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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 all theory work. Money isn't the limiting factor there, it's just that very few people have the required intellect and level of education to advance the field. There's nothing to spend money on until some of them propose an experiment to test their latest theory. Even the particle physics people can ask for new accelerators, and cosmologists always have some new instrument on their wish-list.
The only hope for fundamentally new space travel tech right now is the quantum vacuum thruster, and that only because the experimental evidence so far has too many flaws to say anything more than 'something funny going on here.'
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.
So basically what he's saying is we might as well dump the money into a black hole. Sounds like most government programs.
Does that cover the government projects where they bail to private companies that are to big to fail?
Why is Scientific American even running such an article?
What's next? Supposedly-serious newspapers "fact-checking" a comedy sketch?
"physics very probably forbid warp drives and traversable wormholes."
I would imagine that the human understanding of physics 50 years ago would have forbid the creation of the kind of microelectronics/transmitters/battery technology that are commonplace in most of our pockets today. Admittedly the physics of FTL (or any interstellar travel method) are far more difficult than what we have done in the electronics field over the past few decades, but believing that our pre infantile understanding of the universe makes us in any way knowledgeable of what is and is not possible is hubris of the highest degree.
I can't be alone in not liking this film. It wasn't the science (there was obviously a lot of work done there) that bothered me, and besides which with Sci Fi you always get a 'gimme' or two (warp drive, transporters, technobabble etc) but I really didn't feel anything with the story. It didn't draw me in, it just dragged. This wasn't what I was expecting as I had been looking forward to this film since I saw the first teaser. I see so many people going on about who great this film was but I can't help but wonder what it was that I missed?
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Sure he is. He's saying there's no realistic chance of "receiving" the technology today, no matter how much you spend, this isn't a video game tech tree. In a few centuries or millenia our science and technology may have advanced enough that we might at least have an idea how to start chasing the dream; or maybe not - at present the evidence slightly suggests that such technologies are impossible for anyone in the universe, regardless of their level of technology or how many resources they're willing to dedicate to developing them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
This is half completely wrong. Thermodynamics by definition does not apply to small scales, only to bulk systems. Hell, a small system of particles can (and in fact quite often will) easily violate the laws of thermodynamics. They're almost meaningless at small (i.e. a few dozen atoms) scales, because they're purely statistical laws. Even a large system can, in principle, violate the laws of thermodynamics, but only for extremely brief periods of time, and with a likelihood that approaches zero for macroscopic (order of 10^23 particles) systems.
Secondly, the behavior of relativity at very small scales is currently unknown. Reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics requires quantized gravity, and all current attempts to describe that mathematically have failed. This is a problem in either very small scales (i.e. Planck lengths, which to be fair haven't been observed and probably won't for quite some time), or in extremely large gravitational fields, such as that created by black holes, which we have (indirectly) observed. Both relativity and thermodynamics work great in their relative domains, but both of them have known domains where they collapse. For thermodynamics that doesn't really matter (it's constructed to only be true for bulk systems), but it's a pretty big issue for relativity, and suggests there is a significant gap in our knowledge.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
No, I was not wrong, I am well aware that certain effects propagate faster than the speed of light. Note that gravity waves have not been directly observed. There are other quantum effects which propagate faster than c, but the fundamental constraint is that nothing can accelerate to or past c, and classical information cannot propagate faster than c. There are solutions to GR equations which allow for spacetime to be bent to the point where something that *looks* like FTL to fall out, but they tend to require exotic matter, and there's no evidence to suggest that said matter exists.
Finally, one must keep in mind that any form of FTL allows for reference frames in which effects precede their causes. You may feel happy living in a universe where causality isn't a thing, but that to me would put unpleasant limits on what is knowable about our universe.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.