On the Science of Interstellar

I had no idea Kip Thorne was a producer for this. For non-physicists, Thorne is one of the authors of _the_ general relativity book for graduates, _Gravitation_ [1]. It&#x27;s this huge telephone book sized tome that was published in 1973, and while it has fallen behind the times with respect to experimental data included in it, it is still unparallelled in scope and depth today in covering Einstein&#x27;s theory.<p>I certainly enjoyed the movie, and I really loved the visualizations of a wormhole and of the large spinning black hole, things you usually have to imagine as a physicist without ever seeing with your eyes.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Physics-Series-Charles-Misner/dp/0716703440" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Gravitation-Physics-Series-Charles-Mis...</a>

pretty cool to see some of the math of this spelled out. I appreciate the effort the author has put into this.<p>unfortunately, my issues with Interstellar have very little to do with whether or not the black hole was portrayed realistically.<p>edit: why was I downvoted? for saying I didn&#x27;t like the movie? come on guys.

Visual and practical effects were nicely done. Really liked the depiction of the Saturn colony at the end. It&#x27;s a proposed style from the 60&#x27;s that has never gotten a proper cinematic representation.<p>The bad parts of the movie were mainly editing, non rational emotionalism (main characters making obviously bad choices for shallow emotional reasons), and a giant paradox.<p>With editing, the drone scene was interesting but did nothing to advance the story. School scene was ok but too long.<p>The entire &quot;power of love&quot; scene was just dumb. People in that situation would not act like that.<p>The biggest problem was the paradox. Earth is becoming uninhabitable. Future humans must influence the past to save humanity. But there are no future humans in the first place since the Earth is dying. This is the biggest plot hole in the movie and it&#x27;s the size of a black hole. Even slightly changing the story so that humans do survive, then are reaching back to make the survival process easier would be fine. Kind of a Redemption of Christopher Columbus type of story.

If you&#x27;re on the fence of reading it, I&#x27;d say read it. He really put it nicely in laymen terms.

Ok, this is very well written article explaning some problematic parts that people don&#x27;t understand. But there is one more paradoxal point I didn&#x27;t get it why and how the writers could not figure it out that, if a nation can&#x27;t survive in itself and needs help from aliens (later cooper finds out that these aliens are actually us, who are already in 5 dimensional universe) to solve the equation for their existence and if people would die without help of outside, how could their descendens survive and then live in 5 dimensional world to save their ancestors?! This is pure paradox and not possible. And it&#x27;s very well known that one can be in the future but can&#x27;t go or change things in the past, even in 5 dimensional universe.

Fascinating read. I&#x27;m generally not too concerned with science being 100% accurate in my sci-fi movies, but to find that it is all grounded in real science - even the far out, funky, stuff of the last act - is pretty cool.<p>I personally loved the movie, and the cinematography brought me back to the same feeling I had as a kid watching 2001 for the first time. I grew up completely enamored in space and all of the things in it, and some of the shots produced a very visceral reaction. Almost enough to make me regret that I didn&#x27;t follow the oh so ubiquitous dream of trying to become an astronaut.

How does one explain the frozen clouds? Are those actually possible? How do they remain afloat if they&#x27;re more dense than the atmosphere?

i&#x27;d love a binary where i can have complete control of the camera in these visualizations