Why scientists are in a love
Image: Interstellar, Paramount Pictures
Christopher Nolan's new film, Interstellar, has already gobbled up $17 million at the box office, and is expected to gross over $50 million this weekend.
Interstellar, which follows a group of astronauts who go through a wormhole in an attempt to find a new habitable planet to save mankind, is playing in no less than six different formats at theaters across the United States.
Reviews of the film (check out Mashable's review, here) have been mixed. Although critics and audiences mostly like the film, it's not earning the same kind of universal acclaim that some of Nolan's previous films - including The Dark Knight and Inception - have earned.
Interstellar is an interesting film in the science fiction pantheon because it takes much of its inspiration not only from other sci-fi films (notably 2001: A Space Odyssey), but from actual science itself.
As we've seen with 2013's hit Gravity, scientists, astronauts and physicists have opinions about how their work is translated to the big screen.
So how does Interstellar stack up? Well, as with its critical reviews, reactions are mixed.
Warning: Light spoilers ahead. We've done our best to avoid any outright plot revelations, and are preserving the ending, but be aware that some of the linked articles do not hold back.A solid foundation
The premise for Interstellar was originally the work of film producer Lynda Obst and theoretical physicist Dr. Kip Thorne. The idea, which was based in part on Thorne's research, was to create a film around the concepts of black holes and wormholes.
Thorne was both an executive producer and the scientific consultant for the film. According to a profile in Wired, Nolan (who co-wrote the script with his brother Jonathan) worked together with Thorne to 'get a handle on the science' in the story. Thorne was also consulted by the special effects team to help them more accurately visualize how a wormhole and black hole would actually look.
Thorne told Wired that although 'the story is now essentially all Chris and Jonah's ... the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is embedded in the fabric from the beginning-and it's great science-that was preserved.'
This is echoed by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. Kaku told CBS News that Interstellar 'could set the gold standard for science fiction movies for years to come.'
Likewise, Tim Reyes, a former NASA software engineer, writes at Universe Today that, 'Thorne's and Nolan's accounting of black holes and worm holes and the use of gravity is excellent. Interstellar makes a 21st Century use of gravity in contrast to Gravity that was stuck in the 20th Century warning us to be careful where you park your space vehicle.'
Getting it mostly right
Image: Interstellar, Paramount Pictures
Jeffrey Kluger, Time magazine's editor at large and the author of Apollo 13 (which was the basis of the 1995 film of the same name), discussed the scientific accuracy for some of the film's plot points for Time.com.
There are some minor spoilers in the article, but Kluger does a good job of sussing out the film's portrayal of black holes and worm holes from the actual science.
For Kluger, the film gets most of the big parts right. Still, that isn't to say there aren't examples of artistic license. This is a fictional film after all.
One bit of license the Interstellar story did take concerns how the wormhole came to be. It takes a massive object to generate a gravity field sufficient to fold space-time in half, and the one in the movie would have to be the equivalent of 100 million of our suns.... Depending on where in the universe you placed an object with that kind of mass, it could make a real mess of the surrounding worlds-but it doesn't in the movie.
Kluger's opinion is shared by Sky and Telescope's Robert Naeye who basically gave Interstellar an A for effort.
To my delight, Interstellar clearly falls within the domain of true sci-fi. The producers were clearly inspired by the science, and they even used the time dilation from Einstein's general theory of relativity to enhance the drama and ask interesting moral questions of the characters. Compared to the vast majority of Hollywood flicks, I give Interstellar high marks for its attempts at scientific realism.
That isn't to say that Naeye doesn't have some issues with the film. He has qualms with how it portrays what happens to the crew once it arrives in the other galaxy.
Light Spoiler Warning
And while Naeye praises the way the film renders a black hole, he criticizes the idea that a spacecraft would actually be able to travel closely to one.
In reality, traveling so close to one of these beasts would be lethal. The movie shows a highly luminous accretion disk of gas, even though there's no obvious source (such as a star) of accreting matter. High-energy X-rays from the disk would literally fry a spacecraft and its human inhabitants.
Soft in the middle
Image: Interstellar, Paramount Pictures
Writing for The Guardian, Dr. Roberto Trotta also breaks down some of the scientific aspects of the film. (Note: Trotta's article contains spoilers.)
Trotta writes that he was disappointed by the 'core science of the movie,' but in general, there were parts of the movie that stuck to the books.
There was much that was accurate: the representations of space travel, zero gravity, the surfaces of other planets - they were all fantastic. Alongside this, though, were many classical devices of science fiction: time travel, warping of space-time, traveling vast distances in extremely short time. Interstellar had a veneer of science, but at its core was not as sound as I thought it might be.
Plot holes in black holes
Image: Paramount Pictures, Interstellar
Not every science critic appreciated the film. Astronomer Phil Plait (the author of Slate's Bad Astronomy blog) eviscerates the film from a narrative and scientific point of view in his spoiler-laden review.
Plait, who writes that he really wanted to like Interstellar, really didn't like the film. Like, he really didn't like it.
Although Plait had plenty of issues with the plot of the film, his real beef was with the science.
Here's an excerpt of Plait's takedown ( spoilers within):
It turns out that one of the three planets orbits very close to the black hole, so close there will be severe relativistic effects. Relative to a distant observer, time slows down near a black hole (true), so one hour on the planet will equal seven years elapsing back on Earth. Right away, this is a big problem. To get that kind of time dilation (a factor of about 60,000), you need to be just over the surface of the black hole, and I mean just over the surface, practically skimming it. But because of the way black holes twist up space, the minimum stable orbit around a black hole must be at least three times the size of the black hole itself. Clocks would run a bit more slowly at that distance than for someone on Earth, but only by about 20 percent.
In other words, for the planet to have the huge time dilation claimed in the movie, it would have to be too close to the black hole to have a stable orbit. Bloop! It would fall in.
Over at Vulture, their team has compiled a list of '21 things in Interstellar that don't make sense.'
Most of these things (and yes, this list is full of spoilers) deal with the plot, rather than the movie's scientific underpinnings, but it does outline one of the basic questions about space travel and time travel.
But what does Neil deGrasse Tyson think?
Image: Frank Micelotta/Invision for FOX/Associated Press
After his Twitter take-down of Gravity, some of us were hoping to see acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson share his thoughts on Interstellar.
Alas, Tyson hasn't tweeted his response to the film. But he did share some of his thoughts with NBC News.
The verdict? Tyson seemed to enjoy the film - even if every detail wasn't perfect. He especially enjoyed the way the film captured a black hole.
According to Tyson, 'when you approach a black hole, the black hole is distorting space in its vicinity, and this was captured beautifully.' He continued, 'I enjoyed watching the surrounding imagery get distorted. ... It's a sophisticated ray-tracing problem, and if you're a movie producer and you can get it right, then why not?'
Tyson will be talking about the film with Christopher Nolan on an upcoming episode of Star Talk Radio.
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