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Physicist Kip Thorne On the Physics of "Interstellar"
A review of Interstellar at Scientific American that was not entirely flattering of the film's scientific aspects caught the eye of Cal Tech physicist Kip Thorne, who served as a consultant on the movie, and has actually written a book on the physics depicted. He and SciAm writer Lee Billings ended up having a conversation about how the film deals with time travel, black holes, and more. A slice:
I think the laws of physics very probably forbid warp drives and traversable wormholes. The research that has gone on over the past 25 years trying to determine whether its possible all point in negative directions, but it’s not a firmly closed door. So there are two issues here. One is that the laws of physics probably forbid it, but, gee, if they don’t, it would be great to have! The other is that the technology required to make a warp drive or a traversable wormhole is so far, far, far beyond the technology needed for a laser sail or a nuclear-pulse rocket that I would not be in favor of putting any significant resources into trying to develop it.
Now, you may have small amounts of money—tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—spent on this, but nothing is wrong with that. Peer-review, at least in the United States and in Europe, is too strong for there to be any danger of millions or billions of dollars being spent on these things. The technology required for wormholes is so far removed from our current and plausible near-future capabilities that to throw lots of money at it would almost certainly be a total boondoggle.
It's an ad. There's a movie out, and you know how it is with the movie industry: They're starving.
Why is Scientific American even running such an article?
What's next? Supposedly-serious newspapers "fact-checking" a comedy sketch?
Scientific American stopped being about Science at least 15 years ago. If you want to see how much it has gone downhill compare the scientific quality of the articles of the 1950/60/70/80s and those of the 90/00/10s. And weep in dispair.
Well, think of it like this.. with limiting factors such as the speed of light, or planck length, those tend to be rather concrete 'limits' to technology. So unless our understanding of those limits is 'wrong', it's not like they can just be removed by some handwaving and dilithium crystals.
Your comparison to electronics 50 years ago was purely a lack of understanding of materials science. To create a transistor there's nothing in the fundamental physical laws that preclude its construction, thus requiring a workaround to construct.
I don't believe I've ever seen a modem break 56 Kbps over a phone line.
The exact term is spaghettification.
Who ordered that?
This kind of comment is deeply ignorant and anti-science. Relativity is a description of the geometry of the universe. If you would rather believe in your own personal fantasies instead of one of the most well-supported theories in science, congratulations, you are yet another variety of religious loon.
Look, it's pretty simple. Science is not magic, and there is shit that it says that is for real-real not for play-play. We don't know what the future will look like in 2050 or 2100, but we can be completely sure of three things:
1) There will be no violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
2) Nothing (for all important values of nothing) will travel faster than the speed of light.
3) Commercial fusion power will still be 20 years out.
The first two are immutable laws of physics, the final one was proven by a Dr. M. T. Budget. Humor aside, relativity and thermodynamics have been proven at both the largest and smallest scales that humans have been able to observe, and at every level in between. They are not perfect theories, but they do place very hard and very real constraints on what kind of rabbits you can pull out of a given hat. You will not go to intergalactic space today, nor tomorrow, nor while anything recognizable as human exists.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.