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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.
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.
2001 Space Odyssey. Hollywood is about special effects.
Kip Thorne was used for nothing more than propaganda - hey look we have a Physicist on staff. He's not the end all be all of Physics. A wormhole by Saturn - really Kip? Because that's a natural spot for one, unlike say, the center of the Galaxy! You know where a black holes might be found - where one might turn out be a worm hole!
Kip Thorne, like Carl Sagan need to stay away from movies.
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.
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.
Mostly bland and boring. Most of the spectacular astronomical photos are time-lapsed over hours. When people look through a telescope at real time stuff, they are often surprised how dim and colorless it is. The colors look washed out because our eyes evolved for the mixture of light reflecting off surfaces here on earth.
They look colorless because the objects are very distant and very dim and thus primarily engage the low-light 'rod' photoreceptor cells which cannot see in color, not our color-perceiving 'cones'. That's nothing to do with their actual color content, nor anything directly to do with 'mixtures of light reflecting off surfaces', whatever that means.