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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.
In understand why he did it. If he made it accurate looking, a large percentage of the non-geek public wouldn't understand they went to a different part of the universe.
Bibliophiles and science-literates. The lesson is: stop trying.
And much the same reasoning goes to why NASA uses false color images for release: many of the colors out in space are pretty muted and there's a whole lot of brown and grey. There are some striking exceptions, but mostly, the universe looks pretty boring compared to the special effects laden adventure you'd expect from an sci-fi movie.
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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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'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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a stuntman, you insensitive clod!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I knew the wormhole transit view was BS, having read Rudy Rucker's book about wormhole travel years ago. I forgave them for it because the different views of the black hole itself were just awesome, and they needed a heavy-hitter like Thorne to come up with those.
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
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I think they could have made it work if they framed the shots right. If you move from one star field to another star field, then yeah, the audience isn't going to see much difference. But if Saturn were in the foreground and dead ahead in one shot and they transitioned to Gargantua being dead ahead as they went through the wormhole, I think the transit would have been obvious enough. Particularly if they looked back and showed a distorted view of Saturn through the wormhole after they passed through.
Also, how nasa "fudged" the moon landing by filming it in a sound studio.
Yeah, but they had to build the studio on the moon to get the gravity right.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.