Thanks for this post. I am not an astrophysicist but always irks me when people complain about the science of this movie as if they know more than Kip Thorne. Cool to see another scientist break some stuff down.

Kip Thorne stayed close on set to ensure scientific accuracy. Sick guy.

Lazarus is a famous story from the Bible. I highly doubt Bowie was thinking of Interstellar when he wrote that lol

Oh wow that’s cool that your an expert. The coolest launch I have ever seen was the spaceX falcon heavy first launch, it was amazing. Also I am glad Elon watched the movie I hope he loved it, and while I didn’t immediately like the first picture of the black whole I can’t wait for a better one to be taken soon.

Good perspective. I would like something like this on Contact movie too from guys like you.

I almost keep both these movies almost at same level while Contact has little in terms of theory it does a very good job of connecting with people. This is where I felt Interstellar failed but Contact doesn't even come close to the amount science that this movies throws at you.

I love how Hollywood movie critics all of a sudden became scientists and bashed the film when it came out because it wasn’t accurate according to them. Like what degree do you have, movie critics? Not exactly a bastion of intelligence, that profession.

Specifically speaking of Gargantua (the black hole), it was the most scientifically accurate and appropriate depiction for a mainstream film. Per Kip Thorne himself, whose lecture on Interstellar I've attented way back then, they rendered another black hole image initially which was more true to science, but Chris deemed it too bizzare for the film.

Follow up- he’s one of the leading authorities on Black Holes

yeah power of love makes you time travel is the most scientific plot in sci fi

Nitpick, but no, he did not produce the movie. He was a scientific consultant. Producer is a completely different job.

Not that accurate really.

Visually, the representation of a black hole is pretty good. It was built with the help of physicists and is considered one of the best visualisations of a black hole that exists.

Plot and story wise though the movie is a crock

I'm wondering what kind of magic engines their landers had. Epstein drives?

Interstellar is accurate in areas that most sci-fi ignores, but it's still not, you know, scientifically accurate because Hollywood.

The wormhole science is pretty sound, they got Kip Thorne as a consultant, and he pretty much is the godfather of wormhole physics. I mean..... wormholes are still theoretical so whether they exist or not we don't know.

The time dilation stuff, yes, that's gen relativity. Not sure if the discrepancy would be that massive. The hibernation tech also looks more like what NASA is looking into. The accounting for microgravity in space as well was great.

But there is one thing you have to remember. That ship would have been ripped apart by the tidal forces of the wormhole (unless the wormhole was specifically designed to not rip objects going through), but it would definitely have been shredded loooong before it got to that black hole.

Oh and dont get me started on the gamma ray exposure from the negative energy required to hold open a wormhole. But you know..it's theoretical so you can get away with it.

All in all though, just like gravity, of course it has innacuracies, but it's one of the most scientifically accurate hollywood space blockbusters.

The consultant wrote a book detailing the process of coming up with the scientific elements, and justifying them. Probably the most impressive thing in it is that he was actually able to come up with a hypothetical stable orbit for a planet as deep in the gravity well of a black hole as the one described. It's extremely unlikely, to the point that there's a very good chance it's never happened in our universe. But, as with most other things in the film, it's technically possible.

Time dilation is a known effect that was calculated to realistic levels in the film given the situations. It's an effect that we have to take into account every time your phone gets signals from a GPS satellite, among other things.

The mysterious plague makes slightly more sense when you read him write about it, but that one they chose to leave enough out to not have to justify it. And the bookshelf/gravity/love/transcendence climax is all fringe or fantasy.

Pretty much everything before that works out, though. Including the visuals. This film is known for having made the first full resolution simulation of what a wormhole would look like, if they were real, according to current theory (by which I mean relativity).

Kip Thorne was the consultant. His background and expertise is in gravitational focused astrophysics. He recently won a Nobel prize due to the discovery of gravitational waves. When I helped put on a conference for the whole LIGO organization he only came to the dinner, because the rest of the week he was going to some elite party conference thing Jeff Bezos hosts. Which should give you an idea of his clout. A couple of people got him to sign a book, Gravitation, that he co-authored and that graduate physics students have treated as a sacred text.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said it is actually all pretty much scientifically possible, I think that included the book case stuff.

IIRC he only had issue with the frozen clouds on Dr Manns planet.

If the planet was in orbit around a super massive black hole and the ship was in orbit around the planet, I believe both would experience the same level of dilation. I don’t believe there would be a difference between the planets surface time and the space immediately around the planet, but I suck at math and am not a scientist, so my beliefs are irrelevant! ��‍♀️ I love that movie though!!

The stuff up until Cooper enters the black hole is okay.

The stuff in the black hole is 100% nonsense.

True! That would be a rather busy satellite. Edited.

It's accurate at a theoretical level. As mentioned by another reply, there is a whole book about the theoretical science behind the movie. Of course theory isn't set in stone fact. There may be, or will be, colliding theories in the field which would make the movie seem like nonesense.

Given my limited knowledge, with a CS degree (so some good basic physics and math background), I liked the theories used in the movie and was able to logically follow it...eventually. Needed a second viewing and online research for a certain piece of it. The 'we saved ourselves' piece. But pretty sure I have it straight and think it is a cool part of the story.

I thought the point of the movie was that we were the aliens. Did I miss something?

The book was great

Is this written with AI?

Downvoting this A.I. garbage.

This nolan is dead, and replaced by an unimaginative hollywood hack who only ever directs adaptations that are star vehicles for a-listers.

Love was indeed the driving force behind the events of the movie. It's not that it made the science possible, it's that it provided the motivation for the characters to do what they needed to do.

Without Cooper's love for his daughter and his sacrifice for Amelia, Humanity never would have received the data necessary to escape Earth and eventually develop into the 'bulk beings'.

Dr Amelia brand, on the other hand, takes this way too far and continually makes catastrophic mistakes based on emotion (e.g. her belief that Dr Mann was "the best of us").

I never saw the movie, so i cant say, but i know most of the science is based in reality, though perhaps skewed to make a "better" movie, though i highly doubt love powers that black hole

I believe its one of the most accurate depiction, and i wanna say its a general concensus. I know the black hole they use is one of the most accurate depictions at least.

I think Martian was the most accurate. But this is close too.

Nah, there's tons wrong with it.

First of all, they need that huge rocket to get off the surface of the earth but only need those tiny car sized craft to get off all the other planets.

Also I'm pretty sure a wormhole that small would have torn their ship apart.

And don't even get me started on that "love is the fith force" stuff.

Not just an accurate depiction, but also a very touching analogy with the field of filmmaking itself at the same time. I was stunned to see this breakdown . Nolan is the greatest storyteller I've witnessed.

First it was two scientific “papers” that really only talked about the effects of gravitational lensing on a virtual IMAX camera. Now it’s three papers.

Even the abstract of one of the papers states: “There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussion of Interstellar interesting.”

And now that we have a real photo it’s exactly what a black hole looks like.

I wonder if those conspiracy theorists who think Kubrick directed the moon landing footage will think that Nolan faked this black hole?

This film is aging like a good wine

This article explains the process and has a link to the study:

https://www.space.com/28552-interstellar-movie-black-holes-study.html

And this one explains the science behind the movie

https://www.space.com/27692-science-of-interstellar-infographic.html

If only the characters had acted like they understood it I might have agreed.

Why was the water planet considered the “best option” when they could have easily calculated that in relative time the probe had only arrived moments ago and Hathaway’s DATAAAAAAA! that she was ready to die or kill the whole crew for amounted to mere moments of recording that weren’t enough to make any kind of judgement upon.

The problem they were facing was wrongly stated and approached with maximum stupidity.

They didn’t have two positive signals they had one. One second of “haven’t died yet” information is worthless.

They could have also solved many of their time and resource constraints by using the gravity well as a resource itself. Rather than naively fly from planet to planet you could have used the gravity planet not as an exploration option but as a stasis pod to preserve time and air and food and fuel.

They also could have left a courier drone by the wormhole so once they’d decided which planet to choose they could have physically couriered the message through the hole back and broadcast on the other side.

They set up so many cool possibilities and then every character did the dumbest thing they could do after explaining how they all worked.

Tapping morse code to your daughter is always an option inside black holes. There’s these rooms that all go to your daughter, because science.

Nolan somewhat famously enlisted the help of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to help with the science stuff in the film. Afterwards, Thorne wrote a book about the science used in the film's cosmological ideas and themes.

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a black hole.

It has been praised for this for 10+ years…

That sad. They stripped it of x-rays and electromagnetic fields and proper time dilation in the movie.

It does look similar to the version taken in 1978 by  Jean-Pierre Luminet.

It would have been nice to see the actual work by Thorne-Luminet used in the movie. Apparently it was scrapped due to being too "confusing".

dunno if people realise but black holes started to be depicted everywhere using the interstellar model because it was the most accurate to date. before we had the usual circular black hole everywhere,with the black middle and the circumference a bit distorted . then interstellar came along and every black hole everywhere suddenly has the properly depicted accretion disk.

gg Kip Thorne!