Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
On April 10, 2019, the world celebrated the first real picture of a black hole, as all the pictures previously circulating on the Internet were only visual simulations. This event deserves to be celebrated, because we were able to observe the most important natural phenomena in the universe, about which controversy has continued for nearly a century. It was first discovered mathematically by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild in 1915 from the equations of general relativity devised by the great physicist Albert Einstein. In this context, this is a scientific review of the movie Interstellar, which was released in theaters in November 2014. The film received positive criticism for the scientific accuracy that was implemented by the contemporary physicist and astronomer Kip Thorne, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.
Before starting to discuss the film’s story, I would like to point out that this is a scientific review of the film without mentioning the events of the movie so as not to restrict the viewer’s imagination. However, I recommend that you enjoy watching the film before reading the article, because Interstellar is not just a Hollywood movie with great media resonance; rather, it is an artistic masterpiece that was presented through the depth of the idea and the simplicity of the script, to achieve the desired goal of making a science fiction film in which the weight of scientific realism is balanced by the creativity of cinematic imagination and its tools. Starting with the genius director Christopher Nolan, whom we know from great films such as Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Inception, then moving on to the cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, and Bill Irwin. It is no wonder that the genius composer Hans Zimmer, who composed “Time”, participated in the Interstellar soundtrack, so that the oscillations of his music take us to the horizon of the black hole’s gravitational waves and settle us in the deep silence of the rings of Saturn.
The film’s story centers on the farmer, Cooper, who worked as an engineer and spacecraft commander at NASA, before the agency was closed by the government. He is also the father of two children: Tom and Murph, who all live in a house in the middle of a large farm with their grandfather. Murph is a ten-year-old girl who shows signs of precocious intelligence through her questions to her father and is preoccupied with an important event happening inside her room. There is a library in her room that covers an entire wall, from which books sometimes fall to the floor, and she always wondered why, while her grandfather gave her a ready answer that it was “ghosts.”
Cooper’s curiosity in discovering the coordinates of a secret place leads him to carry out a mission whose goal is: “to search for a habitable planet.” To achieve this goal, the mission is divided into two plans:
The first plan: transporting humans via gravitational waves, the method of which is still stuck in Professor Brand’s equations.
The second plan: an alternative plan in the event that the first plan fails. It intends to transfer fertilized human eggs that will accompany Cooper and his fellow astronauts in the spacecraft to the new planet.
The film’s events appear to take place in a future that extends from our present reality, and from my scientific point of view it appears to be very close. There are indicators that appeared in the film, even if their appearance is symbolic of a conceptual idea about human life on planet Earth in the near future. These indicators are not science fiction, but rather a reflection of the experimental reality of the scientific laboratory today.
Climate Change
The Earth is becoming uninhabitable, and the reason is not the huge population density, but rather climate change, as danger indicators are ringing threatening the motherland (Earth) and us humans. Statistically, the Earth’s temperatures have accelerated over the past thirty years, with the highest increase in temperature recorded in 2015 at 1.08°C. Recording a measurement of 1°C increase for the Earth’s temperature means that we have reached the middle of the danger, because if this temperature increase doubles to reach 2°C, the Earth will not become a suitable home for life. Scientists estimate that between the years 2090-2100 it is possible to measure an increase of 2°C if humans continue to waste the Earth’s resources.
What is impressive about the movie Interstellar is that it translated this change into sandstorms, not only an abbreviation of scientific truth, but an employment of the concept of gravity as a physical dimension, as we will see later. While the second effect of climate change is the decrease in oxygen levels, which has developed a type of pest that breathes nitrogen gas, which humans do not breathe, and is abundant in the atmosphere. This in turn led to the proliferation of these pests at high speed, destroying agricultural crops. With food resources becoming scarce, humans were forced to focus their efforts on agriculture.
Solar Energy
The plane that Cooper insisted on following is a solar-powered plane. Its efficiency produces enough energy for Cooper’s farm, which he will later use to operate agricultural tractors. This means that its efficiency is higher than the current efficiency, which has reached approximately 45% of the solar cell in the laboratory today. I was very fascinated by the view of the wind turbines in the plane’s flight scene with the natural beauty of the skyline and the ocean, which was the brightest in the film and a reflection of the bright future of renewable energy.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence in the film was used for more complex tasks than now; it drives spacecrafts without human intervention, but it remains under human control by controlling the appropriate settings for each mission, or sometimes the robot works in synergy with the human, but the tasks that required complex precision were carried out by Cooper, as happened at the moment the vehicle in which they emerged from the Earth’s atmosphere docked with the Endurance spaceship waiting for them in space. This cooperation between humans and artificial intelligence is very far from the ethical concerns addressed by most science fiction films in depicting the superiority of artificial intelligence over human intelligence, and thus their attempt to eliminate humans. A sense of humor, sincerity, and frankness are programmable elements. In addition, the appearance of artificial intelligence in the two crew members, Tars/Case, was contrary to what is usual, as they do not have a human form, and this is close to reality, as robot designs today have emerged from human bias to suit motor capabilities similar to those of humans or proportional to the requirements of tasks. In fact, the film went further than that, as the Tars robot differs in personality from the Case robot to match the meaning of the spirit of companionship alongside the astronaut team, who will spend a large amount of time in frightening isolation and under the pressure of an unknown journey.
Artificial Gravity
This precise design of the Endurance spaceship, which the visual effects crew put a great deal of effort into simulating and photographing from many aspects, consists of 12 boxes that continued to rotate until the moment of docking with the spacecraft. This rotation around a fixed axis forms an equivalent weight, a “centrifugal force,” similar to the effect of Earth’s gravity on objects, because our bodies cannot tolerate the lack of gravity for long periods, as the muscles gradually atrophy, which leads to their contraction. Scientific accuracy would have been great if the high gravitational influence of Miller’s planet was taken into account, whose gravity is estimated at 130% of Earth’s gravity, circumstances under which the human body would supposedly be crushed.
Biological Evolution
The film did not address human development in biology in a significant way except in the process of hibernation in special beds that provide oxygen and food on the one hand, and on the other hand protect the human body from the effects of time and aging. As for freezing fertilized eggs, what is scientifically known as oocyte cryopreservation, it is possible and advanced with a success rate exceeding 30%.
Spatial Dimension
The essence of the film lies in its complex story due to the difficulty of understanding time and gravity. I will try to simplify the events by dividing them into spaces. Imagine that there are three spaces, so that each space is related to three factors:
Place – Time – Physical Dimensions
Space A
Place: Earth
Time: Earthly time Dimensions: Three physical dimensions
In this space, Newton’s laws of classical physics, which constitute partial laws of modern physics, are the ones that operate. We humans know the three physical dimensions, which are length, width, and height, and we call them space. As for time, it is linked to the movement of the Earth around the sun. Our measurement of time is nothing but the complete cycle that the Earth completes in its movement around the sun, which we know is equivalent to 365 days and six hours. The day is calculated by the rotation of the Earth around its axis, to represent approximately 24 hours, and we all know that time is related to place. Five o’clock in the afternoon in the city of Riyadh, for example, is two o’clock in the afternoon in the city of London. So, we represent time coinciding with the movement of the Earth because we belong to the Earth, but our earthly time has no meaning on a planet closer to the sun or farther away. It also has no meaning in another galaxy with planets and gravity completely different from our solar system, so, Newton’s laws fail outside the first layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Space B
Place: The new galaxy after bypassing the wormhole
Time: Relative timeDimensions: Four physical dimensions
In this space, Einstein’s laws of general relativity are what accurately explain the universe. Time joins the three dimensions of space as a fourth physical dimension, together forming a fabric called space-time.
Gravitational Waves
Gravity in the theory of general relativity is a distortion (anomaly) that occurs due to the effect of mass in the fabric of space-time. Because the universe is expanding, the mass of planets and stars affects the fabric of space-time during their movement, causing gravitational distortion and producing gravitational waves. It’s kind of like water rippling while a body moves over it, and of course the greater the mass of the body, the greater the frequency of the ripples. Gravitational waves were detected from the collision of two neutron stars for the first time in 2016, a full century after the theory of relativity predicted them. This is the field for which the scientist Kip Thorne won the Nobel Prize a year after its discovery. In the film, they detected a gravitational anomaly near the planet Saturn that had caused Cooper’s spacecraft to crash when he was working for NASA, and they discovered a wormhole.
Wormhole
It is a theoretical passage and an ideal mathematical solution in the fabric of space-time predicted by the theory of general relativity. It is scientifically called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. It was developed by scientists Einstein and Nathan Rosen. Mathematically, it is much more complex than what was depicted in the film, and we have not yet been able to prove it because it requires a mass amount of energy, but it constitutes rich material for science fiction films, as they benefit from its mathematical concept, which is summed up as a shortcut to cut down the travel time between stars or galaxies. The wormhole in two-dimensional space is imagined as a circle, but in the fabric of space-time it is spherical in shape, according to the wormhole equations that the scientist Kip Thorne worked on.
Relative time is time in Einstein’s theory of relativity, and it is a physical dimension that, along with the three dimensions of space, forms the fabric of space-time. This fabric is affected by the mass of objects. In the case of very large objects such as the Sun or Earth, their mass causes distortion in space-time. This distortion causes light to bend in its transmission, and the larger the mass of the object, the greater the amount of light that will deflect. This was proven experimentally a century ago, thanks to an expedition led by the physicist and astronomer Arthur Eddington. Today, atmospheric satellites take this distortion into account in accurate GPS calculations.
This space-time distortion also increases with gravity, therefore, time expands. This scientific phenomenon is called Gravitational Time Dilation, meaning that when there is an object with very high gravity, such as a black hole, time passes slowly. So, Cooper spent only three hours on Miller’s planet, which was located within the gravity of the black hole, but it was more than twenty-three years in terms of Earth time.
Space C
Place: The black hole Gargantua
Time: Time as a fifth dimension
Dimensions: Five physical dimensions
The Black Hole
To understand black holes, the laws of physics must work together. There is a very huge void in the material atoms, which are formed in stars with great thermal energy through nuclear fusion in order for the elements to be manufactured. If the star’s nuclear fuel runs out, the balance of forces is disturbed between those that work to bond the basic components for atoms, which is gravity, nuclear forces, and the forces that push the components of the star to fly into space. The expiration of nuclear fuel gives gravity the upper hand to compress the material mass of the atom. The mass shrinks to a body with a very small radius, known scientifically as the “Schwarzschild radius.” This body is a black hole. A mass like the mass of the sun will have a radius of 3 km to turn into a black hole. However, for a black hole to be less massive, it must be equivalent to more than 3 times the mass of the sun. The universe is full of black holes, even our galaxy has one in the middle. Black holes are a natural result of Einstein’s equations in general relativity, and the experimental evidence for them is the gravitational waves that resulted from the collision of two neutron stars for the first time in 2016, forming a black hole.
Space A is our physical reality that we know well, and Space B is the scientifically real relative space that we can imagine. As for space C, it is a space that we know mathematically, but it has not yet been scientifically proven. There are two reasons:
First: Light does not escape from the black hole due to high gravity; Therefore, there are no electromagnetic waves emitted that can be monitored or sent to study the behavior of this object.
Second: A black hole is a body of infinite density with very high gravity, and here lies the unified theory that attempts to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics in the four forces of the universe: gravitational forces, electromagnetic forces, strong nuclear forces and weak nuclear forces, in order to solve the mystery of gravitational singularity. Mathematically, the solution lies in five dimensions, in which time becomes “frozen” and gravity is “infinite,” two physical dimensions that merge together with the three dimensions of space.
Therefore, inside a black hole, we must abandon the idea of space and time as we know them.
The Interstellar film team imaginatively depicted the space of a black hole as a surreal space, in five dimensions, where these dimensions enable the fragmentation of every space-time event into infinity, due to the infinity of gravity, and the movement between these dimensions is similar to our movement in the three dimensions of space, but communication takes place through gravitational waves because they are the only constant physical dimension in the three spaces, and this is what happened with Cooper when he tried to communicate with his daughter in space A. “It is not time travel.” Rather, it is a new fabric with certain dimensions that opened in some way from space C to space A to draw coordinates on the floor of the room after the dust storm, and from those coordinates Cooper learns about the secret place.
Survival Instinct or Love
The film’s creativity is more comprehensive than approximating scientific reality and depicting future fantasy, even though the picture of the first real black hole is very close to its depiction in the film, which alone is considered a resounding success. The film also shows superiority when it comes to the visual effects, which deserved an Oscar, and scientific accuracy. But the great success lies in the hidden message of the necessity of believing in science even in the face of a dark reality, and this became clear in the dialogue that took place between Cooper and his daughter’s teacher, who considered that “the Apollo missions on the surface of the moon were nothing but a clever propaganda campaign carried out by the American government to bankrupt the Soviet Union.” It also represented the government’s fear of provoking public opinion by keeping NASA a secret organization. As for the beauty of Interstellar, in my opinion, it lies in the open ending that the film left for the viewer. Both plans succeeded, but the method changed the narrative to leave the beginning and end loop expanding, just as our universe expands with the development of human consciousness from a three-dimensional universe to a five-dimensional universe, transcending our perceptual reality of linear time.
Cooper’s struggle in the search for a new planet is a sacrifice that transcends the selfish nature of humanity:
“I think of my family and millions of families.” Cooper fought against Dr. Mann, who believed with Professor Brand that the first plan, which was to transfer humans to a habitable planet, would not succeed because of evolutionary biology. Kin Selection Theory explains that altruism is an essential behavior in natural selection, as an individual shares 50% of the genes with his siblings. Therefore, naturally, a person will choose to prefer those closest to him over those who are farthest away. This is what Professor Brand adopted, sacrificing his own humanity by believing that humanity will work together, transcending selfishness, surrendering to his inability to solve the mystery of time in the equations of gravitational waves.
The deep bond of love between Cooper and his daughter is the key to solving the mystery of “Why was I chosen?” Love, which Dr. Amilia defined as that strong bond, which lasts even in the absence of social benefit, builds an unfathomable dimension in consciousness that science cannot prove.
The question always remains: “Will we love our land, transcending our selfish nature, and work together humanely so that we never have to leave it?”
T1609
