Interstellar: Science!

 Warning: Spoilers for Interstellar ahead!

This blog post will be a little bit different from the others because I will, instead of focusing on the historical context of the film, focus on the scientific context of the film. For the historical context, simply look around; it was only released three years ago. Wait, three years ago? Already?

In order to generate the visuals for the film, director Christopher Nolan enlisted the help of a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist named Kip Thorne. One of Interstellar's most iconic visuals is that of the massive, rotating black hole Gargantua (pictured above), and Nolan enlisted the help of Thorne to create that visual.

Thorne also served more generally as a scientific consultant for the film, ensuring that the parts of film that should have been grounded in reality actually were. For example, one of the film's main plot devices is the time dilation that occurs near a black hole. The group of astronauts land on a planet where, for every hour they spend, seven years pass back on Earth. Thorne was responsible for ensuring not only that the numbers given were correct but also that being close enough to a black hole to experience such extreme time dilation was even possible in the first place.

Of course, some parts of the movie were more speculative than others. Most notable is the "tesseract" that sits in the center of Gargantua. Through it, Cooper is able to make small changes in his daughter Murphy's past that allow her to solve the equations necessary to save humanity from impending climate-related disaster. This is all, of course, pure speculation; no human alive knows what really lies at the center of a black hole, and it could very well be impossible to tell. Interstellar explains this away by describing an extremely futuristic society that could build such a thing at the center of a black hole.

More interesting than science's effects on the movie are the movie's effects on science. The following interview describes some of the insights that visualizing the black hole gave Kip Thorne:

As matter is sucked into the black hole, it forms a brightly glowing disk, called an accretion disk, around the black hole. Though the disk is flat, it does not appear to be due to the black hole's gravity bending light. In order to determine what a black hole would actually look like, Nolan enlisted the help of a team of computer scientists, who used memos written by Kip Thorne to model the light emitted by the accretion disk.

The shape the disk appeared to make was striking, creating a glowing halo around the black hole, and its appearance did not have to be modified much to create an image ready for the film. In fact, finding out what a black hole really looked like was a notable enough finding that it warranted a scientific paper about the gravitational effects and the computer programs used to visualize them.