University:
Felician University
Course:
PHYS-355 | Advanced Topics in Physics
Academic year:

2020
Views:

270

Pages:

1
Author:

5CelestialChronicle

INTERSTELLAR Enjoy the movie… but learn the astrophysics! Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception) and starring Matthew McConaughey (Contact) and Anne Hathaway (Dark Knight Rises). The film follows a crew of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in space in search of a new home for humanity as a future Earth slowly dies. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. "For the depictions of the wormholes … I worked on the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein's general relativity equations." Thorne was also the science advisor on “Contact” and early in the process, he laid down two guidelines: "First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations... would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter." The plot of the film deals with hard to imagine but real physics, such as the effect of gravity and speed on time, an effect known as time dilation. This has been demonstrated on Earth by noting that atomic clocks at different altitudes (and thus different gravities) will eventually show different times. Greater speed and lesser gravity actually slows the passing of time! Wormholes, or Einstien-Rosen bridges, as featured in this film, are hypotheticals ‘tubes’ through three dimensional space. Researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, but the equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. So while we’ve never actually seen one, the laws of physics allow that they can exist. The portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is considered scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, because it’s a 3D hole, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy. This movie packs a LOT of science in, but most of it hinges the fundamental relationship between what we call space and what we call time, and how the two concepts aren’t as different as they appear to us.