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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.
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.
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.
"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
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
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.
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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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.