Apparently, the project was originally born from the desire of an astrophysicist to put a realistic black hole on screen.
So they did.
And the simulation was so realistic that they get new scientific data out of it.
Ok, now count me hyped.
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I had heard of some of this, but I didnāt know Kip Thorne helped them model it or that it was meant to be scientific from the beginning! Iāve also heard they got the info on how to show a blackhole/wormhole from the same guys that EVE online got theirs from. I expected them(and still do) to look similar. This was an awesome read, nice find!
Edit: Iāve read the article twice now and that is too cool.
This is also my favorite quote from it: "In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. āI thought we might cross the petabyte threshold on this one,ā
Just came back from the IMAX.
Great film. They definitely went to the borders of theoretical physics and that believable. Cudos.
I liked the robots.
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Iām going in an hour! I took the risk of spoilers by clicking thisā¦thank you for having none!
Edit: It was fantastic. I highly recommend it - Itās easily one of the best movies Iāve seen in awhile in my own opinion.
The robots were greatā¦I loved tars
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Didā¦ Did we watch different movies or something?
Pretty ray traced graphics passed through a properly modeled gravitational lens doesnāt make the science in the film any good. Or even consistent, for that matter. For all of the hype around the science of the movie Iāve seen over the last few weeks, one would have expectes the group of astrophysicists who watched it last night to not have mocked it mercilessly in the lobby afterwards. But we skewered it.
Nolan tried so hard to be Kubrick I almost started to feel bad for him. The movie doesnāt so much invite comparisons to 2001 as it begs for them. It was laughable.
At least the story was a decent soft sci-fi story. They packed 2 hours of it into a 3 hour package, but the bones were good, and the acting was good. The technobabble was a reasonable 0.5 Treks, and the characters were infinitely more likeable than those in Prometheus. I wish the tone had stayed dark and bleak, but there was nothing wrong with a happy ending.
Iām glad I avoided all of the discussions about the movie. If I had been excited for the film, Iād have been devastated.
Marginal 3/5. Glad I saw it in IMAX. The eye candy let me distract myself from the āscienceā.
Warning: small spoiler alert
There were flaws in the science yes, but I can let myself overlook them for the sake of the movie itself. Comparing itself to similar films it surpasses many. It is difficult to make any film 100% accurate.
So what if its eye candy? It did a great job of bring delicious. Thatās part of the appeal, along with mostly realistic physics.
7 years in 1 hour seemed pretty ridiculous and I sleepily calculated you would need a gamma of 61000(please correct me if Iām missing something or wrong) to get that sort of dilation. Its absurd. But it added to the plot and made for a good āwowā factor to people who have never even heard of or understood relativity.
It seems absurd to myself but thatās because thatās what Iām interested in. The vast majority of the public simply isnāt and the film stands to explain the basic concepts of what happens, without losing the viewers interest.
I looked around the theatre when I saw it and the movie had people on the edge of their seats, Iām not even exaggerating.
My point is, it was good enough. We canāt and should not expect perfection. I canāt expect machenehey(I have no clue how you spell it and Iām on my phone, will fix later) to inform the audience about how they will put the ship into a geosynchronous orbit and then perform a hohmann transfer to maximize efficiency of their lander. And then explain to them what that all means.
You have so little time the director must make sacrifices on how accurate to be. With the type of audience heās shooting for(that being the mass public) I think he did a fantastic job of explaining and making everything as real as possible. For the diehard physics nerds who know too much it left something to desire, and films made for a different audience always will.
This is why I loved it as much as I did. I saw it a tool to get people awed and interested in space exploration. I like to imagine the thousands of kids and teenagers who see and it say to themselves,āholy shot being an engineer/astronaut is awesome, I want to get into that field somehowā
Anyways /endrant
Iām tired so sorry about grammar and typos. Iāll check later
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Spoilersā¦
Watched it last night, and I completely agree, the robots were excellent. I was expecting the ever present ābad robot / aiā cliche to occur at some pointā¦ but it never happened, which felt fresh and unexpected.
The science was something I too had to put out of my mindā¦ it would be too hard to enjoy if Iād nitpicked, but some details were done well. Lack of sound in the space shots being the most pronounced, well timed, well placed, and done rather nicely
.
I know Iād watch it again, but not in theatersā¦ Iāve become bitter and dismayed at the behavior of movie goersā¦ munching, noisy, disrespectfulā¦ How many people leave as soon as the closing credits have been hinted at, it can really kill the mood. I think Iāll end the rant there.
Would recommend, 4.5 wormholes / 3 potentially habitable worlds orbiting a small black hole for one reason or anotherā¦ capable of sustaining human life? @Kichae ? Thoughts on that?
Apparently, this āmost accurate black hole simulation everā was, letās say, a bit overblown.
Here is a 1991 simulation :
You can note that the disk is asymmetrical. The disk is rotating so fast that it creates a Doppler effect that blueshifts (well, yellowshift here) one side and redshifts the other.
One of the authors (also the author of the first black hole simulation in 1979) published an article about it here in French for those interested.
He notes, though, that Kip Thorne is probably not responsible for it, intends to make a fully realistic simulation (with the Doppler effect, cut from the movie because) and properly cite the previous works done on the subject ; he attributes this bit of misinformation to the media and their tendency to not, you know, do proper journalistic work.
Not that it will prevent me to see the movie anyway, hopefully this week.
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Health warning: Above post has a TVTropes link in it. Click at your own risk.
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You know, the biggest sin a sci-fi or fantasy story can commit is to fail in inducing a sense of awe or wonder in its audience. I definitely think that Interstellar succeeded in making its world interesting, though I would suggest that it was a marginal success: a victory won with compelling characters and a not-so-entirely-off-the-wall threat of global agriculture failure. Thatās by no means a bad thing, but I honestly felt the story āat homeā was so very much more compelling than anything that happened in the black.
The movie was, frankly, misnamed.
I donāt have any issues with movies that make up BS science for the sake of story. I do have issues with movies that make up BS science for no good reason (there are few things more aggravating for me, when watching a movie, than seeing writers make up pure nonsense thatās really just background noise), and Interstellar is guilty of that in places, but its bigger crime is just the glaring inconsistencies.
Like the Ranger, for instance. It required a two stage rocket to lift the thing off of a 1g world, but on a 1.3g world it just space-planed itself into orbit. That whole Apollo-esque rocket launch was rendered obsolete.
Oh, and the test pilot not actually checking that it was safe to land on that first world? Ugh. Thatās almost worse than a planet with a 2 foot deep ocean generating waves that were hundreds of metres high. Especially when that planet is in a gravitational field strong enough to slow time by a factor of 2500, meaning that almost all of that water should be located in two massive tidal bulges (one on the black hole side of the world, and one opposite to the black hole). Even if it were possible for waves that large to occur (and it was a good, dramatic scene, so Iām willing to make allowances for them), they would have been visible from orbit. I guess they would have appeared to be āfrozenā, and so appear as mountains, but I walked away from that whole encounter feeling like everyone was incredibly reckless, and Iām not convinced that was the point of that adventure.
If it was, then my issues with this planet basically boil down to āwho thought a planet on the inner edge of a black holeās orbital stability zone was going to be hospitable in the first place?ā I mean, that world is going to be bombarded by high energy radiation from the accretion disk and debris falling in toward the black hole! Better yet, why would you start at the deepest part of the gravitational well? If one of the outer planets had been habitable, there would have been no need to go closer in, and they would have had fuel to spare.
Well, that and the space plane thing.
Believing there could be life on the icy world was a joke. I mean, the clouds were frozen. Thatās one of those times were you just yell ānopeā, and fly away. I get that they wanted to believe Dr. Mann, especially since they basically bet their fuel reserves on his beacon, but reallyā¦ You have to figure that A) someone realized that black holes donāt produce a whole lot of heat, so getting farther away from one than that watery death trap they started on wasnāt going to end well, or at least B) the guy left on their space station there would have done a quick, back of the envelope calculation about the surface temperature of that world during the two decades he spent alone doing jack all.
There are some real questions about whether those planets ā particularly the innermost one ā could actually exist at all. If the black hole isnāt rotating, that inner planet isnāt in a stable orbit, and would have long ago spiralled in to its doom. If the black hole is rotating, the planetās orbit is fine, but the magnetic fields associated with the black hole would bathe the entire planetary system in the type of high energy radiation fields that would retroactively sterilize those astronauts ancestors going back about a thousand years.
Oh, and cook them to jerky before they could blink. But mostly the sterile ancestors thing.
You know, if I hadnāt heard nothing but hype about the science in this movie for the two weeks leading up to the premiere, I probably wouldnāt care so much, but the the science was hyped. It was supposed to be a selling point! And it failed to live up to that hype. Plus, I donāt care what the typical movie-goer will pick up on. It hampers my enjoyment of the movie when writers and directors pull this crap. I mean, seriously: They could have just space-planed off of Earth, and Iād be like 60% less irked right now.
On top of that, Nolan really went out of his way to invite comparisons to 2001, which felt really, really awkward.
So no, I didnāt think the movie was āawesomeā or āfantasticā, and Iām more than a little puzzled by people who do. But thatās their business. No amount of apologetics for what the movie did wrong is going to change my opinion on the film, either.
It was alright. Iām not upset I paid to see it.
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/shrug
I tend to be a hard critic of films and I enjoyed it very much. I resorted to calling it fantastic and other euphemisms because I really think so. If I donāt like something, Iāll say it.
Kichae:
You are correct on a lot of points of scientific inaccuracy, some I had thought about and some I had not.
We have different thresholds of where we hold the bar to how scientifically accurate a movie must be, and there is nothing wrong about that. Like you said, when you see advertisements about how scientifically accurate the movie is supposed to be you expect it to be so.
I donāt pay attention to much media and the only articles I had actually read about the movie was the one where it stated the blackholes were rendered realistically. There were my own scientific biases to hold up to and obviously it wasnāt perfect, but it was enough for me. We had different expectations for the accuracy and in the end it comes down to our opinions. To each their own.
So I went to see the film yesterday and I have to agree with most of the comments here.
Yes, some of a science was a little shaky. Yes, some of the scenes were decidedly improbable, even ignoring the odd frankly idiotic decision from the characters. However, I still came out of the cinema and the first word to leave my mouth was "Wow!"
The journey it took me on along with the characters felt substantial. I had a slight fear it was going to stop somewhere and leave me feeling dissatisfied, but no, it just kept going until the bitter (sweet?) end! Plus, who am I to judge their reactions to situations? Perhaps I would do differently, or maybe not. Every time the human condition was picked apart, it felt like as much an exploration of ourselves as another galaxy.
The only thing I would have wanted a little more of would be beauty shots. I donāt know why, but I felt the ones that were there of planets and so on didnāt quite have as much impact as they could have done. Except for the black hole, which was bloody fantastic and very dramatic.
Overall, I enjoyed this film - perhaps more so because I new very little about it going in. The trailer told me nothing and I refused to read anything about it beforehand. It was worth the money. 
Finally got to see it today.
And, well, Kichaeās opinion is pretty much mine as well.
Spoiler alert
Iād add to the bizarre science :
- The agricultural catastrophe. While it could happen, there would be solutions.Going for more agricultural diversity, bar that aggressive programs of genetically modified crops (there may be health/environment problems, sure, but thatās the least of the problems at this point) to hydroponics, coupled with draconian birth control policies (they have generations, so those would have time to work)ā¦ Any of those would not only save more people and be easier than an exodus, but would also be required in the first place for space/alien habitats.
- The oxygen running out. Seriously? What kind of biological process can lower atmospheric oxygen by any significant fraction? There are about 10t of air per mĀ² on Earth. Any biosphere able to change the composition by that many percent over the course of less than a century would have to do something with those many, many kg of difference - i.e. it would either cover everything under a thick carpet of life, or create giant jungle-like biohells on many places. Thatās not a feat a simple crop parasite can even dream of beginning.
- The ship is spinning to fast. You get sick over 3RPM, and severely incapacitated after 6RPM. The ship was turning at least at those 6RPM, and probably faster. Now it seems you can be used to 6+RPM if the acceleration is progressive enough, but in the movie, they donāt bother with it. Also, why get a full 1g? That would needlessly strain the ship, and a lower g would be more comfortable for the crew without yet causing health problems.
- Those are the most silent life support systems Iāve ever heard of. A real ship is loud : sound has nowhere to go and run through the hull until it dissipate. As such, little things like ventilation, generators and such are a constant noise. Which can be great for film-making, with the āwait, why is there silence - oh f*ā moment. In fact, when the Soviet sent a pair of cosmonauts in emergency repair mission to a space station, the silence was one of the first things noted by the commander.
The last two are pure nitpicking, though the first two are so patently ridiculous because they could have gone for a far better explanation - there was apparently a freaking world war ten years ago. Some will say that itās clichĆ©, but something going wrong then and slowly poisoning the Earth would have been far more credible. If youāre going to make science up, then go with the nuclear intensifier!
That said, my friends didnāt have a problem with the movie, so (even though the āItās so Scientific!!ā hype is annoying) that wonāt change my advice for those who want to see it (which is, go for it).
What does is :
The good :
- The robots : that was some great design here!
- The cast
- The visuals. Particularly those inside the "tessaract
- When they bring the drone down (wait, isnāt that a Reaper?), when Murph say (something like) āWhy bring it down? It wasnāt hurting anybody.ā Thatās the thing a sensible child would say, and answering that could be less than trivial.
- The aliens. If they had been, you know, alien alien, that would have been some of the least helpful help Iāve ever seen. āSo, we could have probably done something sooner, or better communicate, or putting the wormhole, you know somewhere closer than freaking Saturn but that wouldnāt be as fun!ā. But in fact, the closed (unmodifiable) time loop is actually a solid explanation. In fact, I was wondering if they would go for the smart move (this one) or the dumb one (the surprisingly benevolent but appallingly incompetent god-like aliens). Good thing they made the right call.
- The āfake moon landingsā. That was pretty funny. Though came surprisingly close of looking like a (warning : incoming TvTropes link) Strawman has a Point (it may have helped to bankrupt USSR indeed, and no, it wasnāt followed - in fact, present-day NASA is still failing at even trying to replicate it and other space agency arenāt even interested), it has to make you chuckle.
The less good (other than science):
- The first hour is too long! It should have either been more engaging, more useful as world/character building, or shorten it to lengthen the rest of the movie, you know, in space.
- āThe greatest of usā et all. Fine, we understand, he will turn out to be a bad guy. Can you stop now?
- ā20 feetā Seriously? Present-day NASA, unlike some of their contractors, know better than using an obsolete system extinct in almost the entire world. No, I donāt care if you live in the two countries that still use it in everyday life. If you work in science, the military or anything space-related, you donāt use it. Or you crash probes. Which is bad. Particularly when you are trying to save the world. So why would future-day NASA go back? Sure, the project seems to be surprisingly un-international, but come on.
What do you mean, ānitpickingā?
All in all, a good movie that I would recommend with a warning for the weak first hour, and the weak science to avoid unmet expectations. Not the best, not as great as it could (should?) have been, a bit pretentious at times, but good nonetheless - worth a theatre ticket.
Oh, and another thing. I was working on a novellette (and its comic adaptation) aboard the first (STL) interstellar colonisation ship. And of course I had chosen āEnduranceā as its name.
Anyone has a good name for a giant interstellar colonisation long-duration sleeper ship?
Oh man, that was bad, but not nearly as bad as calling him āMannā. Shock. Gasp.
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I recently did the math with my ladyfriend because I was wondering what the true magnitude of their artifical gravity was.
The conclusion we came to is that they most definitely did not have 1g of gravity. We guesstimated the diameter of the endurance was ~200m and that the rpm, taken from a google search, was 5.7rpms which would give us about .08gās of acceleration. Far less than 1g. I couldnāt tell if they actually were trying to portray the gravity inside the endurance as 1g or not but it was definitely far less. To get 1g of gravity the endurance would have had to spin at a rate of roughly ~18 rpms which would be absolute hell for anyone inside looking outward.
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That was only 5.7 RPM? Funny, it felt like more - I really should have checked thatā¦ (not that it changes the fact that they would get sick, mind you)
Iām pretty sure one character says āone geeā when they start the rotation, so thatās definitely another mistake there.
It could have been more to be honest. I only took that number for granted from a search. I couldnāt find a video to measure it myself. It may be more but I donāt know.
Soooā¦
It seems that itās harder science-fiction that we thought.
After all, in a vast Universe, even improbable combinations probably exist somewhere. Not told in the article, but I also suspect the black hole is a giant one, meaning that a human-sized craft wouldnāt be dislocated by tidal forces before reaching event horizon.
And I guess we can be generous and let slide the āwith this kind of tech, why leave in the first place?ā element by Necessary Plot Requirement, as was the need to go visit first the most āDonāt ever go there - ever. Iām serious!ā planet in the known Universe.
Or smaller quibbles like the conspicuously absent fuel tanks. And that the Endurance survives a barrage of relativistic particles with no problem while slingshoting thorugh the disk. And that they should have seen the sky blueshift like a Van Gogh painting on LSD. And that they didnāt bother with the redshift/blueshift effect on the disk due to its rotation - because apparently even hard-SF moviegoers wouldnāt understand (should I feel insulted? Nah, Iām sure they thought that in good faith.)
But Iām still not forgiving that nitrogen asphyxiation nonsense. They could have fixed that by literally changing one sentence with no effect whatsoever on the rest of the film.
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And NASA using feet.