Interstellar: A Visual Masterpiece with Disappointing Writing and Physics

In summary, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy had major problems with the science in Interstellar. It has basic physics that doesn't seem to fit with today's technology, characters that don't act like people, and a dodgy plot. Do you have criticism of specific points which are not constrained by the medium?
  • #176
Evo said:
I hope this hasn't already been posted, seems to be a good review of how bad the movie is.

http://news.discovery.com/space/interstellar-a-missed-opportunity-review-141108.htm

For some reason this link is redirecting me to Discovery's store, even though it's correct.

Briefly, my take on the review.

  1. Your mileage may vary on the dramatic and editing criticism. Fair enough.
  2. O'Neill is completely wrong regarding Interstellar's depiction of both Gargantua and her planetary system. But then again so are several other reviewers so no surprise here.
 
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  • #177
Matterwave said:
I just had a thought...the gravitational time dilation of a Schwarzschild black hole (I know Gargantua was a Kerr black hole, but it was said to be rotating very slowly, so I'll use the Schwarzschild approximation) is ##t_o=t_f\sqrt{1-r_s/r}## where ##t_o## is the time as ticked by clocks at radius ##r## from the black hole (i.e. Cooper and Brandt), and ##t_f## is the time as ticked by clocks far away (e.g. Earth), so if you want ##t_f/t_o\approx 60,000## you better have ##r \approx r_s##. Actually, doing the calculation gives ##r\approx 1.00000000028 r_s##. However, there are no orbits there as the photon orbit (the last place a freely falling object, a photon, can still orbit the black hole) is at a radius ##r_p=\frac{3}{2}r_s##.

To get a time dilation factor of 60,000, you have to be well within the photon sphere, where there are no more orbits available...

It's said to be rotating very quickly, just shy of 3e8 m/s.
 
  • #180
So, as I understand, the problem of inconsistency between GR and QM is solved.
Inside the BH, instead of singularity, there is a... library, right? :)
 
  • #181
tzimie said:
So, as I understand, the problem of inconsistency between GR and QM is solved.
Inside the BH, instead of singularity, there is a... library, right? :)

they play with emotion drives the reality: because its cooper in the BH/5th dimensional space what is there relates to coopers life.

the robot also entered the BH so what would it have seen?
 
  • #182
Did you have a chance to look at the formulas they write on the desk?
I will buy this movie just to make screenshots of the desk.
I've noticed weird indices in russian, something like Hяя
 
  • #183
DaveC426913 said:
A very common theme I am discovering in this film is that, being almost 3 hours long, many plot points are ‘left as an exercise for the student’. :D

Which, as far as I'm concerned, is what separates good hard sf from an infodump in search of a plot.
 
  • #184
tzimie said:
So, as I understand, the problem of inconsistency between GR and QM is solved.
Inside the BH, instead of singularity, there is a... library, right? :)

Even better. A TARS.
 
  • #187
Also I remember there was something like "our left wing is already below the event horizon" )))
 
  • #188
tzimie said:
Also I remember there was something like "our left wing is already below the event horizon" )))
I'm glad I didn't hear that.
 
  • #189
Fredrik said:
I'm glad I didn't hear that.

Aside from being a (possibly) awful line of dialogue, what's the problem?
 
  • #190
Pete Cortez said:
Aside from being a (possibly) awful line of dialogue, what's the problem?
I'm not sure. If we had been dealing with a typical black hole, then tidal forces would have ripped the ship to pieces faster than they could say that line. But Gargantua is supermassive, so the tidal forces near the horizon are negligible. If we had been dealing with a non-rotating or slowly rotating supermassive black hole, then they would still have been dead faster than they could say the line, because to hover just outside the horizon, the rocket needs to produce an impossible amount of thrust. The required thrust goes to infinity as the distance to the event horizon goes to zero. So the engines can't possibly be strong enough, and if they were, the people inside it would be crushed to the floor by the acceleration. Actually, this close to the horizon, I think the thrust would have to be so strong that it breaks the entire ship into its subatomic components.

But someone mentioned that Garguantua is rotating close to the speed of light. I'm guessing that the result is similar to what we'd get if it wasn't rotating, and the ship was flying at a speed close to the speed of light. I'm thinking that in that scenario at least, if they're extremely close to the required escape velocity, they might not have the same problem. But doesn't the rocket still have to produce enough thrust to tear off that wing? That doesn't sound survivable either.
 
  • #191
DaveC426913 said:
verboten!

http://io9.com/infodump-mary-sue-and-other-words-that-authors-are-1663345948

You forgot one:

Pete Cortez said:
Which, as far as I'm concerned, is what separates good hard sf from an infodump in search of a plot.

Good article. Reading through the list, it makes me wonder why people insistent on spewing such terms bother reading books or going to the movies.

I asked my movie going brother about the movie at Thanksgiving, and his response was, as I predicted, very old hat.
I was surprised though that he knew, within 10% accuracy, the gross of both Mindwalk and Interstellar.

I just wish you'd shared the article before I had the discussion with him. I apparently don't read enough reviews:

Infodump (Too many big words in the explanation. I will never be able to use this word in a sentence.)
Mary Sue (What? Who started this?)
Dystopian (Most all of my favorite fictional stories have been about dystopias. When did this become a bad thing?)
Head-Hopping (See "Infodump". I will have to spend hours researching what these terms mean.)
Hard Science Fiction (I'm assuming they borrowed this from "Hard Science vs. Soft Science". )
Truth is stranger than fiction (Old hat)
Old Hat (I'm assuming "cliched" had been overused, and they had to come up with a phrase that was, um, less old hat?)
Idiot Plot (Like the word "retard", this phrase needs to go away, even though this is the first time I've seen it.)
Relatable (Nice explanation.)
​
I would have so loved to have [name]-dropped all these words and phrases on my brother. We have zero* common interests. But as Kushner stated, you marry people who are relatable, and our family hasn't yet devolved to that point.

* pedantic literalists; "Zero, Om? Really?"
me; "Close enough for government work".
...
"pedantic literalists": About 173 results (0.42 seconds), per google.
Drats! And there I thought I was being original...
 
  • #192
OmCheeto said:
Infodump (Too many big words in the explanation. I will never be able to use this word in a sentence.)
Describes the expository parts of a story - where the author just explains stuff. The opposite of : "Don't tell us, show us!"
OmCheeto said:
Mary Sue (What? Who started this?)
I'd never heard of it either, and can't think of any examples.
OmCheeto said:
Dystopian (Most all of my favorite fictional stories have been about dystopias. When did this become a bad thing?)
I think the objection is more to the overuse of the word itself. A verbal crutch.
OmCheeto said:
Head-Hopping (See "Infodump". I will have to spend hours researching what these terms mean.)
Jumping from one person's perspective to another too often. I'd understood this was bad too.
 
  • #193
Monsterboy said:
'They' could have simply led humans to a habitable planet orbiting a medium sized star , in our own galaxy ,why find a planet orbiting a super massive black hole in some other galaxy and all the unnecessary complications with time ?

Mars and some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn would be as bad or as good as any of those planets.

How? Earth was dying, its technical resources dwindling. The best they could do was get a half dozen people off the planet in what was essentially their last rocket*.

The key to survival (plan A) was to solve the mystery of gravity, so they could get a large fraction of the population to safety. They made that pretty clear (inasmuch as any aspect of Interstellar could be said to be "pretty clear". :) )
*ignore the fact that the lander on top of that last rocket had a propulsion system that could lift it out of a gravity well so steep it had a 60,000 time dilation factor...
 
  • #195
Pete Cortez said:
Aside from being a (possibly) awful line of dialogue, what's the problem?

At first, you can't cross your Rindler or apparent horizon, they are always at some distance from you, so captain was probably talking about the absolute horizon. He could not see it (it is a mathematical abstraction). However, let's say he was able to calculate it's position (despite the fact he was so stupid that in the beginning of the flight he did not know about the wormholes at all). Then an object in free fall (in free fall, because otherwise you will be crashed by gravity) crosses the horizon at almost of speed of light. So if your left wing is below the horizon then the right wing will be there in... I leave it as an exercise
.
 
  • #196
Interesting, how much we can tell about the planets observing them from Earth, even without landing there, while the crew of the spaceship, flying right above these planets, was not able to do simple 2+2 and to check what was the average temperature of the planet, failed to notice huge tidal waves (so huge that definitely visible from the outside), Dr. Mann was even telling them the duration of the day and night on his planet!

I understand that it is done for the story, but this just plain stupid!
 
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  • #197
15733691668_65243849de_n.jpg
 
  • #198
I have a pretty strong feeling that "We consulted with real scientists when making this movie" doesn't mean a whole lot more than "We emailed some scientist somewhere once or twice."
 
  • #199
jack476 said:
I have a pretty strong feeling that "We consulted with real scientists when making this movie" doesn't mean a whole lot more than "We emailed some scientist somewhere once or twice."
Nope. The 'big' part of the movie - the black hole and it's environment - is in match with the general relativity (or with Kip Thorne's own theories).
Or at least not many of us is rated to be able to challenge it in depth.

What's missing is:
- a year's worth of work with the plot
- a second consultant: preferably an engineer from NASA, who has some close and live knowledge about orbital mechanics...
 
  • #200
According to Kip Thorne's book, it would have been possible to do a gravity assist to reach Miller's planet and return if there was an intermediate mass black hole orbiting Gargantua. However, to avoid confusing the audience, Nolan insisted that this be replaced with a neutron star (which I seem to remember being mentioned at that point). The problem with doing a gravity assist around a neutron star is that the tidal forces would be too large to be survivable, where as a 10,000 MS IMBH would be. He further mentions that while Miller's planet was not physically impossible, the rotation rate of Gargantua would have had to have been extremely close to the speed of light, and this is implausible because there is a equilibrium point where by black holes would lose angular momentum beyond something like 0.9 c. So the only way the angular momentum could have gotten so high is if some unusual and relatively recent event occurred such as two SMBH's merging.
 
  • #201
jack476 said:
I have a pretty strong feeling that "We consulted with real scientists when making this movie" doesn't mean a whole lot more than "We emailed some scientist somewhere once or twice."

Not even close. Kip Thorne worked "full time" for months with Tunzelmann and James from Double Negative on all visualizations invoking GR. The result is not only the most physically accurate depiction of these exotic objects in the history of cinema, but likely most accurate--as well as the most encompassing and certainly the most expensive--modeling performed in the history of computational physics.
 
  • #202
Rive said:
What's missing is:
- a year's worth of work with the plot
- a second consultant: preferably an engineer from NASA, who has some close and live knowledge about orbital mechanics...

Setting aside the plot, there was at least one more consultant. Astronaut Marsha Ivins served as a http://www.nst.com.my/node/50498 to the production crew.

To my knowledge, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with the depiction of orbital mechanics in Interstellar--at least nothing that anyone has demonstrated by actually showing their work. There are, however, a lot of assumptions made by several critics, as well as a tendency to view even the tiniest bit of dialogue as sacrosanct.
 
  • #203
Pete Cortez said:
Not even close. Kip Thorne worked "full time" for months with Tunzelmann and James from Double Negative on all visualizations invoking GR. The result is not only the most physically accurate depiction of these exotic objects in the history of cinema, but likely most accurate--as well as the most encompassing and certainly the most expensive--modeling performed in the history of computational physics.

please expand on this because the scene of cooper using a jet plane ejection system to leave his SPACE shuttle is questionable engineering.
here's an excerpt from Wikipedia on ejection seats for the shuttles:
"Ejection seat
Modified Lockheed SR-71 ejection seats were installed on the first four shuttle flights (all two-man missions aboard Columbia) and removed afterwards. Ejection seats were not further developed for the shuttle for several reasons:

  • Very difficult to eject seven crew members when three or four were on the middeck (roughly the center of the forward fuselage), surrounded by substantial vehicle structure.
  • Limited ejection envelope. Ejection seats only work up to about 3,400 mph (2,692 knots) and 130,000 feet (39,624 m). That constituted a very limited portion of the shuttle's operating envelope, about the first 100 seconds of the 510 seconds powered ascent.
  • No help during Columbia-type reentry accident. Ejecting during an atmospheric reentry accident would have been fatal due to the high temperatures and wind blast at high Mach speeds.
  • Astronauts were skeptical of the ejector seats' usefulness. STS-1 pilot Robert Crippen stated:
n truth, if you had to use them while the solids were there, I don’t believe you’d—if you popped out and then went down through the fire trail that’s behind the solids, that you would have ever survived, or if you did, you wouldn't have a parachute, because it would have been burned up in the process. But by the time the solids had burned out, you were up to too high an altitude to use it. ... So I personally didn't feel that the ejection seats were really going to help us out if we really ran into a contingency.[16] "

The sparks show entering the black hole just before he ejects was just a bit better than adding sparklers to the scene.
 
  • #204
QuantumPion said:
According to Kip Thorne's book, it would have been possible to do a gravity assist to reach Miller's planet and return if there was an intermediate mass black hole orbiting Gargantua. However, to avoid confusing the audience, Nolan insisted that this be replaced with a neutron star (which I seem to remember being mentioned at that point). The problem with doing a gravity assist around a neutron star is that the tidal forces would be too large to be survivable, where as a 10,000 MS IMBH would be.

In this case, the audience can simply say "oh well, Cooper flubbed and the robots corrected him off screen" if they want to reward their suspension of disbelief. The key lesson for good boys and girls doing their homework is that there is a pretty nifty way to compensate for woefully inadequate reaction mass reserves, and that with the right toolkit you can work out a physically plausible way to drop down the throat of a supermassive, super-rotating black hole system.

He further mentions that while Miller's planet was not physically impossible, the rotation rate of Gargantua would have had to have been extremely close to the speed of light, and this is implausible because there is a equilibrium point where by black holes would lose angular momentum beyond something like 0.9 c. So the only way the angular momentum could have gotten so high is if some unusual and relatively recent event occurred such as two SMBH's merging.

Implausible under likely astrophysical conditions for thin disk accretion flows. A lower viscosity, thicker disk permitted an order of magnitude greater maximal rotation, and you have to arrive at these configurations piece wise and the a/M values numerically. It's also unclear as to what artificial processes might plausible permit spin-up beyond even that point.
 
  • #205
dragoneyes001 said:
please expand on this because the scene of cooper using a jet plane ejection system to leave his SPACE shuttle is questionable engineering.

Questionable engineering is divining a universal truth about something very specific--ejection seats in spacecraft in this case--from scant Wikipedia details on a very limited sample of trials.

Presumably they've solved those problems and then some by Cooper's time.
 
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  • #206
tzimie said:
Interesting, how much we can tell about the planets observing them from Earth, even without landing there, while the crew of the spaceship, flying right above these planets, was not able to do simple 2+2 and to check what was the average temperature of the planet, failed to notice huge tidal waves (so huge that definitely visible from the outside), Dr. Mann was even telling them the duration of the day and night on his planet!

I understand that it is done for the story, but this just plain stupid!

There's a Lorentz factor of close to 60,000 between Endurance's parking orbit around Gargantua and Miller's planet, so remote observation isn't going to tell you much. These guys presumably want to get there and back before mankind starves to death (they still lose two decades for their trouble). Their planned window to do everything was for around one hour expedition proper time. You might forgive them for failing to do a complete enough oceanographic survey before landing.
 
  • #207
Pete Cortez said:
Questionable engineering is divining a universal truth about something very specific--ejection seats in spacecraft in this case--from scant Wikipedia details on a very limited sample of trials.

Presumably they've solved those problems and then some by Cooper's time.

yes the future made something which is useless 4/5th's of the launch period and totally useless during re-entry problem free.
 
  • #208
dragoneyes001 said:
yes the future made something which is useless 4/5th's of the launch period and totally useless during re-entry problem free.

A conclusion drawn from two unattributed sentences in a Wikipedia article and non sequitur about reentry. Clearly Crowley didn't do his research.
 
  • #209
Pete Cortez said:
A conclusion drawn from two unattributed sentences in a Wikipedia article and non sequitur about reentry. Clearly Crowley didn't do his research.
its getting old trying to point to what even NASA has changed because it didn't work and you going on about the source as if that's proof of your argument.
here is what NASA has put into action instead of the ejection system "THEY" rejected.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/escape/inflight.html
 
  • #210
dragoneyes001 said:
its getting old trying to point to what even NASA has changed because it didn't work and you going on about the source as if that's proof of your argument.

It's getting really old dealing with poorly thought out nitpicks. You didn't see ejection seats from half a century ago in the Ranger, so who cares?

here is what NASA has put into action instead of the ejection system "THEY" rejected.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/escape/inflight.html

That's nice.
 

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