Any Physicists out there? Interstellar was garbage...

[Zinfab]

Any advanced physicists out there that can explain the worm hole / Blackhole garbage in Interstellar? Kip Thorne apparently contributed his knowledge for it but appears to be so unrealistic I wanted to throw heavy objects at the screen. The biggest problem centers around the Black Hole 1) the gravitational forces would crush anything down into sub atomic particles which makes sending anything into it and having it stay intact extremely idiotic 2) Space time / quantum physics proposed there may be extreme time distortions in a Black Hole, that does not mean you can travel in time or even alter events in the past 3) Unlike a worm hole, there is nothing on the other side of a Black Hole, Black Holes are collapsed stars that pulls itself and anything surrounding it into an extremely compressed focal point. The only thing on the other side is nothing because there is no other side. 

 

Speaking of which, since Wing Commander the movie had combat around a Black Hole, I wonder if Star Citizen will have it as well.

[Calexus]

I didnt read the above - but if it contains spoilers please put *SPOILERS* in title

[Hutch Cartmen]

Since no one has ever entered a black hole (let alone lived to tell the tale) we don't know what is on the "other side". We can only speculate and apply the laws of physics of what we think we know to the phenomenon.

[VoA]

*** I enjoyed the movie and remember it is Sci-Fi

 

Any advanced physicists out there that can explain the worm hole / Blackhole garbage in Interstellar? Kip Thorne apparently contributed his knowledge for it but appears to be so unrealistic I wanted to throw heavy objects at the screen.

I am not a physicist but I do have a broad knowledge of physics (also being an architect / aerospace engineer).   It wasn't entirely garbage..... and keep in mind it is Science Fiction and obviously took some liberal creativity.  It can be both somewhat realistic and somewhat sci-fi (think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010).

 

The biggest problem centers around the Black Hole 1) the gravitational forces would crush anything down into sub atomic particles which makes sending a robot, ship, and an ejected pilot in one surviving extremely idiotic

Actually physicists don't think you'll be crushed in a Black Hole but rather stretched like a noodle.  Black Holes don't just pull matter in directly to the singularity but they have high rotational forces as well (and thus ejects matter out of the poles of the Black Hole).  Obviously this would ultimately kill you but since space time is stretched you may not actually "die" when this "stretching" starts to occur.

 

2) Space time / quantum physics proposed there may be extreme time distortions in a Black Hole, that does not mean you can travel in time or even alter events in the past

Most physicist today don't believe it is possible to travel backwards in time (and they did not do this in Interstellar *not giving out any spoilers - but the library was not this it was something else = let others see the movie before talking about it).  However you can slow down your "time" relative to the rest of the Universe near a Black Hole or any heavy gravity object... or traveling faster (more so near the speed of light). 

 

3) Unlike a worm hole, there is nothing on the other side of a Black Hole, Black Holes are collapsed stars that pulls itself and anything surrounding it into an extremely compressed focal point. The only thing on the other side is nothing because there is no other side. 

Most physicist today have changed their mind on this.  There is matter that is ejected from black holes (defined as Quasars) in addition there are theories that the singularity in the center of a Black Hole becomes a White Hole in another Universe or other Dimension (yes this is the current favored theory).  We have observed many Gama ray bursts and we think this is caused by Black Holes or possibly White Holes expelling matter from another Dimension (or Verse).  Most physicist today believe that the Big Bang was either a White Hole opening up in our Universe or two dimensional planes colliding (like two membranes touching each other).

 

 

 

Speaking of which, since Wing Commander the movie had combat around a Black Hole, I wonder if Star Citizen will have it as well.

Yes Star Citizen has Black Holes as part of the lore and we will encounter them in some systems.  Note in reality (and thus Star Citizen) there are different size of Black Holes.  Some can be miniature black holes - smaller than the Earth and some can be Super Massive Black Holes like in the center of galaxies  

[Zinfab]

No, I didn't really reveal much about the movie. But that's just it, there is nothing in the universe that can withstand the gravitational field of a Black Hole.

 

"Gravitational collapse occurs when an object's internal pressure is insufficient to resist the object's own gravity. For stars this usually occurs either because a star has too little "fuel" left to maintain its temperature through stellar nucleosynthesis, or because a star that would have been stable receives extra matter in a way that does not raise its core temperature. In either case the star's temperature is no longer high enough to prevent it from collapsing under its own weight. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole."

 

"If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity."   

[CheeseNorris]

A black hole is a black hole, a point where space-time itself is collasped in such a way that matter ceases to exist, and a hypothetical singularity surrounds that point. Upon entry into the black hole, hypothetically again, space and time itself may be stretched as would be a spaghetti, without the participant/s knowing it (but would be observer-able by someone outside the effect radius). Unless the participant was unfortunate enough to ram himself into the -hypothetical- singularity, he would be able to pass through the black hole unharmed and after this point everything else would be hypothetical and up the the director's imagination.

 

A neutron star however, is not a point in space, but a star with a massive scale and core that has been crushed upon its mass and weight.

 

The way I understand *SPOILERS* is that Cooner ejected himself to reduce his mass, and thus being able to successfully navigate through the singularity (by sheer luck). Basically the bigger the mass, the more likely you are to ram into the singularity and poof.

 

*Can some mod add the spoiler text for me please, unsure how... thanks in advance*

[Zinfab]

Someone invite Stephen Hawking into this discussion, at least what he says is based on actual physics. Kip Thorne is making a mockery of physics to sellout to Hollywood (remember Contact - Jodie Foster).

[Osclin]

Someone invite Stephen Hawking into this discussion, at least what he says is based on actual physics. Kip Thorne is making a mockery of physics to sellout to Hollywood (remember Contact - Jodie Foster).

 

You can't really make a movie about interstellar exploration without making a mockery of physics(at least as we understand physics now).  We can't get to within spitting distance of 1% c, much less the velocities to make interstellar travel interesting fodder for a movie.  While I might enjoy the story possibilities presented by a millennia long journey aboard a colony ship, I'm pretty sure my tastes are not representative of the general public.  If we want science fiction we have to accept that a good bit of that fiction is going to involve mooning the laws of physics.  I'm not defending the movie(haven't seen it and have no plans to), but remember that nearly none of our favorite science fiction would exist if we didn't play fast and loose with physics.  Has nothing to do with selling out to "Hollywood", just an acknowledgement that strict realism can make for absurdly boring entertainment.  Babylon 5 was a great show, and got a lot closer to proper physics than most, but without jump gates, jump drives, and hyperspace it would have been nothing at all.

[Valenquo]

HUGE SPOILER DON'T CLICK THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE.

I believe that the moment Coop ant Tars are thrown into the black whole, scientifically they knew they would most probably die, but it was just as well to try and shoot towards it and maybe something interesting would happen. Even earlier he was told that using the black hole would not help them travel back in time. They kept all the knowledge the characters had of black holes as scientifically accurate.

That is where the fiction takes over as the black hole is more than the scientific entity that we know but used...

AND REALLY DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT SEE THE MOVIE!!!

By the 5th dimension beings who perceive time and gravity differently and therefore are capable of using the black hole's gravity as a tool for them to communicate.

 

The whole premise is that they know so much more than we know, and therefore we cannot comprehend black holes like they do, and that is the sci-fi part of the movie. You must accept that it is a science fiction movie, and that they have to take some liberties and surrealistic interpretations for the story. If not then it would not be sci-fi.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

 

Although if you feel that the fiction part of this movie is to much, you should try the novels "The Quiet War" and "Leviathan Wakes" for Space Operas that try not to bend to many rules of science. 

[Stoff]

Some of the stuff in the movie is according to science, but loads of it is not. Hollywood!

[CheeseNorris]

You do know that everything right now is still theoretical, and Astrophysics still do make mistakes.

 

Each and every separate astrophysical branch works towards their own version of quantum mechanics, and there is always some political manoeuvring going on even within the scientific community. I'd say since Interstellar was an American Production, recruiting Kip for the movie was purely on a reasonable note as opposed to Hawking (being a British).

 

Kip employed a network of computers (forming it into a mini super computer) to generate the black hole in the movie with his own set of equations. That is a fact.

 

My opinion would be to wait and see whoever's theories can be proven or dis-proven at the six sigma level.

[artboycat]

I love it when people who have a miniscule understanding of science and film decide to start threads like this.

[Core]

@Zinfab did you like the movie Gravity?

 

 

I love it when people who have a miniscule understanding of science and film decide to start threads like this.

 

You made an account just to say that?

 

 

Not unrelated:

 

People often take uprage with Science-Fiction because the Science in Science-fiction, more often than not just happens to be Fiction.

Thats basically like saying: Those stupid romantic comedies! Why does there have to be comedy in them!?

 

The setting "Sci-fi" does not imply it is supposed to adhere to the laws of physics or even science for that matter, it is just a simple way of saying that it is a post-modern setting that usually does not contain magic in the same way it exists in Fantasy type settings and atleast TRIES to explain why technology/things exist through "vague science" than through "magiccy faithy" stuff.

 

I watched Interstellar last tuesday, it was quite enjoyable even if it was stretching the bounds of my disbelief.

The thing that annoyed the absolute living shit out of me, was how terrible the musical score was considering it was by Hans Zimmer.

[Zinfab]

Upon giving it a deeper reflection on Contact, Gravity, Interstellar I do realize I may have been too harsh in my initial critique however, it came from the gut and I just went with it. Was Gravity @Core more accurate scientifically, yes. Did all these scifi movies had their good and bad moments, obviously. I was just going along and enjoying the ride in Interstellar until the Black Hole gave me a big slap in the face and a wtf reaction. And @artboycat is right, although m knowledge of physics is rudimentary, I was interested in having a discussion on this matter.  

[Boildown]

I've not watched the movie. However I know a few things about recent black hole theory.

There's nothing special about the event horizon as far as forces go. Matter doesn't suddenly "spaghettify" or "noodlify" when it crosses the event horizon boundry. These things happen when the tidal forces on the object entering the black hole "overwhelm its structural integrity" (a Star-Treky but accurate description). In small black holes, this probably happens well outside the event horizon boundry. In super-massive black holes, this probably doesn't happen until the object is well inside the event horizon. A human could easily survive, in the right starship, crossing a super-massive black hole's event horizon, as the increase in tidal forces is very gradual in large enough black holes. This doesn't mean this person would suddenly see the heart of the black hole though. And at some point deep enough inside, the tidal forces would break them apart, but it needn't be right at the event horizon.

From an outside observer, things seem to pile up on the event horizon boundry because of the relativistic effects on the light emanating from those objects. But in actuality those objects don't have something special happen to them right at the event horizon.

The jets that are shot from the poles of black holes aren't matter exiting the black hole. Its matter that never crossed the event horizon. If matter is piling up around a black hole, it bumps into each other, and inevitably starts swirling, like water going down a drain (except in 3d instead of 2d, although even this description lacks somewhat). The end result of this is that some matter gets shot out in jets on both of the rotational axis, but its not matter that ever entered the black hole, per se, just matter that got close.

My position is that we don't really know if there's really a singularity inside a black hole or not. It could just be another even-more-compact state of degenerate matter. Some people believe a new universe is spawned by every black hole (or just super-massive ones), a new Big Bang occurring when the matter in the black hole finally reaches the singularity point (which would mean universes within universes). I find this idea appealing, but we'll never really know most likely.

This latter idea however seems to conflict with the idea that black holes can lose mass over extremely long timespans due to quantum effects in what is known as Hawking Radiation. In fact, over an impossibly long timespan, its been theorized that black holes will eventually "evaporate" all their matter away. This would seem to preclude the possibility that black holes spawn new universes, because what happens to the matter in that universe... does it just vanish?

[Zinfab]

"mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form." Law of conservation of mass (Lavoisier, 1774)

 

So Nolan should have made sending a robot, human, and ship into a black hole send out an Autobot - more than meets the eyes... 

 

Hey since it's scifi just have movies sink to new levels of nonsense.

[Core]

Upon giving it a deeper reflection on Contact, Gravity, Interstellar I do realize I may have been too harsh in my initial critique however, it came from the gut and I just went with it. Was Gravity @Core more accurate scientifically, yes. Did all these scifi movies had their good and bad moments, obviously. I was just going along and enjoying the ride in Interstellar until the Black Hole gave me a big slap in the face and a wtf reaction. And @artboycat is right, although m knowledge of physics is rudimentary, I was interested in having a discussion on this matter.  

 

No worries, I thought Gravity was mindnumbingly terrible. Calling it scientifically accurate will have plenty of people raise their finger and go, if that were true... Clooney wouldn't have died! But it was necessary for the PLOT(which was nonexistent) for him to die!

 

But my point is, people loved Gravity and for the same reason that people loved gravity, they will hate Interstellar. A good movie has nothing to do with reality, just a good story. If I compare Gravity to intersteller one has an interesting plot and the other is basically 90 mins of camera angles around a surviving astronaut.

 

Anyway, spoilers. Up ahead.

 

Interstellar does throw you a massive curveball at the end, mostly because THATS THE ENTIRE PREMISE OF THE PLOT. The foreshadowing that SOMETHING sent back GRAVITY through TIME and SPACE was hinted at pretty much throughout the entire thing. Then they preface it by saying "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENS AT THE CORE"  and "THIS BLACK HOLE WAS CREATED BY "THEM""

I mean come on, you didnt see it coming? The black hole was just a plot device. Not a science lesson. 

[Genesis]

Like Zinfab said energy is never destroyed, it just takes different forms.

 

I'm surprised no one mentioned this documentary.  There's many more but it's a start.  Baby steps.

 

Black hole lensing effect.

 

Useful sources(Follow the hyperlinks and page sources, see you in 2 weeks):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583

 

 

Perspective:

http://stars.chromeexperiments.com/

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

 

 

There is no full understanding.  Only ideas.  

[LeroyJenkins]

No, I didn't really reveal much about the movie. But that's just it, there is nothing in the universe that can withstand the gravitational field of a Black Hole.

 

"Gravitational collapse occurs when an object's internal pressure is insufficient to resist the object's own gravity. For stars this usually occurs either because a star has too little "fuel" left to maintain its temperature through stellar nucleosynthesis, or because a star that would have been stable receives extra matter in a way that does not raise its core temperature. In either case the star's temperature is no longer high enough to prevent it from collapsing under its own weight. Because of the relationship between mass and gravity, this means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force. Virtually nothing can escape from them — under classical physics, even light is trapped by a black hole."

 

"If you fell into a black hole, gravity would stretch you out like spaghetti. Don't worry; your death would come before you reached singularity."   

This is slightly wrong and slightly correct. 

 

Once you pass the event horizon, you're screwed. That being said, while you're outside the event horizon, its gravitational pull is just like that of any other celestial object.

 

I can't find the link, but there was a system lore discussion about this earlier this year about a system where the star collapsed into a black hole (without blowing away the planets somehow), and the consensus from the community was that RSI's initial stipulation that everything was slowly spiraling towards the black hole was incorrect. If the black hole's mass was similar to that of the original star, the solar system would remain largely unaffected and the planets would more or less continue on their original paths, although any significant change of mass (which is usually the case, at least initially) would result in a proportionate change in planetary orbits, and some larger planets may be in danger of being knocked out of orbit rather than sucked in. Any planets remaining within the event horizon would be destroyed, of course. 

[Zinfab]

I thought I was going to be in a select minority in my critique of Nolan's insanity but to my surprise!

 

*Spoilers*

http://www.slashfilm.com/jonathan-nolan-interstellar-interview/

http://screenrant.com/interstellar-reviews-movie-2014/

http://theconversation.com/on-interstellar-and-real-physics-33270

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2014/10/27/review-interstellar-gets-lost-in-space/

http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/movie-review-interstellar.html

[p...]

*Spoilers*

All I know is that after Matt Damon derped the airlock and caused a 56 degree out-of-control rotation, what followed was a typical 30 minutes of Space Engineers after a collision knocks out someone's gyros.

[Zinfab]

Lets try to replicate that move in Star Citizen with an out of control Caterpillar and try to dock it with a cutlass then stabilize it. I bet you would see lots of dead body and ship parts very quickly. Maybe if the pilots wore Matthew Mcconaughey masks, then it would work. Interstellar was supposed to be Nolan's cinema shattering "Grapes of Wrath" movie. When instead the Wrath was Kahn was marginally better.

[Drum]

You write a thesis to explain scientific fact.

You write a Sci-fi book (movie) to examine the interactions of the players you populated it with.

 

In any of the good Sci-fi, the science is just a prop. A means of getting the players where you need them to be or have the thoughts you are giving them.

Now don't read this wrongly. The harder the science the more it is believable (entertaining). But in the end it is just a prop to get the players into the environment you want to exploit for their interactions among themselves or their own soul searching in their mind.

 

People watch someone do a 360 in a car and then it continues driving down the road. No one will picket against seeing this movie because it is Unreal. That 360 was a prop, a gimmick. Just a way to entertain you until the good//bad guy got to the next conversation and moved the plot along.

 

Unreal physics is the same sort of prop. Just a way to get there so they can continue the plot. - DRUM out

[Blade]

I'm not a physicist as a profession, but I have taken advanced physics courses and researched (mostly as a hobby) quantum mechanics for a good portion of my life.

 

 

 

The biggest problem centers around the Black Hole 1) the gravitational forces would crush anything down into sub atomic particles which makes sending anything into it and having it stay intact extremely idiotic

 

 

 

From my understanding; a Black Hole isn't really a hole, but rather a strong curvature of space-time due to immense gravitational forces (I've always visualized it more like a waterfall at the edge of a river). An object that passes into a Black Hole is essentially stretched across space in an exponential gradient. Since the gravitational forces are so large, even small displacements across the gradient result in large distortions of light and matter. The current theory is that at the singularity an object's density becomes infinite and its mass is added to the singularity. However, the appearance of singularities usually means a break down in the physical model. 

 

 

2) Space time / quantum physics proposed there may be extreme time distortions in a Black Hole, that does not mean you can travel in time or even alter events in the past

 

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/time-travel3.htm

 

 

3) Unlike a worm hole, there is nothing on the other side of a Black Hole, Black Holes are collapsed stars that pulls itself and anything surrounding it into an extremely compressed focal point. The only thing on the other side is nothing because there is no other side.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/science_faq.html#36

[CheeseNorris]

"mass can neither be created nor destroyed, although it may be rearranged in space, or the entities associated with it may be changed in form." Law of conservation of mass (Lavoisier, 1774)

 

So Nolan should have made sending a robot, human, and ship into a black hole send out an Autobot - more than meets the eyes... 

 

Hey since it's scifi just have movies sink to new levels of nonsense.

 

Past the singularity, all laws of physics breaks down, including the law of the conservation of mass.

 

The law only applies to anything else within our space-time frame.