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Physicist Kip Thorne On the Physics of "Interstellar"

Posted by timothy on from the it's-a-movie-get-through-it dept.

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.

6 of 289 comments (clear)

  1. Total Boondoggle by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    1. Re:Total Boondoggle by Feral+Nerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    2. Re:Total Boondoggle by Immerman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. So it is not an accurate Documentary Film? by microcars · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am so disappointed.

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    I like microcars
    1. Re:So it is not an accurate Documentary Film? by nine-times · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, the blog post seems a little insane to me. I get it when Neil deGrasse Tyson complains about things like, in some movie the Earth spins the wrong way, or if the constellations are wrong for the time that the movie takes place. He's nit-picking and he knows it. He's pointing out interesting scientific inconsistencies. It might possibly be educational, and he's showing off his knowledge and attention to detail, and whatever, that's fine.

      But this guy is actually complaining that the movie depicts a stable wormhole that we can travel through. His problem with it is, scientifically, we have no reason to think that it's possible, though we don't strictly know. Did he think that either Christopher Nolan or the audience was not aware that we can't create wormholes?

      Even in the movie, it's not depicted as something that's easy to create. But that's beside the point, really, since it's a science fiction movie that is just positing that such a thing is possible for the sake of building a plot around that supposition. It's like complaining about Jurassic Park on the grounds that, "It's unlikely that we'll ever be able to clone dinosaurs from ancient mosquitoes formed in amber." Or complaining about the movie E.T. because, "We've never been visited by extra-terrestrial life forms-- at least not so far, not as far as we know..."

  3. Interstellar is a work of - get this - fiction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is Scientific American even running such an article?

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