As our knowledge of the universe expands, so does our imagination. Today’s science fiction movies, such as Interstellar, are based on new discoveries and research that older movies, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, did not have. However, both movies stayed true to science, etc My goal in this paper is to discuss the accuracy of the physics and astronomy in Interstellar, and compare it to 2001: A Space Odyssey. To achieve this goal, I have divided my paper up into 3 sections. The first section is a brief plot summary of Interstellar.
The second section is a discussion of the scientific accuracy of Interstellar, and the third section is a literary and scientific comparison to 2001: A Space Odyssey. PLOT SUMMARY The movie is set in the future, where the Earth can no longer sustain crops. Humanity’s very survival is at stake as farmers struggle to grow crops. A group of space explorers, consisting of Cooper, Dr. Brand, Romilly, and Doyle, travels through a wormhole that mysteriously appeared near Saturn. The crew uses it to travel to another galaxy, where they meet up with previous explorers who landed on and studied nearby planets for signs of life.
A disastrous landing on a planet with extreme tides kills Doyle. They travel to another planet, where Dr. Mann has been living and studying the terrain for many years. He had grown desperate and wanted to leave his planet, so he planned to kill the crew and steal their ship to head back to Earth. During his sabotage mission, Romilly is killed, and Cooper’s ship loses a lot of fuel. Cooper sends Brand to explore one last planet, while he ejects his shuttle and is swallowed by a black hole.
When he dives into the black hole, he is not spaghettified, but rather enters a 5-dimensional room constructed in a 4-dimensional spacetime called the Tesseract. There is an extra dimension of time in the room. The Tesseract is a never-ending staircase of his daughter’s room, and each stair represents a moment in time in the room. Cooper can essentially ‘time travel’ by moving to a different bookcase. From within the Tesseract, he can relay information about the black hole to his daughter at any point in time, allowing her to complete a new theory of gravity which accounts for quantum mechanics.
Cooper is ejected from the black hole, out of the wormhole, and ends up floating near Saturn, where a space station picks him up and rescues him. Cooper awakes to discover that over a hundred years have gone by on Earth while he has only aged a few years due to time dilation, and learns that together with his daughter, they saved the human race. SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY OF INTERSTELLAR The accuracy of Interstellar was mixed. Some scenes were based on sound discoveries, some were based on theoretical research, and some were dependent on Hollywood magic.
However, this movie put an incredible effort on including science as an essential part of the movie and was reasonably scientifically. The movie was mostly correct when it came to relativity and its applications. One such instance was when Cooper, Brand, and Doyle were on Miller’s planet, which was orbiting very close to Gargantua, a supermassive black hole. Romilly was on a space-ship far enough away from the planet to not feel the effects of time dilation. However, when Cooper, Brand, and Doyle were on the planet, the gravity from Gargantua caused time to run much slower for them than for Romilly.
In fact, every hour spent on that planet was equal to 7 years on Earth. When Cooper and Brand returned to meet Romilly, they discovered that Romilly had aged 28 years while Cooper and Brand only aged a few hours. The science behind this scene is based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The theory is about gravity and the geometry of space as it is bent by gravity. According to general relativity, a gravitational field can slow down time. The stronger the gravitational force, the slower your clock runs relative to somebody experiencing weaker gravitational forces.
If you are on a planet that is 100 times the mass of the earth, then time will pass slower for you there than it would on Earth due to the increased gravity of the other planet. That is why Romilly aged so much relative to Dr. Brand and Cooper. He felt weak gravitational forces while Dr. Brand and Cooper were the ones who who experienced the intense gravity of Miller’s planet and Gargantua. The movie did have many aspects that were based on speculation and has been neither confirmed nor denied by experimentation. An example of this is when Cooper fell into Gargantua and ended up in the Tesseract.
Today, we do not fully understand what happens inside a black hole. We have seen stars and planets being torn apart by the extreme gravity of black holes, and we know that the gravity of a black hole is so intense that light itself cannot escape. However, after something passes through the event horizon, no information can escape. Therefore, we cannot observe the inside of a black hole. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, there is an massive strengthening of the gravitational field and a violent warping of space around a black hole until it climaxes at the singularity.
If something did manage to survive the extreme gravitational forces and cross the point where light itself cannot escape, known as the event horizon, we don’t know what would happen to it for sure. Our knowledge of physics begins to break down at singularities, and we have never experimentally observed a black hole or its interior. In fact, the nature of the black hole prevents information inside the event horizon to exit the black hole. According to Kip Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar, there could have been a total of 3 types of singularities in Gargantua.
There was an infalling singularity, an outflying singularity, and a BKL singularity. After Cooper fell into Gargantua, he was sandwiched between the singularities. The infalling singularity was created by the matter that fell into the black hole after Cooper did, and the outflying singularity From Kip Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar was created by the matter that fell into the black hole before Cooper . These two singularities exist because the matter that falls into the black hole accelerates until it travels at nearly the speed of light.
According to special relativity, the faster something is going, the more massive it becomes. Therefore, as more and more matter fell into the black hole with its speed approaching the speed of light, the gravitational forces that they exert also approach infinity, essentially creating another singularity. The BKL singularity is an extreme distortion of spacetime that rips atoms apart. It is the singularity made by the extreme gravity of the black hole itself. BKL singularities were predicted by Vladimir Belinsky’s, Isaac Khalatnikov’s and Eugene Lifshitz’s calculations using Einstein’s theories in the 1970s.
In the early 2000s, David Garfinkle simulated their results on a computer and proved that it was possible that BKL singularities could exist in black holes. However, they have never been experimentally proven to exist. While falling through the black hole, Cooper was sandwiched between the infalling and outflying singularities. He had to eventually hit one or the other. In the movie, he hit the outflying singularity, according to The Science of Interstellar, and fell into the Tesseract. The Tesseract must have been placed there by a future extremely advanced human civilization, as suggested by Cooper when he told TARS.
When Cooper hit the outflying singularity, he should have been killed. His body should have been stretched so much that his cells were breaking up into atoms and those atoms were breaking apart into subatomic particles. He should have been crunched into a singular point with no size. What happened, however, is that he ended up in the Tesseract. A possible explanation of how this could have happened is that the extremely advanced version of humans in the future could have somehow constructed a wormhole, similar to the one they placed near Saturn.
General relativity allows wormholes to exist. Therefore, when Cooper fell into the singularity, there could have been a white hole on the other side that ejected him out into the Tesseract. This wormhole could have led him to another part of the universe or another universe entirely. However, the white hole would be emitting extremely intense radiation that would kill him if he was in contact with it. If, somehow, Cooper could make it to the Tesseract, without being fried, he could survive inside it and even communicate to TARS, who accompanied him into Gargantua.
The Tesseract is another example of scientific speculation in Interstellar. It was a 5-dimensional object (3 dimensions of space, 2 dimensions of time) shaped in a 4-dimensional representation (3 dimensions of space, 1 dimension of time) so that Cooper could interact with it. It was an endless array of copies of Murph’s room. There were rows and columns extending out in all directions. Each copy of the room was slightly different, however, as each room represented another point in time in Murph’s room.
Cooper used this to communicate with Murph and send an adult version of her the quantum data that TARS had collected while in the black hole. Normally, information is not allowed to leave a black hole since not even light can escape it. Cooper’s form of communication with Murph circumvented this rule since he was in the Tesseract. Had he tried to send a radio signal out of Gargantua, it would have never left. However, he used gravity to communicate with Murph. For example, he grabbed her attention as a young child by pushing books out of her bookshelf to represent Morse code.
This is allowable, since his message is not fighting to escape Gargantua’s gravity. The Tesseract’s ‘hallways’ were a physical representation of the 2nd dimension of time. By moving forwards and backwards, Cooper could access different points of Murph’s lifetime, essentially moving through time in a form that he, as a 4-dimensional being, could experience and understand. He appeared to be plucking strings to manipulate the watch because he could not actually touch the watch. It was in another dimension, or perhaps, another universe. Instead, Interstellar also had a wormhole.
Wormholes are shortcuts between 2 points in our universe. These shortcuts involve moving through the 4th dimension. If you were to create a wormhole for a 2 dimensional surface, like a piece of paper, it would exist in the 3rd dimension (folding the paper over). Wormholes are predicted by relativity as a warping of space. However, they are not stable, and need something holding the mouth open so that something can pass through. Otherwise, they would instantly collapse on themselves. A possible solution would be to use negative energy.
Negative energy is energy that pushes things apart, and is the opposite of gravity. However, this is tens of thousands of years beyond our technology if it is even possible to accumulate enough negative energy to hold a wormhole open, and we have also never seen a wormhole in the universe before. They have only been predicted by calculations and never been observed. Therefore, the wormhole scene in Interstellar was based on speculation as well as the predictions of a well-accepted theory. Interstellar did have parts that were not realistic according to today’s knowledge of the universe.
One example is when Cooper and TARS fell into Gargantua unscathed. Black holes have an infinitely strong gravitational field that would have torn Cooper’s space ship, his body, and TARS apart. Additionally, the intense radiation from the black hole’s accretion disk would have raised the temperature enormously, probably melting the Ranger’s hull or at least making it dangerously hot for Cooper to be in if the Ranger was heat-shielded. Black holes rip apart planets, neutron stars, and even traps photons moving at 186,000 miles per second if it gets too close.
It would be impossible for the Ranger to be made up of a material that would not be shredded apart, because the black hole would rip apart the molecules that made up the material. Therefore, the black hole scene in Interstellar could not happen in real life, and was added to keep the movie thrilling and exciting. DRAWING COMPARISONS TO 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey had similar literary aspects. Both movies were set in the distant future, where everyday life was completely different than it is today.
In Interstellar, the blight had caused most of the world’s population to become farmers in order to feed the world’s mouths. Dust storms were common, and life on Earth could not survive much longer. The central point of the movie was that humans needed to leave Earth in order for humanity to survive. It painted a dark picture of our future. The perspective that 2001: A Space Odyssey took was optimistic at first, but then sent a clear warning about the dangers of technology. In the beginning of the movie, we see Heywood Floyd take a space shuttle from the Earth to the Moon.
Before leaving, he was at a space station where he video chatted with his daughter who was back on Earth. He departed on a small spaceship that housed a small number of people. The space ride was similar to an airplane ride, with hostesses bringing food and passengers enjoying the view. This notion that space travel could be as common as an airplane ride in the future showed the positive potential for technology to change our world. Additionally, in 2001: A Space Odyssey there was a line of super-intelligent computers known as the HAL 9000.
These computers had never made an error, and were intelligent enough to manage the computer systems of the Discovery during the Jupiter mission. However, 2001: A Space Odyssey took a dark turn when the HAL on the Discovery turned against its crew. He falsely claimed that a part was malfunctioning, and when the crew discovered that the part was working perfectly, HAL suggested that they return the part to its spot outside the spaceship. Frank Poole went outside to do so, and HAL killed him in the process. When Dave Bowman asked him what had happened, HAL lied and told him that he had insufficient information about what happened.
Dave went outside to retrieve Frank’s body, and in the meantime, HAL turned off life support for the crewmembers in cryogenic sleep. He then tried to lock Dave Bowman out of the Discovery, but Dave was too clever and managed to sneak in and disconnect HAL. The theme of man’s tools replacing man was a dark reminder about the dangers of technology and the fragility of humans. While Interstellar was heavily focused on science, specifically astronomy and physics, 2001: A Space Odyssey was not as entrenched in science. Interstellar showed us black holes, a 5-dimensional time machine, a wormhole, and 3 extrasolar planets.
Also, many of the characters were scientists, such as Dr. Brand, Romilly, and Dr. Brand’s father. They discussed science often in Interstellar. For example, when the Endurance was about to land on Miller’s planet, Romilly explained the time dilation that would occur due to relativity. Additionally, adult Murph and Dr. Brand’s father were working on a new theory of gravity, and we got to see what it was like for them to struggle to figure it out. Meanwhile, 2001: A Space Odyssey concentrated more on the plot of the movie rather than science.
There is very little talk about astronomy or physics. The concentration of the movie is the evolution of civilization, from a group of apes to space-exploring humans and finally to Star Children. The progression of our species is what drives the movie forward. Additionally, this movie was made in the dawn of the personal computer age. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed the dangers of computer giants such as IBM through HAL during the Discovery’s voyage. Overall, Interstellar was entrenched in science while 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced traces of it throughout the movie.
Both Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey showed a dark vision of our future and the great lengths that a hero had to go through to save our world. In Interstellar, Cooper had to leave his daughter and the world behind him as he traveled through space and time risking his life to find a new home for humanity. Dave Bowman had to fight against a hyper-intelligent computer and travel to the black monolith’s ‘laboratory’ to be reborn as the Star Child and watch over the human race. Comparing the two movies was comparing two sci-fi movies that defined an era.
2001: A Space Odyssey represented a time where commercial moon flights and supercomputers were dreams that humanity sought. Interstellar represented a time where traveling between the stars and formulating a complete theory of gravity is the goal of our journey. Both movies had common themes and were reasonably accurate, but the reason they are remembered today is because they resonate with human curiosity and imagination. They showed us what we can only dream of doing, and it is that special aspect that makes Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey worth remembering.
