Interstellar : The Science Behind 2014’s EPIC MOVIE

2014 saw the release of a movie named Interstellar; this movie presented some scientific facts that made it easier for the general public to understand the functioning of space and its constituents. Some things that everyone should know about- the points made in the movie- here’s a small show for you. A movie nominated for the academy awards, here’s reminiscing the real game-changer..

DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING BLINDLY!

Here are some solid reasons that will teach you why you shouldn’t believe everything blindly, no matter how logical it seems to be:

• The movie has what is called Bootstrap paradox.
  They show that future Cooper sends a message to Cooper about the coordinates to the NASA facility, without which NASA wouldn’t have selected him in the first place. Question is, How did the future Cooper go to space in the first place?
• A humanity-saving mission taking off the day after an old pilot who never left the stratosphere randomly shows up at the NASA station with no vetting, qualification, training or preparation.

• Murphy is younger than Brand. If Murphy is already dying of old age by the time Cooper magically reappeared again, Brand can’t possibly be alive. Even if Brand experienced time slowdown relative to earth time, Cooper went into the black hole on top of the slingshot around it. As he approaches it, his time slowdown vs Brand will be even greater and he probably didn’t traverse that astronomical distance in hours.
• They also show that future humans create the flux inside the blackhole, consisting of the bookshelf world for Cooper to communicate with Murph and send her the blackhole data for her to solve the Gravity equation, allowing her to save humanity and build the world she did. The question that stands is, how did the future humans survive in the first place in order to be able to evolve a 5 dimensional space? It’s like If I had a bomb to diffuse, I’d use a code that the future me sent, which would kill me unless diffused. Question is, how did the future me survive in the first place, to be able to give me the code?

• If traveling between planets 2 and 3 is faster with a slingshot around the black hole, it means that moving to the black hole is necessarily similar in distance to moving to the other planet directly which means the black hole is already in that solar system which then wouldn’t exist for long.

• If they’re deep enough into the black hole that 1 hour is 7 years on the first planet, they’re already so deep in a gravity well that it would take immense energy to climb out of it, much more than chemical thrusters that a Lander can provide.

• Slingshooting around the black hole would experience such time delay that even if anything fruitful came out of it, humanity on earth already likely expired, especially considering it takes 2 years to travel to Saturn (probably when earth is closest to Saturn) and that a slingshot around a black hole takes a similar amount of time.

• There’s no Doppler effect in the light waves when Cooper is looking around near the black hole.

• Near the black hole, there’s so much matter being squished together that the black body radiation of the accretion disk reaches x-ray frequency. There’s no way a spacecraft can travel into it.
• A pilot and apparently smart engineer needing to be explained what a wormhole is once a mission which involves traveling through a wormhole is already underway
• Why did they send 12 people through the wormhole? Were there 12 earth-like planets in that single solar system ? Adding to this, there isn’t a single earth-like planet in all the systems we  observe in the milky way?
• Not being able to detect that massive tidal waves are covering the first planet without first landing or exercising any degree of prudence.
• Wanting to colonize a planet in a system near/in a black hole.
• Creating artificial gravity aboard Endurance by spinning will create differently felt gravity in the lander at the center of the ship than the ring on the outside of the ship.
• There is no explanation about where the biomass would come from to populate a colony using plan B’s genetic data banks. What energy will take the primitive compounds to create the complex organic compounds that forms biomass?
• A spacecraft isn’t built to survive shearing forces of water tides. ( PLEASE !)
• Getting off earth required a 3 stage rocket but getting off of the other planets with similar gravity just required a lander craft?
• Traveling between 2 planets in our solar system required 2 years in cryo sleep but they were able to just flag a cab ride for 15 minutes to travel between planets in the other system
• The Endurance after losing a chunk of itself couldn’t possibly rotate around its airlock which is no longer at its center of gravity, Could it now?
• They built a seat ejector in a spacecraft? Really now?
• Cooper could still ‘see’ the inside of the craft after entering the event horizon which doesn’t make sense at any level.( Super powers? )
• What data encoding and transmission mechanism did he use to send data via the watch hand? Was it ASCII? UTF-8? How did he communicate the beginning and end of the transmission?
• If there was no sentient ‘they’ helping them, who consciously decided to lock Cooper in the tesseract specifically behind Murphy’s bedroom bookshelf during her childhood? Why couldn’t he ‘manipulate gravity’ such that the blight never existed?

Image Source : Google Images

If you find an answer to some of the questions I raised above, Well! Do answer them. But if you don’t ( I know you won’t be able to) just remember this :

Next time you see a pizza, don’t just jump to eat it; might have been topped with rotten vegetables attached to the delicious and melting cheese.

By Shreya Gupta