Jonathan Svilik
Sep 1, 2024
THE PLOT
Set in a dystopian future, director Christopher Nolan brings us an Earth plagued by a global crop blight and on the brink of uninhabitability. Initially set in a small Colorado town, Joseph Cooper, a former NASA pilot and engineer, and his daughter Murphy Cooper, discover a “gravitational anomaly” in Murphy’s room after a dust storm. This anomaly provides coordinates for a secret government facility not far from their family home. Determined to understand what caused the anomaly, Joseph and Murphy travel to the coordinates provided. After the robotic security guard gives them access, they learn that the facility is the last remnant of NASA. Their current objective: find a suitable planet for human life before life on Earth ceases to exist.
Dr. John Brand, the head of NASA, quickly enlists Joseph Cooper to pilot the Endurance spaceship along with a crew of scientists through a wormhole found near Saturn. NASA believes that on the other side of the wormhole lies a number of potentially habitable planets that must be investigated. NASA needs Cooper and his team to follow the trail of an earlier crew and determine what happened to them. Cooper initially struggles to decide between leaving his kids (Murphy and her older brother, Tom) indefinitely and potentially saving the human race. Eventually, Cooper decides that he must move forward with the mission. Now, Cooper and his fellow astronauts begin their long trek to what may be a habitable planet.
After two years of travel within a deep sleep, the crew awakens and enters the wormhole. Soon they are transported to the other side of the universe. The crew travels to two different planets to visit the explorers previously sent by NASA and to assess each planet for human colonization. After arriving on the first planet Cooper and another member of his crew discover a planet with a surface covered by water, yet terrorized by constant and enormous tsunamis. These waves are caused by the enormous gravity of the supermassive black hole, Gargantua, which the planet orbits. When they return to their ship, Cooper finds that 51 years have passed in the time that they spent on the planet due to the phenomenon of time dilation. Next, the members of the Endurance mission elect to travel to the planet first investigated by the commander of NASA’s earlier mission, Dr. Mann.
After awakening Dr. Mann, he tricks them into believing that his planet is habitable. Mann then attempts to commandeer the Endurance, but he inadvertently damages the ship and kills himself during a failed docking sequence. Now on a damaged spaceship, the remaining crew sets a course that will orbit and slingshot the Endurance around Gargantua and towards a third planet. However, as the ship runs out of fuel, Cooper and their robot, TARS, sacrifice themselves and fall into the black hole in an effort to preserve fuel by reducing the total mass of the Endurance.
As they fall into the black hole, Cooper and TARS discover themselves within a four dimensional tesseract connected to Murphy’s bedroom. Within the blackhole, Cooper is able to travel across time and space, giving him the ability to manipulate the dust grains in his daughter's room: the initial gravitational anomaly found at the beginning of the movie. Using the information that Cooper collects and transmits to his daughter from within the tesseract, Murphy develops a solution to the gravitational manipulation problem that Dr. Brand was never able to complete, saving humanity from extinction and allowing them to build habitable colonies in space.
THE PHYSICS OF INTERSTELLAR
INTERSTELLAR is an excellent example of a seamless union between a beautiful story and advanced astrophysics. From the start of the film, the audience is introduced to the idea of time as a fourth dimension that can be traveled across similar to space. In addition, INTERSTELLAR introduces the audience to the concept of a wormhole. Wormholes are based on a theory within astrophysics that space and time can fold in a way that allows massive distances to be traveled extremely quickly. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity this structure may exist; however, scientists have yet to actually discover a wormhole in space. In addition, regardless of the existence of wormholes, it is highly unlikely that humans would survive entering one, as they would be very unstable and might easily collapse or lead to the “spaghettification” (i.e., stretching towards the singularity) of the human.
Time dilation is a critical factor in this film’s plot and timeline. This phenomenon occurs when space and time are curved by a very large mass such as a blackhole. From the perspective of the person near the blackhole, minimal time has passed compared to the perspective of a person who is beyond the influence of the black hole. This concept is also proven by Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity. In INTERSTELLAR, Cooper sees how time slows down when he is on the first planet which is near the super massive black hole known as Gargantua. Upon his return to the Endurance, his crew that remained aboard the ship has aged significantly, while Cooper has only aged minimally. This is again a function of Gargantua’s incredibly large mass.
INTERSTELLAR also uses the concept of a “tesseract” or a four dimensional cube as a plot device. When Joseph Cooper and his robot TARS fall into Gargantua they enter a tesseract connected to Murphy’s bedroom. Simply put, this detail is complete fiction. If Cooper really was to fall into a blackhole he would die quickly due to spaghettification. However, the idea of higher dimensions may be accurate. As a basis for our understanding of higher dimensions, it is important to note that we perceive a three dimensional world consisting of length, width, and height. A tesseract (also known as a “hypercube”), as mentioned in the film, consists of 4 dimensions: length, width, height, time. The concept presented in INTERSTELLAR is that there might be life forms (advanced, evolved humans?) that can perceive all four dimensions as we perceive three. This would mean that a four dimensional being could travel through time in the same way that we travel across physical distances. This is a very exciting concept to consider. But, I must stress that much of the physics concerning higher dimensions is heavily theoretical.
OUR GUEST
Wormholes, Einstein’s theories of relativity, higher dimensions, the potential of habitable planets outside our galaxy, and more will be discussed at length with TBD. Below is a brief introduction to TBD and his / her specific relationship to Christopher Nolan’s brilliant film, INTERSTELLAR.