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Why Hollywood Fudged the Relativity-Based Wormhole Scenes In Interstellar
KentuckyFC writes: When Christopher Nolan teamed up with physicist Kip Thorne of Caltech to discuss the science behind his movie Interstellar, the idea was that Thorne would bring some much-needed scientific gravitas to the all-important scenes involving travel through a wormhole. Indeed, Thorne used the equations of general relativity to calculate the various possible shapes of wormhole and how they would distort the view through it. A London-based special effects team then created footage of a far away galaxy as seen through such a wormhole. It showed the galaxy fantastically distorted as a result, just as relativity predicts. But when it came to travelling through a wormhole, Nolan was disappointed with the footage.
The problem was that the view of the other side when travelling through a wormhole turns out to be visually indistinguishable from a conventional camera zoom and utterly unlike the impression Nolan wanted to portray, which was the sense of travelling through a shortcut from one part of the universe to another. So for the final cut, special effects artists had to add various animations to convey that impression. "The end result was a sequence of shots that told a story comprehensible by a general audience while resembling the wormhole's interior," admit Thorne and colleagues in a paper they have published about wormhole science in the film. In other words, they had to fudge it. Nevertheless, Thorne is adamant that the visualisations should help to inspire a new generation of students of film-making and of relativity.
The problem was that the view of the other side when travelling through a wormhole turns out to be visually indistinguishable from a conventional camera zoom and utterly unlike the impression Nolan wanted to portray, which was the sense of travelling through a shortcut from one part of the universe to another. So for the final cut, special effects artists had to add various animations to convey that impression. "The end result was a sequence of shots that told a story comprehensible by a general audience while resembling the wormhole's interior," admit Thorne and colleagues in a paper they have published about wormhole science in the film. In other words, they had to fudge it. Nevertheless, Thorne is adamant that the visualisations should help to inspire a new generation of students of film-making and of relativity.
It was a movie and Nolan was in it for the money and maybe the art.
Bibliophiles and science-literates. The lesson is: stop trying.
In other words, some "real" scientific theory is much too boring for Hollywood.
... the heroes would be ripped apart just by approaching the wormhole. But it is a movie, it has to be watchable. I thought they did a great job visually and an OK job story-wise - there were no "hair-pulling" moments. Although I must admit, watching both in IMAX (the giant screen 70mm type) I enjoyed Gravity more.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I'm sure you could make a movie adaptation that wasn't horse shit unrelated to the book; however, a TV series is more suited. We really need long-run drama TV series where each episode carries an hour and a half of content to capture the story in a lot of really good books.
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LMOL, umm no Sherlock they would not have been ripped apart. A Worm hole is not a black hole. The big questions is whether or not a worm hole is stable enough to allow travel through it.
No they wouldn't. A supermassive black hole of the size mentioned in the movie has less gravitational tidal forces at the event horizon than what you have at the surface of the earth. You are being pulled apart right now more than you would be near that black hole. It's size makes the event horizon radius very large so the gravitational differences per length are small that far away from the point of the singularity.
It was blatantly obvious who the ghosts were. Blatantly obvious, no question about it.
But, hey, great visuals, man! Really makes the graphics snobs jizz their pants!!
Problem is, with a crappy plot, it's still a shit movie, no matter how impressive the visuals are.
It's a movie. Most people don't care but for those sticklers, all they have to do is release a special edition that contains a "director's cut" of the film as well as a "science advisor's cut." They would eat it up and it would be a fun way to spark discussion.
Make it so, movie guys.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
From the depths of my mom's basement, I loose my voice to cry betrayal! that they would have the nerve to inaccurately portray something that hasn't been shown to exist.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Hello, this is why we have entertainment. I wish I could visually enhance and add special effects to my drive to work!
If it is a supermassive black hole with low tidal forces at the event horizon, how did it create mindbogglingly huge tidal waves on the first planet they visited?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Reality is disappointing?
This is why we create fiction in the first place.
-kgj
or..."Kimmy ticks off Sony by re-editing the flick to actually make it funny"
Table-ized A.I.
The problem I had with the low tides is that you don't get a glowing accretion disk if the tides aren't strong enough to rip apart nuclei. Where was all the radiation supposed to be coming from, bremsstrahlung?
Those who complain deserve the goat-se edition of the wormhole
Table-ized A.I.
People expect wormholes to look a certain way because directors keep trying to make them look visually exciting for audiences that expect them to look a certain way because directors keep trying to make them look visually exciting for audiences that expect them to look a certain way because directors keep trying to make them look visually exciting for audiences that expect them to look a certain way because directors keep trying to make them look visually exciting for audiences that expect them to look a certain way because ...Star Wars hyperspace. ...or the Dr. Who title sequences. ...or whatever.
The point is: stop doing what people expect because they expect it.
Like father, like son: http://www.thevoiceofreason.com/2009/05/images/KimJongIl.jpg
as Sheldon Cooper might say (and did say in one episode I think) cosmology is a load of baloney.
and he would have been right.
Hipsters expecting correct physics from hollywood?
Ah, who cares. I can't read that hipsteriffic crap site anyway.
Where was all the radiation supposed to be coming from, bremsstrahlung?
Holy crap, that is the actual name of a kind of radiation. I thought it was a made-up word!
Wormholes have never been observed in nature.
Therefore, there is no science behind them. There is only faith.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
In movies machine gun fire does not generally sound like machine gun fire.
Explosions are caricatures of the real thing largely done with diesel to create the big fiery plumes we love to see.
A stick of C4 going off does not create a giant fireball. It's just not good eye candy.
In the supermassive black hole in this PDF, the diameter of the event horizon is about 600 million kilometers, or roughly four AU, which is roughly the gap between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. It also has a mass 100 million times that of the Sun, which would basically suck the Solar System in real fast. A black hole the mass of the Sun (which would disrupt the Solar System considerably) would have tidal forces of about 50K Gs at the event horizon.
I'm way not convinced. (I'm also not impressed with the huge rocket that throws them to Saturn in a few years, carrying smaller rockets that can maneuver in the gravity well of a supermassive black hole and casually get out of an Earth-style gravity well.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Neither have electrons.
The SFC Dune adaptation was really quite good, but I thought the '85 Lynch film, for all its deviations, did an excellent job of capturing the atmosphere of the milieu.
That's a funny way to misspell 'math'.
One thing I like about "Big Bang Theory" is that it's the one television show I can see nowadays where science is mentioned and correct. Okay, I have minor nits, like the whiteboard in the apartment sometimes shows stuff Sheldon would just do in his head and expect everybody else (including Penny) to grasp easily.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
But I'm tempted not to watch this just because of all the marketing I've seen around it.
Did you write that while sipping tea with your pinky finger extended? lol.
I'm sorry, I see the word "milieu" and that's all I can picture. Some high society bore. :P
just like we want our cars to sound badass
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
i predict once we get laser weapons in space, we'll play cool FX to hear the sound they're not making.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
1) The blight "breathes nitrogen" and destroys all plants one crop species at a time.
2) A society which never got much further than we are today and whose technological civilization is falling apart is able to mount a crewed mission to wormhole near Saturn?
3) Several habitable worlds very close to a black hole. Why are there any? Where are the host star(s)?
4) The future utopia never went back to the black hole worlds but got along fine anyway. So what was the point?
With all the sloppy science, technology, and plotting going on, does it really matter if the visuals of the worm whole traversal or subtly wrong, exactly right, or just pure bologna?
Because the supermassive black hole is spinning, and when it spins the force it exerts isn't equal everywhere.
Oh and even in the giant tidal wave planet, the humans walked around okay without getting ripped apart.
Don't forget the episode where Leonard claimed his rocket fuel would make Wolowitz's model rocked more powerful than an F-1 engine (I believe that Leonard claimed 8 Meganewtons).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Movie increases visual effects to make things more awesome -- story at 11.
I don't know a lot about wormholes, but it seemed to me from the movie that they were entering the hole tangentially. Isn't that the worst possible way to enter a wormhole? The entry into the hole is prolonged and any stresses on the structure of the spacecraft have longer to act. As I say, IDKALAW, but a perpendicular, central entry seems safest to me.
Great point, as I've read this before and it's definitely worth mentioning. But the wormhole and the black hole were two separate objects in the movie. The wormhole was much smaller, and found in an orbit around Saturn.
I've always wanted to know what some of these things would look like if I was simply looking at them through a window of a spacecraft.
the '85 Lynch film... did an excellent job of capturing the atmosphere of the milieu.
So... it captured the atmosphere of middle but not the rest of it?
Neither have electrons.
I think you misspelled "erection" and forgot that not everyone has a dick as tiny and impotent as your own.
They're real - ask your mommy.
Lynda Obst and Kip Thorne came up with the the movie, then gave it to Spielberg and Jonathan Nolan to work out a scenario.
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
It's a project that has its genesis in the two-decades-long friendship between Obst, an astronomy enthusiast who produced "The Siege" and "The Fisher King," and Thorne, the Feynman professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. (When Obst was producing "Contact," adapted by screenwriters James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg from Carl Sagan's novel, Thorne conceptualized a wormhole sequence for the film that also advanced the field of theoretical physics.)
Over the years, Thorne's work on gravitational-wave detectors, which calculate negative space in things like black holes and imploding galaxies, has been at the very front edge of Einsteinian astrophysics. At one point Obst and Thorne were brainstorming about, as Obst puts it, "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans," and crafted a potential cinematic scenario that hooked Spielberg enough to consider directing.
And that version was...
Well, let's just say that Jar Jar Abrams and studio heads would have loved it.
There is sex in zero gravity and a Chinese expedition too. And the robot wears a baseball cap.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
1) It consumes nitrogen from the atmosphere, binding it in the form that humans can't breathe, while eating up ALL PLANT LIFE at the same time.
Humans just managed to create species of plants they need for food which managed to stand out longer.
They got dustbowls because there are no more plants to hold down the dirt. On the entire planet.
Corn is the last EDIBLE PLANT that they can grow. Possibly last plant at all. And that would include plankton.
It's Soylent Green all over again. It's not about the food - it's about the collapse of the entire biosphere.
2) It's a post global war society, REVERTING BACK to old technology.
Think 20th century humans going back to horse and cart.
They still got the science and knowledge, they just don't have the resources anymore.
And they are clearly far more advanced in robotics and AI, they have means of artificially growing humans without a human uterus, they have space planes which can take off from the surface of a planet unassisted, cryogenics...
3) Because the entire setting of the story was picked and arranged by the distant future humans to provide the conditions for present (in the movie) humans to OBSERVE a very specific black hole and then transfer that data back to Earth without violating causality - with the help of a temporary tesseract attached along the universe and then collapsed.
They've scoured the ENTIRE UNIVERSE to find them those exact conditions.
No time traveling or time altering ever takes place nor does any matter or information leave or enter the universe.
All they did was bend the existing space to get humans to a place where data for figuring out anti-gravity could be gathered.
4) "Future utopia" would not exist without the data gathered by observing a black hole for 20 years or so, then dropping an AI probe into it, then telegraphing all that OUT of the black hole without breaking causality, to a specific point in space-time to a specific human with training and motivation to solve the problem and a means of reading the message.
Why aren't they leaving a perfectly good solar system with a slightly used home planet in a goldilocks zone that has only been messed up a little by an ecological catastrophe, and with dozens of planets, moons and asteroids laying around...
I'm guessing smurfs.
Also, what makes you think that it's an utopia?
Those are kids and grandkids of generations of "caretakers". Not explorers.
They've sent the last batch of explorers out to die far away in space somewhere.
They just want to play baseball and eat corn. And "take care" of museums.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If it is a supermassive black hole with low tidal forces at the event horizon, how did it create mindbogglingly huge tidal waves on the first planet they visited?
The director explained they took some liberties. They used two different concepts to get their point across. For example, a supermassive black hole would not have caused the tidal wave on the first planet and the time dilation would not be as large as shown in the movie. The effects of the tidal wave on the first planet and huge time dilation is what you would expect from stellar black hole. Also, stellar black holes have huge tidal forces at the event horizon. Nolan admitted that the effects on the first planet is what you would expect from a stellar black hole and effects at the event horizon is from a supermassive black hole, and he did it that way in the interests of story telling.
Quantum scale wormholes work just fine for quantum scale spacecraft. Human seem to think everyone out there is a huge human sized creature. But actually many ETs exist on a quantum scale in those curled up dimensions that go unnoticed by large things like human beings. A quantum scale spacecraft is a bit like Dr. Who's Tardis. It's a lot bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside.
Meeting the audience's expectation, and conforming to the cultural standards of drama at the time, whatever it is, always trumps literal truth.
I remember watching a dumb old black-and-white movie with my brother when I was a kid. I was the one who "knew about science." Someone was using a metal detector with a search coil, and it was dramatically "right" for them to find something. My brother says "Tick. Tick. Tick. Tickticktickticktick." I say, "Oh, no. That's a Geiger counter. This is a metal detector, and it does "Wheeeee-oooh, because the metal changes the resonant frequency of the coil and the oscillator--"
--and the metal detector goes "Tick. Tick. Tick. Tickticktickticktick."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
They would only be ripped apart if the black hole doesn't rotate. If you are making one to save the earth naturally you would want it to rotate, so the ring singularity would create a second event horizon that would allow transit and block spagettification. My wish is a better explanation of exotic matter with negative energy density.
Someone should have said "1.21 gigawatts! Great Scott!"
That all depends on whether negative mass/energy are real..
I laugh at your humiliation. It must have been terrible for you. :)
Spoken like somebody who was born after Euclides' Parallel Postulate was disproven. There was a ton of math that worked out if you assumed that his postulate was correct. But eventually it was shown to not be the case and there was a huge amount of progress made after that was dispelled. And likewise there's a bunch of math that works out now that we've dropped that requirement that would never have been possible previously.
Whether you care to admit it or not, you can't say that any mathematical formulation reflects something other than fancy math until you take it out into the real world and see if the model has any predictive value. Until you do that, you just have a bunch of numbers and funny Greek letters.
Which is why I question the utility of continuing to work on ever more complex models for physics without having any method of testing them available. If any of those models that the assumptions are being based upon proves to be wrong, there's a ton of work that's going to have to be redone in part or in total with nothing to show for it but ever increasing ways of solving difficult math problems.
Just because you can do something in your head doesn't mean that you should do it in your head. Writing things down isn't just about making things more manageable to calculate, it's a record that you can go back over when things don't come out the way you expect or to verify the assumptions and steps as being valid.
You might get away with doing something in your head a hundred times, but that doesn't mean that the 101st time you're not going to have a thinko and screw it up. Good luck finding the mistake if you haven't written it down. You're going to have to find it yourself as the technology doesn't yet exist to show people what you're thinking.
That's how science works, you stupid fuck. Hypotheses, theories, and models sometimes get proven wrong or have to be reworked. That's how it's supposed to be, and it doesn't mean that they represent any kind of waste of effort, because those flawed ideas are the stepping stones that led us to develop the more accurate ones. And it sure as hell doesn't mean that any "faith" is involved. "Faith" would be continuing to hold to the disproven ideas even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Your "questioning the utility" of research is nothing more than a flimsy cover for your resentment of people who are demonstrably smarter than you.
In the PR and even in the reviews it was claimed there were long drawn out scenes discussing physic theories. This was nonsense. All those scenes were 5 minute sum-ups and 5 times as much time was used to talk about how the feeling of love should be used in a judgement about which planet to visit. They need to shut up already about it being a sciencey movie. It wasn't. It was a feelings movie. A bad one. The red camera of HAL9000 had more personality then any actor in this terrible terrible film. This is the first Hollywood movie I had seen in a year. I was dragged to it. It just reminded me not to waste my time.