Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I am so disappointed.
I like microcars
Why is Scientific American even running such an article?
What's next? Supposedly-serious newspapers "fact-checking" a comedy sketch?
FTFY.
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.
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.
Actually the whole point is that we have several theoretical constructs that should allow travel from A to B at speeds greater than lightspeed. All rely on the fact that special relativity only imposes a local speed limit: i.e. you can't travel faster than light *through space*. Nothing in it forbids the existence of short cuts (wormholes) that connect distant parts of the universe with drastically shorter paths. Nor does it forbid things like an Alcubierre warp drive, where you don't move at all through the space you're in, but instead move an isolated bubble of flat space through the surrounding space at arbitrary speeds, while leaving the contents of that bubble of space in free fall (Relativity imposes no speed limit on space itself.)
Both constructs have their weak spots, but so far every time someone comes up with something showing them to be "impossible" somoeone else comes up with a modified construct that removes the impossibility. And of course there's the little issue that if Special Relativity is correct then any method of getting between A and B faster than light can also be used to send information into your own past, which would wreak havoc with our understanding of causality. But then the whole "time passes in only one direction" thing is a serious weak spot in our current understanding of the universe as well, so it may be that it's only us that would have an objection to causality loops, and not the universe itself.
Where every construct falls flat on it's face is that we have absolutely no idea how to actually create such a thing - we're mathematically modeling the things we might be able to do if we had nuclear reactors while still living in the stone age. But then that's what our species does, we tell ourselves stories of things that have never existed, and then try to figure out how to make them exist. We did it when our ancestors imagined how useful a killing-stone with a long, light handle would be, and we do it today on a million different fronts. Only difference is today we do our imaginings with a level of mathematical precision that guarantees that, if our starting assumptions are true, then the thing we imagine can in principle be built, even if we don't know how to do so at present.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.