The advanced physics that gave birth to “Interstellar” and Nolan’s thorough realism

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2018.10.26Takayuki Oguchi

"Interstellar" synopsis

Earth's lifespan was running out. A former engineer with a young child was chosen for a mission that exceeds the limits of humanity: finding a new habitable planet. What awaited him was a shocking universe that no one had ever seen before. Will he be able to accomplish his mission that will put the survival of humanity on the line?

Index

Scientific background of “Interstellar”

``Interstellar'' is a movie with a slightly unusual story. It all started when Carl Sagan, the director of the Planetary Institute at Cornell University and an astronomer who played a leading role in NASA's planetary exploration program, wrote a science fiction novel called " Contact " (Shinchosha, 86) (*1). It started with something I wrote in 1985.

In the story, Sagan was worried about how to transport the protagonist to Planet Vega without contradicting the theory of relativity. Until then, ideas such as warp navigation had been commonly used in science fiction novels and movies. However, Sagan wanted proper scientific support for this.

Therefore, he sought advice from Kip Thorne (*2), a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. The wormholes used for warping in science fiction are derived from the theory of general relativity, but even if they actually existed, their size would be at the quantum level and would disappear in a very short time. Thorne considers Sagan's ideas and begins to consider wormholes that humans can pass through. He devoted himself to this research, leaving university behind to stay in the mountains, and it is said that he was so serious about it that it worried the people around him.

Thorne published this theory in papers in 1988 and 1991, but he continued his research and published it in the thick book `` Black Holes and the Distortion of Space-Time: Einstein's Extraordinary Legacy '' (Hakuyosha, 1997). Published in 1994. This book describes his interactions with Sagan and specific scientific theories.

I'm sorry if this is a personal story, but around 1999, I was writing a plot (*3) for a full CG anime, using this ``black hole and space-time distortion'' as a hint. That project never came to fruition, but I was surprised when I heard that Thorne himself was planning to make it into a movie. In fact, as an executive producer, Thorne spent several years working on the scenario with screenwriter Jonathan Nolan to make Interstellar into a movie (and the story of the completed movie was similar to the author's plot). I was even more surprised). I believe that Thorne followed Sagan's example and understood the importance of the power of fiction in disseminating science.

Thorne's aim was to convey advanced physics (*4) to the general public, but Jonathan discovered that there was a large-scale dust bowl , the death of plants, a fatal deterioration of the Earth's atmosphere, and... The story includes the love and hate between the main character Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn), which transcend time and space.

*1 This novel was written in 1997 by director Robert Zemeckis.Contact'', but Sagan passed away the year before its release. However, Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson said,Trying to die in a black hole - Dr. Tyson's sermon cosmology (bottom)” (Hayakawa Nonfiction Bunko, 2017), the most important part of the movie.drake equationpoints out that the calculation is wrong. This may have been done intentionally by the screenwriters, and would have enraged Sagan had he been alive.

*2 Thorne received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his ``definitive contribution to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.''

*3 The plot I was writing at the time was ``It is predicted that the sun's activity will decrease, the Earth will be frozen like it was 700 million years ago, and most living things will die out. A fleet of ships headed for a promising celestial body ('passenger”(16)) is sent out. However, no habitable planets were discovered on any of the celestial bodies. Since the ship the protagonists were on was also in the same boat, it was decided to return to Earth. Fortunately, a black hole has been discovered nearby, and by repeating swing-bys using it, we can accelerate, and at the same time, we hope that the strong gravity will slow down time and restore the Earth's environment. When they returned to Earth, 200 million years had passed since their departure, and a completely new ecosystem had been born that had re-evolved from the simple organisms that had survived...'' They kind of look alike, right?

*4 Thorne summarized the scientific theories depicted in this film,The Science of Interstellar” (WW Norton & Company, 2014), which provides a very detailed and illustrated explanation. Recommended for those who want to deeply understand movies.

Commitment to film photography

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