedly that considering the strong rotation of the black hole is critical for the situation in the movie to be possible. "It's hard" is not an excuse to ignore a strong effect.
Also, the effect is strong, but in all of the formulas you're already guessing factors such as mass of the black hole, which have a far bigger influence on the end result.
I read that, for Interstellar, it's actually very important to include rotation of the black hole: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/11/09/interste...
> which offer great 'Fermi problems'
An aside, but I'm curious. I see this mentioned a lot more often lately, and I know Randall Monroe talks about them a lot in his 'What if?' series, so I'm not sure if it's because of that popularising the term, or if it's just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon on my part. A Google Trends search suggests increased interest, but it could just be coincidental.
Considering the massive dilation (1 hour -> 7 years, a factor of 1 : 61320), wouldn't even relatively small distances on the planet surface create different dilation effects depending on an objects/individuals distance to the black hole?
I'm just wondering if there would not only be noticable effects from a distance (orbit -> planet), but also within visible distance on the surface itself.
If the dilation could act on scales such as the 200 meter wave, I'm having trouble imagining how it would look / behave, if for example the top of the wave was moving "slower" compared to the bottom of the wave.
"If the radius of our planet were larger, there could be a point at which an Earth escaping rocket could not be built. Let us assume that building a rocket at 96% propellant (4% rocket), currently the limit for just the Shuttle External Tank, is the practical limit for launch vehicle engineering. Let us also choose hydrogen-oxygen, the most energetic chemical propellant known and currently capable of use in a human rated rocket engine. By plugging these numbers into the rocket equation, we can transform the calculated escape velocity into its equivalent planetary radius. That radius would be about 9680 kilometers (Earth is 6670 km). If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport."[1]
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedi...
If you can find a copy of Thorne's book (it's already leaked to the web) and skim the appropriate sections, it'll clear up some things.
> I found that Chris’s huge slowing of time requires Gargantua to spin almost as fast as the maximum: less than the maximum by about one part in 100 trillion. In most of my science interpretations of Interstellar, I assume this spin.
> In 1975, I discovered a mechanism by which Nature protects black holes from spinning faster than the maximum: When it gets close to the maximum spin, a black hole has difficulty capturing objects that orbit in the same direction as the hole rotates and that therefore, when captured, increase the hole’s spin. But the hole easily captures things that orbit opposite to its spin and that, when captured, slow the hole’s spin. Therefore, the spin is easily slowed, when it gets close to the maximum.
> Ultimately, when the hole’s spin reaches 0.998 of the maximum, an equilibrium is reached, with spin-down by the captured photons precisely counteracting spin-up by the accreting gas. This equilibrium appears to be somewhat robust.
In essence, the necessary spin (for an object to stably orbit at a distance for the time dilation needed for the plot), while possible, is not sustainable, based on what we know about physics. But it's allowable as real physics, because there could be some exotic physics involved in keeping Gargantua spinning that fast, possibly intervention by the civilization that created the tesseract.
Also, from what I learned in high school physics, the body of a human would completely fall apart if it's falling to the black hole, because of the difference in gravity between proximal and distal parts.
These are just the 2 things I noticed and I'm far from a physicist. Basically, it got a couple of things right and a bunch of things wrong. There was a clear preference of emotion over science. It just seemed like "The Core" Version 2.0, but here love and reading books conquers all and is beyond the forces of nature.
I liked Europa Report a lot more even though they didn't invest nearly as much into special effects.
Concerning the second point, there is actually a pretty fascinating explanation: For a small black hole, the "tidal force" when entering the black hole (i.e. the force difference between your feet and your head) would be so enormous that you'd probably get ripped apart (so-called "Spaghettification" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification). However, the Schwarzschild radius (or event horizon) increases linearly with the mass of a black hole, whereas the gravitational force declines with the square of the radius. Hence, for a supermassive black hole with 10 million solar masses, the tidal force is not bigger than the one you experience here on Earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole), and you would probably not even notice when you cross the event horizon. Fascinating stuff.
I remember having a similar thought process to all of the above, but they even explicitly call it out as "gentle" with maybe a single really simple sentence on why it was. I don't remember if they made the direct connection to it being supermassive (like they did with its rotation), but it was in the same bit of dialog.
No idea, I'm an EE not an astronomer, just guessing out of my back end.
Actually, the 2 things you noticed are not that hard to resolve:
- The quantum data was most likely never going to get out of the black hole. They executed the plan on the off chance that TARS was able to figure out how to do it if he had the quantum data. It's not impossible that there is a way to do it, we just don't know it yet.
- Your concern about spaghettification is valid, but the risk of that happening also decreases with the size and mass of the black hole. A stellar mass black hole would rip you apart instantly, but around a supermassive black hole the gravity gradient is a lot gentler. It wouldn't be comfortable per sé, but definitely survivable. You would get ripped apart inside the event horizon, but you could cross it pretty safely.
There is actually a much bigger problem than the spaghettification: every black hole has a shell of light orbiting it at the event horizon. It's light that came in tangentially, and doesn't have enough speed to escape, but is fast enough to keep orbiting. In a black hole of considerable age (like the one in Interstellar), that shell would be very very energetic. I don't know if the ships they were in would be able to survive a blast of radiation that intense, let alone the human and robot inside.
I don't think it's fair to say that they went for emotion over science. They tried to do both, and wanted at least an inclination of accuracy from the start. That's laudable in itself, in a time where most wouldn't bother with that.
The event horizon is only the "point of no return" insofar as it's the imaginary boundary inside of which even the forward light cones are oriented towards the center of the sphere (so that light cannot escape no matter what direction it's emitted in). It's not the point at which the tidal forces are so strong that matter is ripped apart (or even just your macroscopic body).
> However, in 1962 John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller published a paper showing that this type of wormhole is unstable if it connects two parts of the same universe, and that it will pinch off too quickly for light (or any particle moving slower than light) that falls in from one exterior region to make it to the other exterior region.
[Spoiler alert] Here's the whole plot of the movie, does any aspect of it make sense?
Earth is dusty so the simplest solution is to transport all of humanity through a wormhole to another planet. The main characters go through a wormhole and walk around on a planet where 1 hour = 7 years of Earth. Later, to help the mission succeed, the main character detaches from their main spaceship into a blackhole and he ends up in a multi-dimensional space where he sends Morse code messages to his daughter in the past by moving her books and watch. How does he do that? Because love. And gravity. She understands the message which contains gravity data from the blackhole that lets them get everyone off earth. The main character then pops out of the blackhole thing near Saturn and is re-united with his daughter just before she dies.
Because the multi-dimensional space was set up by higher-dimensional creatures, who also created the wormhole, specifically so he could accomplish all this (right down to preventing him from going on the earlier missions by causing his craft to crash with a gravitational anomaly at the beginning of the film).
As for the love-powered part, everyone's a little too hung up on that set of dialog. There's nothing in the plot that relies on it. Sufficiently advanced magic gravity technology is more than enough. Is any advancement of the plot motivated by more than the fact that he wants to see his daughter again? Sure, if they had listened to Brand's feelings they wouldn't have ended up with crazy guy and would have ended up on a (seemingly) habitable planet, but the human race also would have died on earth and lived on entirely from the test tube embryos.
The whole tesseract section doesn't entirely fit with the tone of the rest of the movie but it's not powered by love.
I liked the film, and it bothers me a bit that they can launch from a planet with stronger gravity using tiny rockets, or that we would consider a planet orbiting the event horizon of a huge black hole as good candidate for our new home.
But my biggest gripe is with the premisse of the film. We have a catastrophic ecological disaster, which is unconvincingly explained in a single sentence by Michael Caine, and our solution is to take the entire species on an intergalactic travel through a worm hole. Instead of, you know, digging a big hole right here and creating an artificial biosphere underground. Or maybe check out Mars or Europa, which are right around the corner.
Overall I think we may be thinking too deeply about the plot ;-)
The only thing I've been able to think of was that they used some kind of exotic propulsion, like antimatter, therefore there was no sense wasting such a precious commodity to leave Earth if you had a rocket available.
But nothing in the movie seemed to explain it.
Pretty weak, so it would be nice if they had at least given us a throwaway sentence or two to wave it away like they did with spaghettification, as the rocket orbital mechanics, at least, were distracting. I imagine the real reason was Nolan wanted to invoke a parallel to the Apollo missions in the liftoff from earth, but didn't want to waste time with the very hard problem of getting off other worlds once you get there.
INTERSTELLAR SPOILER BELOW
For example, how did he survive inside a black hole, how did he pass through the Schwarzschild radius with his simple spaceship, why was there no time dilation as he approached the black hole, why did his spaceship break down inside the black hole but he was able to eject with his simple spacesuit and survive, how did he realistically survive out in cold space (at the end, yes okay I know this is technically possible but still..)?
When I watched this movie, I saw a lot of problems that made me think "has a physicist ACTUALLY worked on this and said 'yes, this is accurate'?". And those certainly weren't the minor details like the time dilation on the planet, the structure of the black hole and the icy clouds on that one other planet.
Disclaimer: I enjoyed Interstellar a lot, it was a pretty good movie, although I felt that at times the director was pretty much screaming in my face: "SEE? WE ARE SO REALISTIC! LOOK THERE IS NO SOUND IN SPACE, AREN'T WE REALISTIC?" (sorry for caps lock but it's to provide emphasis)
* how did he survive inside a black hole
possible for supermassive black holes up to a certain distance from the singularity. To my knowledge there's still the possibility of ring shaped singularities that could be passed through and we don't really know yet what would happen there. Unified quantum gravity theory needed first, so remains in the artistic freedom of the director.
* how did he pass through the Schwarzschild radius with his simple spaceship
Again the only question is whether the tidal forces would be too strong and a supermassive black hole does not have extremely strong forces at its event horizon.
* why was there no time dilation as he approached the black hole
I think there was. After returning from the closely orbiting planet they had a few decades such that he now was a bit younger than his daughter, after coming out of the black hole another 50-60 years have passed for the outside world. Granted though, as far as I understand GRT, actually entering a black hole takes literally forever from the point of view of the outside world (i.e. time breaks down completely), but again, we don't know what would happen with quantum gravity, so maybe the infinity would cancel out somehow if our theories were better.
* why did his spaceship break down inside the black hole but he was able to eject with his simple spacesuit and survive
Tidal forces act the stronger the more vertical distance from the gravitational center an object has in itself (i.e. the height of the object from the singularity's point of view). A spaceship is much larger than a human, so it will break down earlier.
* how did he realistically survive out in cold space (at the end, yes okay I know this is technically possible but still..)
You do have a few minutes in space - the coldness isn't actually a problem since nothing can transport heat in a vacuum. It's rather the pressure difference that will give you trouble, but there are some measures such as emptying your lungs that will give you more time.
The science was basically non-existing: controlling a distant device with gravitational waves? Which can only be controlled whenever it is in a specific room? Which stores the information transmitted and repeats it endlessly (otherwise, how is the daughter able to gather all information transmitted)? How long does he spend inside the black hole transmitting what must be like lots of information in morse code, by slowly pulling gravitational waves? Looks to me like several hours / days? What is the time dilation of getting into a black hole if getting into a planet gives you a 1 hour to 7 years ratio? Getting inside / outside a black hole, unharmed? What part of this is current physics domain?
More strange facts: the device in the black hole was supposedly man-made ("we are they"), by the men of the future. But the men of the future can only exist if this particular crisis is overcome. And this crisis can only be overcome if this device is in the black-hole. Granted that the man of the future controls the five dimensions, and thus time, but we currently do not, so we can not in any way survive this crisis. Which means the men of the future will never be, so they can not build the device to survive the crisis.
Just the very simple facts are maybe according to the current scientific knowledge (time dilation, gravity effects, I can even accept a worm-hole), but most of the movie is just an exercise on futility with a very high dose of emotions. Boring, slow and not enjoyable at all. The fact that they are pretending that this is a science-based movie makes it insulting. If you want to do a Hobbit, do it and I'll have a good time, but do not pretend it is based on any established science.
Gravity was orders of magnitude better.
Gravity was a completely different sort of movie, so the comparison makes little sense. Gravity was about the here and now, things we understand and can convey rather easily. This movie explores some of the most strange edges of our current understanding in order to tell a story.
Also, did you miss all of the criticism of the physics in Gravity?
The science used in sci-fi movies is not about the science - it's about the myth of science; the things we wish science could do or lead us to do. But more than that, it's about telling a story. We are not relating facts here, we're off into Joseph Campbell territory.
Even the most scientifically accurate movie is going to do some jazz hands once in a while just to keep things interesting/heroic/funny/whatever because: failure is not an option - the movie has to make money.
Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist by profession.
As for science: its more than technical details. Its why they are so dumb. Why can a 12-year-old out-guess the plans made by the scientists? (We're in a terrible hurry; lets set down on a time-dilated planet for a few hours and let the masses on Earth rot for a decade or two).
Once decided, why park your interstellar ship outside the time-dilation zone, so you can take your shuttle to the surface? Makes no difference to Earth - they wait either way. But the ship burns half their fuel, just station-keeping for 20 years. If it had been time-dilated too, that wouldn't have happened! Not even to mention the poor sap on the ship, stuck waiting for half his life.
Oh I can go on (have, for hours, to my family's dismay)
It is all a matter of pleasing the viewer by giving him exactly what he wants. Science is just sexy right now, and that's actually good.
At one point, they mentioned it had to do with the ability to fix nitrogen?
Also, wouldn't any pestilence as widespread as that be transported on the cargo ships with the people and their plants to the new planet?
Someone said it is permissible as a 'closed timelike curve' but smells like BS to me.
It's by far my favorite way to explain time travel system like the one we see in Interstellar, and it's rooted in real science rather than Paradox Philosophy.
> in a CTC, causality breaks down, because an event can be "simultaneous" with its cause—in some sense an event may be able to cause itself.
Anyway, for my money, this issue falls well into the "willful suspension of disbelief" category - and didn't affect my appreciation of the movie at all.
I mean, yeah, it was billed as a "scientifically accurate' movie, but it's still science fiction at the end of the day, with the emphasis on "fiction".
just because you introduce more dimensions, doesn't mean you resolve a paradox within the existing dimensions