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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.

3 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:There are two people you cannot satisfy with fi by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:It was a movie--duh by amRadioHed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    True, but probably the biggest part of the reason why NASA false colors most images is because it's necessary when depicting wavelengths that would otherwise be invisible.

    --
    We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
  3. Re:It was a movie--duh by umafuckit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    many of the colors out in space are pretty muted and there's a whole lot of brown and grey

    My astrophotography friends would beg to differ. There's plenty of awesome color there without the need to falsify it.