Did materials science fall into a black hole in Interstellar ?
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I
am a big fan of science fiction—books and movies. Recently, I finally watched the movie Interstellar.1 It’s a great movie with a fantastic cast (Michael Caine, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy, John Lithgow, Ellen Burstyn, Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon to mention a few) and something for everyone. The premise of the movie is a future Earth facing an environmental apocalypse and efforts to avoid the end of mankind by finding an extraterrestrial home. If you can see the movie at an IMAX theater, that’s probably the best way to experience it. I don’t get to theaters much anymore, so I saw it on my television at home. In addition to the environmental apocalypse, the movie contains amazing spacecraft, wormholes, black holes, relativistic effects, intelligent robots with a sense of humor, hints at beings from an advanced civilization, a tesseract (a hypercube),2 communications backward in time, cryonic systems that enable a kind of biological stasis, elements of trust and betrayal, extraordinary heroics and cowardice, and love stories. Kip Thorne, professor of physics at Caltech, was one of the guiding forces behind the development of the movie and insisted that the science be as real as possible. There was a significant scientific effort to make sure that the images associated with the wormhole and the black hole, as well as the relativistic effects, were founded in our best knowledge of the science associated with these phenomena. The movie is highly enjoyable, even if you don’t understand (or care) about the science. Nonetheless, after watching the movie, I found that I had a lot of unanswered questions. My first effort to answer the questions led me to read the novelization based upon the movie.3 This answered some of my questions, but raised even more. Fortunately, there is additional help available. Thorne has written an excellent book (with Christopher Nolan, the producer of the film) discussing the science behind the movie—mostly about the wormhole, black hole, tesseract, orbital mechanics for planets and spacecraft, and relativistic issues, but also
including a discussion of the biological aspects of environmental disasters.4 A very helpful feature of the book is that Thorne labels each section with a T for true, EG for educated guess, or S for speculative. The book also points to parts of the movie where scientific accuracy had to be ignored for various reasons. Another aspect of the book that I like is that the authors are very generous in pointing to other materials (books, etc.) for those who are interested in diving deeper into the subject matter. Two of the books recommended by Thorne are Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy5 and Warped Passages.6 I have found them very enjoyable and informative. In regard to tesseracts, I remember in my distant youth reading a short story written by Robert A. Heinlein in 1941 entitled “And He Built a Crooked House” that was republished in a collection of Heinlein’s work.7 The story revolves around an architect who
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