Is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar Scientifically Accurate?

Christopher Nolan is one of the most important directors of his time and can even be the pre -eminent director of his generation. But there is one element in the style of the British director who can sometimes make his films a little too functional and cold. As Richard Brody wrote in his New York The review of “Oppenheimer”, “Nolan cuts his scenes to adapt like a puzzle, and the details that do not correspond – contradictions, subtleties, same small random particularities – Leave to be left behind […] What remains is a film to be resolved rather than living. “”

With “Interstellar” of 2014, however, the director proved that he could balance his functional style “puzzle” puzzle “with a real emotional weight. As such, “Interstellar” remains Nolan’s emotional masterpieceAnd it is for many his best film. What makes it a real wonder is that Nolan managed to create a truly moving emotional drama which also happens to be a spectacular science fiction epic which is even more fixed on scientific precision than any of his previous projects.

The fact that Nolan’s engagement is also impressive in scientific realism in “Interstellar” may seem a way to place limits to his science fiction blockbuster Spanning in galaxy, this has actually made some of the most memorable shows movie. From the planet of Miller with his giant tidal waves with the fictitious Gargantua of the black Supermassive hole, Nolan’s film is filled with apparently fantastic elements which are actually anchored in real science. How precisely is “interstellar” in this regard? Well, it turns out that very.

Most fans of Christopher Nolan will probably know that the director hired the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to consult on “Interstellar”. But these fans might not realize how much Thorne was invested in the production of the film. While Nolan took a giant science fiction swing with “Interstellar”, “ The presence of a physicist winner of the Nobel Prize has made sure that things are never obtained Also Far from reality. On Neil Degrasse Tyson Starttalk Podcast, the host did his best to catch Thorne on several scientific points related to the film, but the physicist had an answer to everyone.

First, the very premise of “Interstellar” was based on a true scientific possibility. The film revolves around the humanity research of a new host planet as they face extinction on earth due to the burn of cultures. This is what propels the journey of Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) through the universe to colonize a new planet. But as Tyson said to Thorne, “whatever the effort it takes to find another land, it seems to me to be a more important effort than simply saying to biologists [to] Find a serum that could repair harvests. “”

Thorne had an answer, revealing that the filmmakers brought together “the best biologists” who were “experts on these kinds of things” and after a conversation of three to four hours, none of them could present a reason for which a “Vicious generalized burn” would not occur. In Thorne’s words, “this is something that biologists have never seen but they cannot exclude it.” Were such a thing to exist, developing a “serum”, as Tyson suggests, which could heal each type of harvest would be out of the question.

This approach to the premise of “Interstellar” is very revealing of how Nolan and Co. Approached the whole film, Thorne saying to Tyson: “It is different from almost all the other films in that these problems were verified by the best experts in the world.” Tyson said that “Moillon” was the least scientific scientific science fiction film, But he found no precision problems for “Interstellar”, which talks about the level of commitment of Nolan and Thorne.

A culture burn may not seem to be the most fanciful element of “Interstellar”, when what do you say about something that seems a little more science fiction-like, let’s say, a water planet with tsunamis giants? Miller’s planet is the first planet of the orbit system around the Gargantua black hole, and hosts Coop and its crew when they land on the surface to investigate. They are quickly forced to escape, however, when a giant tidal raz emerges on the horizon. The size of the wave itself is different from everything we would never see on earth, but is it completely unrealistic to think that such a thing could exist on a distant planet?

According to Kip Thorne, the Miller’s planet’s wave in fact has a fairly strong scientific base. The physicist revealed on the Podcast Startalk that he is based on a type of wave called lonely wave, discovered by naval architect John Scott Russell in 1834. Russell observed a wave form after a channel barge he Hold his shape all the time that he followed him on horseback. This is the type of wave shown in “Interstellar”, although even Thorne admits that the size of the version in the film is “exaggerated”.

Another facet of the sequence of the miller’s planet is the extreme dilation of time on the surface of the world. An hour on the planet is seven years in the endurance spacecraft that orbit the planet. This is also based on science, with Thorne, including her calculations in the book “The Science of Interstellar”. According to the physicist, Nolan in fact asked for a scientific explanation which would allow him to represent such a time dilation, which prompted Thorne to carry out the relevant calculations. The physicist claimed having been “surprised” to note that it was in fact possible that a planet is as close to a black hole as the film required without this planet falls into the black hole itself-that is to say If the black hole runs at a certain speed. This also allowed him to justify the extreme time dilation on the planet of Miller, which is so close to Gargantua that the distortions of gravity of the black hole create the differences of time between the surface of the planet and its orbit. But what about this black hole itself?

If you needed more convincing that “Interstellar” is one of the most scientific science fiction films ever, what would you say that Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne made the appearance of a black hole without Never see one. “Interstellar” properly predicted the appearance of a black hole With Gargantua, the giant cosmic object in which Coop advances during The end of “Interstellar”. In 2019, five years after the start of the film, The New York Times published the very first image of a black hole, and it looked remarkably to that based on the predictions of Kip Thorne of the film. In fact, as Nolan recalled in a recent featuretteThe director called Thorne after the release of the photo, saying: “It’s a good thing you were right.”

However, certain freedoms have been taken with regard to Coop’s trip to the black hole. Although these cosmic objects remain largely mysterious (the closest to our planet is around 1500 light years), we have a fairly good idea of ​​what could happen if a human tries to cross the threshold – known as the name of the ‘Horizon of the event – of a black hole. With black holes of stellar mass, a human being would be almost immediately spaghetified, a process that implies being stretched due to a difference in gravitational force between your head and feet. But in supermassive black holes, like Gargantua, scientists think that spaghettification would not occur immediately and that an individual could theoretically cross the horizon of the event. Would there be a tesseract inside with Matthew McConaughey floating? Almost certainly not. But as no one really knows what the inside of a black hole would look like, there is always a possibility …

These are just some of the things that make commitment to scientific authenticity in the “interstellar” clear. It should also be noted that the cylindrical spaceship used to transport humans through the galaxy, which was based on the real conceptions of the physicist Gerard K O’Neill. Although research suggested that the representation of a worm hole in “Interstellar” is not entirely exact, for the most part, the film uses a real science to make some of its most fantastic elements apparently.