Or Barry Bonds. 
Not Aliens, far future Humans.
But what is the distinction here?
In the case of the warp drive say, there is such a concept in theoretical physics, and we can say if X hypothesis is right, and Y model, and we ignore the problem of Z which would make the whole thing fatal, it might just be possible.
I don’t see how this is different to the “artistic liberties” as you put it, with interstellar.
I never said it is all wrong, I’ve just said it contains a number of flaws, more than many films that people have denounced as containing junk science.
However, this is not me taking a quote out of context, this is me quoting a professor of astrophysics that is specifically discussing the science in the film.
I’m aware that Thorne has given a response to the physics community about some of these criticisms. Frankly not too convincingly in my view; for example, on the radiation thing he basically says “If this and this and this, then they might survive” (paraphrasing).
I could defend any movie’s science like that.
Since this thread is still alive, I’ll come out and say the robots didn’t impress me. They were basically faceless blocks with a regular person’s voice coming out of them. Their design was not especially creative (so they look like 2001 monoliths, so what?) or badass. Compared to other robots in this genre, they are rather forgettable.
I mean, I didn’t hate them, but I don’t see them revolutionizing anything.
I think the robots were quite creatively designed. For one, they didn’t just look like a person, which already puts them ahead of 99% of movie robots.
I wouldn’t say that they were revolutionary. I just thought that they were really well done. I wanted TARS to have more screen time because he was so much better written than most of the human characters.
Yes, I agree that it sort of works as far as the story goes. Sure, Mann could have booby-trapped the robot to blow up if someone tinkered with it (although why didn’t he just push it off a cliff somewhere?) But the scene didn’t quite work in a cinematographic sense. I’m not sure I have the right vocabulary to describe this because I have no formal film education, but the shots leading up to the explosion are all wrong. The camera angles, the dialog, the pacing of the shots… none of them indicate that he’s about to set off a booby trap, or that he has set off a booby trap. When I watched them, I thought Mann was about to come up behind him and hit him over the head, which would have fit with the cues. And then - explosion! It’s jarring and strange and appears not to have been scripted that way when they originally shot those scenes, then hacked in later. Christopher Nolan is far too adept a filmmaker to have planned something so clumsy. This was the Plan B.
Compare that to the build-up of the failed-docking explosion. That one is foreshadowed and set up exactly as you’d expect.
No, there is not such a concept in real theoretical physics (outside the popular books fueled by the wild imaginations of Michio Kaku and his ilk) – on the contrary, relativity tells us that such faster-than-light travel is impossible because the fundamental nature of space-time would lead to irresolvable contradictions including violations of causality – precisely why Kip Thorne rejected such a concept when Nolan wanted to use it in the film. There is a rather vast difference between science fiction that presupposes an advanced civilization that can do things that we don’t know how to do but we can show mathematically how they would work, and “science fiction” that just simplistically assumes that an advanced civilization can do the impossible and violate the laws of physics with impunity. The latter is not sci-fi, it’s pure fantasy, and sometimes laughable. It has nothing to support it. The science of Interstellar does. That’s the distinction I’m making.
Granted, there are minor exceptions where Kip Thorne gave in to the preferences of Chris Nolan or the CG folks at Double Negative. But those are minor. For instance Thorne carefully worked out what the gravitational lensing might look like through wormholes of various shapes and proportions, and Nolan went with the one that looked best and then created the graphics for the trip through the wormhole that were inconsistent with the shape implied by the lensing. To me this is perfectly reasonable artistic license.
Perfect example of what I just said above. It’s hardly implausible or fantastical to suggest that there could be a black hole with a very minimal and weakly radiating accretion disk simply due to the absence of sufficient infalling matter to maintain one. An accretion disk is not intrinsic, it’s just a function of a black hole’s surrounding environment. Sounds to me like your professor of astrophysics is just grouchy because Kip Thorne was asked to work on this film and he wasn’t. 
I don’t think the presumption was that Endurance was perfectly in sync with earth time, only that it didn’t experience really significant time dilation, whereas those traveling down to Miller’s planet did. The latter was accounted for by the fact that Miller’s planet was very close to Gargantua’s event horizon and subject to immense gravitational force, whereas Endurance was far enough away that gravitationally induced time dilation was relatively insignificant.
Kip Thorne worked out the necessary orbital mechanics in quite some detail. Given the mass of Gargantua (about a million solar masses, IIRC) in order for Miller’s planet to experience the necessary time dilation of one hour relative to seven years on earth, it would have to be close enough to the event horizon that it would have an orbital period of just 1.7 hours as observed from a distant frame of reference, and just one-tenth of a second as observed on the planet itself! Its ability to orbit and rotate under these conditions is accounted for by the distortions of space caused by Gargantua’s rapid spin, which Thorne computed as needing to be within a tiny fraction of the maximum possible black hole spin rate.
Other complications that arise are that if the planet rotated under these conditions it would be subject to such immense tidal forces that the mantle would be pulverized and the resulting friction would make it red hot (such tidal forces are theorized to heat the interiors of the moons of some of our solar system’s giant planets). So the presumption is that, like our moon, Miller’s planet is tidally locked, keeping one face always toward Gargantua – almost. Thorne hypothesizes a tiny wobble associated with its axial tilt which he computed as having a locally measured period of about one hour – my own interpretation is that these are analogous to the earth’s Milankovitch cycles. Happily, this period coincided with the script’s call for giant tidal waves on the planet with about a one hour period, which Thorne says was entirely but providentially coincidental. These giant tidal waves, caused by Gargantua’s immense gravity, are supposed to be similar to the very much smaller tidal bores we get here on earth.
I don’t…entirely agree. During the scenes when CASE (was it CASE? I forget) was trying to access the databanks of the destroyed robot, there was a distinct “something is going to go horribly wrong here” vibe. Maybe it didn’t directly telegraph “Hey, this thing is gonna blow up!” but it was clear to me that SOMETHING was set up to go wrong.
It’s speculative, but no more so than the wormhole in Interstellar.
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Sounds to me like your professor of astrophysics is just grouchy because Kip Thorne was asked to work on this film and he wasn’t.
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…or they are raising valid points.
Either way, I agree with the point that at least it is getting people talking about these concepts.
I’m pretty happy to just leave this point; like I say, whether the science is accurate or not had little to do with my enjoyment (or lack of) of the movie.
There was totally a “something is going to go wrong” vibe. But in my opinion, it was a “he’s going to figure out the truth, then Mann is going to kill him from behind” vibe, rather than a “the whole place is wired to blow” vibe.
But, having seen it only once, and not having it to refer to, I can’t point to anything in particular. If I remember, I’ll revive this thread when it’s out on video and I have a chance to study that scene more.
Thread is gettin a bit old, thought I would freshen this up, having just watched the movie.
I would imagine that the rest of the world still has people , just that they might not have any more organised govts
I did not see authoritarian, more like practical puritanical moving towards feudal, as evidenced by the remark about uneducated farmers, made by coop. I laughed out loud when I heard the moon landing thing, made me wonder if someone was taking a swipe at the deniers, but if you wanted to discredit Nasa from ever forming again, then all you would have to do is wait a few generations, and retcon the past, why, the only reason I could think of is that someone wanted everyone to be thinking salvation was not going to be coming from a bunch of egg heads in nasa, but an all hands to the wheel evolution on earth, this is just a worse blight than the thirties, but it too shall pass.
Someone in the past would have gotten a briefing on the situation, did the numbers and come up with an extinction level situation in 50 or 60 years, Nasa might have been able to give the heads up earlier, so they had to go, as well as surplus populations to extend things abit. No military means , to me , no threats.
We really dont even know if there is still a federal govt in Washington.
Declan
FTR, it was TARS. CASE was piloting the ship that rescued Cooper when the compound exploded. When Cooper approaches the compound, TARS is running out, and Cooper says “TARS, TARS, 10 o’clock. Let me know when TARS is aboard.” And, yeah, Romilly says “This data makes no sense.” You pretty much knew things would not go well from there.
Yeah, that was kinda fucked up. I just saw the flick yesterday and was wondering if maybe I missed where he was told the son had died or something, I guess not. “Screw that hillbilly farmer, where’s my smart child!”
I just saw this on Blu-Ray last night. I’ve read the entire thread, and still have questions about two key points on the science in the movie.
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Time Dilation. I do not understand how there can be a place where time runs 1 hour to 7 years on Earth. For this to happen as a result of velocity time dilation, the relative velocity of the ship to Earth would have to be about 0.999999999c. There is no claim in the movie that is happening, AFAICT. The math for gravitational dilation is a little beyond my reach at the moment (learned it 36 years ago) but back-of-the-envelope says the gravity would have to be approximately pretty damned high, too high to casually wade through a pool of water, too high to stand up, maybe too high to survive. In either case, the time dilation would be about the same whether they were on the planet’s surface, or in orbit some distance above it, so I just have no idea what the science behind this is supposed to be.
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Why are they calling that thing a “tesseract”? A tesseract is simply a fourth-dimensional version of a cube. That is, a square has the number of parallel congruent pairs of line segments that intersect at right angles in two dimensions (think of the segments emerging from a corner as being the positive x and y axes). A cube has the number of pairs parallel congruent line segments that can intersect at right angles in three dimensions (think of the segments emerging from a vertex as being the positive x, y, and z axes). A tesseract is the same idea in four dimensions.
Another way to think of it is a line segment lies in one dimension. A square is the largest set of equal line segments with ends that connect at right angles lying in a plane. A cube is the largest set of squares that connect at right angles in three-space. A tesseract is the largest set of cubes that intersect at right angles in four-space (the concept of cubes intersecting at right angles is impossible for nearly everybody to visualize but is clearly defined mathematically).
So how is a physical structure that represents the worldline of Earth a tesseract?
By the way, the whole wormhole explanation using a piece of paper is lifted directly from A Wrinkle In Time, published in 1963. I read that book just a couple of years after it was published. However, in that book the author incorrectly used the term tesseract to mean wormhole, a term coined in 1957.
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Time dilation was due to gravity from the black hole, not the planet’s gravity. Right? Probably still not survivable.
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I always thought a tesseract was a three-dimensional representation of a hypercube, which cannot be represented in three- or two-dimensional space. In any case, there is no way to represent on film what anyone would experience in dimensions we cannot wrap our heads around, so I think they just used something that would represent it.
An observational aside.
During the same week I saw both Noah and Interstellar.
If you haven’t seen either, I suggest seeing both close together as an interesting exercise.
- The time dilation was experienced on the surface of the water planet. If it was due to Gargantua’s gravity, the effects of that time dilation would also have been experienced by the guy who waited on the Endurance. Also, wouldn’t that kind of gravity be felt on the planet’s surface? Or would the centrifugal force of its orbit somehow cancel that out? If so it seems that the time dilation would also be canceled out. Also, I am not clear on how far out the Endurance was parked but it would have had to have been very far for the time on the Endurance to be comparable to Earth.
Well, I ordered Kip’s book so maybe I’ll find out from the horse’s mouth.
I think the spaceship was far away enough to not feel the effects. But I don’t know how far away that would have to be. Or… maybe, the endurance was feeling an effect but since they were so much closer, time was much more accelerated for them.
What bothers me is that some reviewers seemed to think that the spaceships were traveling faster than light or near light speed in order to have time dilation. The spaceships traveled at reasonable speeds for the technology. It took them years to get to Saturn which is why they had to sleep. The time dilation was due to gravity not the spaceships traveling at near light speed. Just wanted to get that off my chest.
I know this is several months later but the son says they were going to name him Coop, but named him Jesse (sp?).