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I liked Intersteller a lot as well, but its plot was horribly contrived in places and the science isn't as good as it was purported to be - even moreso if you include the behaviour of the scientists involved :). The science was certainly better than most other serious sci-fi films though. The real problem with the film is the needlessly long hour of character establishment.

(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.

My wife, ordinarily interested in more economic, financial, and fashion-related literature, has been gorging on tesseracts since the movie. She'll adore this. Thank you for the brownie points.

Very interesting observations about the christ story, I didn't pick up on any of them.

Not to mention the use of organ music — easily reminiscent of Christian hymns — in Hans Zimmer's soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo5m5GXF9Ec.

The parallels between "quantum data" and the Logos of Gnostic Christianity are also apparent.

I couldn't agree more. I don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics, when it clearly does, just not in the areas he's most concerned with. Planetary dynamics, propulsion systems... but as long as there aren't Na'vi or dragons on the planets, I suppose they consider it realistic enough. On second thought, Na'vi or dragons might be more realistic than some of what's shown.

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.

The point of the time dilation is 'plot'. It's to age the daughter to a point where she's now a prominent scientist and can interpret the main character's weird sendings, while not being dismissed as a weird kid.

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'.

I understand that time dilation was necessary for the plot. They should have found another way to age the crew, though, that didn't violate common sense.

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 don't understand why Kip Thorne is so desperate to declare that the movie doesn't violate known physics

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.

"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.

I totally agree with you but I feel that our discussion is missing a crucial detail here. A bit of philosophical and cultural theory.

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.

I didn't get an anti-science vibe. If anything the scene at the school was a pretty transparent poke at the folks today who seek to take accurate science out of school curricula.

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.

The messages from the first planet seemed like one area where the movie got the physics wrong. The characters said that they were getting just the "ok" message over and over again. But because of the time dilation, the frequency of the "ok" message would have dramatically decreased. I wonder if they could have received it at all.

I think Thorne is approaching this from a different perspective than you are.

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.

I am actually just happy that they are making movies involving space exploration. We really need to bring back space exploration into the minds of the public so we can get support for awesome missions in the future.

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?

Normal fuel is just less expensive.

That's a possibility, but the special fuel they have would have to have been extremely expensive then. That would have been a fine explanation, and if they had mentioned it in the movie that would be one less point I could make.

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 :)

Ping issues were especially bugging me. Take those pings from the relativistic planet. First it is believed that the person has been sending data for many years, yet only after landing do they recall relativistic effects, and that in fact that person has spend only a couple of hours at the surface.

But they could. That is exactly why they did know about nice atmosphere and water on the planet, but didn't know about the waves since the first wave that killed first astronaut happened during the landing. They also left one of the team member to do gravitation research and planned to spend as little time as possible on the planet.

Yes, they knew about the relativistic effects. And they could obviously send some data. But somehow they can't figure out that they've been getting a repeat of the same ping for the last 10 years? And even if they couldn't figure that out, how could the person on the planet possibly send a ping every year, if she only spent an hour and half on it according to her frame of reference?

I don't remember how many pings they received in the movie. I've understood that they had received just one ping from that planet.

They expected a ping every year, if it ever stopped pinging they would write off that planet. It was up to the scientists to keep the ping going, if they considered the planet still a suitable candidate for humanity. The signal they received from the time dilation planet was supposedly "looped around the black hole" and repeated yearly.

If I remember correctly, one of the characters hand-waved it as (paraphrasing) "multiple echoes of the same signal". Meaning there were no meaningful timestamps

The biggest issue I see is the fact that gravitational time dilation is considerable on the surface of the Miller's planet, but not so much in the relatively close proximity of the planet, where the mothership is. I just don't get that part.

The explanation Kip Thorne offers in his book is that the lander ends up slingshotting around two things, like black holes and neutron stars, that happen to be in the right places to drop the lander into the gravity well and then accelerate it back into a stable orbit close to the planet. Of course, that kind of maneuver twice, on both the descent into Gargantua's gravity well and the return trip, is totally implausible... the idea that there are so many high gravitation objects orbiting Gargantua near the planet's orbit that you can pull it off on no particular schedule... but it might not be physically impossible.

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 figured the mothership was still orbiting the black hole, in a much wider orbit. They could rendezvous by matching orbits using pretty standard manoeuvres, it would just take more time than if it was moving in a similar orbit as the planet itself.

What I didn't understand about these pings is wouldn't their wavelength be massively lengthened by the time dilation? How did they even receive Miller's signal if it was redshifted ~60000 times?

That is an excellent point, I didn't even consider that. It's possible they were listening on the correct frequency to receive it, since they knew the redshift was going to happen, but that just leaves more questions as to why they didn't then realize that it definitely couldn't repeat.

I believe it is possible to set the rules at the real physics level, take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example. But not if you are forced by Hollywood producers to put all the little pieces that follow inner feelings of the masses. This is what I believe happened to Matrix movies, progressively keeping worse and worse grip on their own rules.

Absolutely, it is possible to claim accuracy, but then you have the hard task of making that actually true. 2001 was better because of that accuracy, but for many movies it's not a good way of doing it. Interstellar could have worked with complete scientific accuracy, or they could simply not have claimed that it was scientific. Either would have been fine.

I agree on the Matrix movies, but they had much more of a free pass already, because the core concepts are so flexible.

To be fair, though, 2001: A Space Odyssey didn't explore nearly as many exotic phenomena as Interstellar did. It was a lot easier for that movie to remain mostly accurate.

2001 explored some pretty darn exotic phenomena, it just didn't both to try to explain them scientifically.

Admittedly it's been some time since I watched the full movie, but I don't recall anything in it, other than the highly abstract ending, that would be considered exotic by today's standards. Maybe they were exotic at the time, but they were still quite well understood at the time of the film's production, whereas the interactions near the singularity of a black hole, say, are very much not understood even at the present day.

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).

Well, the ending was a big part of what I was referring to. Plus a monolith appears on ancient Earth overnight without disturbing sleeping hominid animals, and somehow teaches them how to use tools. And another monolith that is buried in the moon for millions of years sends a targeted, powerful radio beam at Jupiter.

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.

> 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."

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.

"in this precise, extremely rare situation it is possible, if we ignore all the other side effects"

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.