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.

Comments

Re:Total Boondoggle

[Feral Nerd]

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?

Interstellar is a work of - get this - fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Scientific American even running such an article?

What's next? Supposedly-serious newspapers "fact-checking" a comedy sketch?

Re:Total Boondoggle

[Immerman]

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.

Re:You will not go to wormhole today.

[Baloroth]

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.