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Movies Space Science

Why Hollywood Fudged the Relativity-Based Wormhole Scenes In Interstellar 133

Posted by Soulskill from the that's-what-they-do dept.
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.
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Why Hollywood Fudged the Relativity-Based Wormhole Scenes In Interstellar More

Why Hollywood Fudged the Relativity-Based Wormhole Scenes In Interstellar

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  • It was a movie--duh (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It was a movie and Nolan was in it for the money and maybe the art.

    • Re:It was a movie--duh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dins ( 2538550 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:20PM (#49096579)
      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.

      • Re:It was a movie--duh (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:25PM (#49096619)

        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.

        • Re:It was a movie--duh (Score:5, Interesting)

          by amRadioHed ( 463061 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:44PM (#49096773)

          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.

        • Re:It was a movie--duh (Score:5, Interesting)

          by umafuckit ( 2980809 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @06:38PM (#49097515)

          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.

          • 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.

            • Re:examples please (Score:4, Informative)

              by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @11:26PM (#49098765)

              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.

              • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                by Anonymous Coward

                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.

                • To give a more mundane example, I once watched the Northern Lights alongside a friend with a camera. I could see them in warmish gray, neutral gray, and coolish gray. When my friend got back to his laptop, he just amplified the light and there were beautiful colors.

                  • Interesting, thanks for that. I didn't know the colours were visible only in time-lapse.

                    • Most people's eyes can actually see the colors fine, but you need to stay outside for several hours for the eyes to get that sensitive. That might be a bit cold in Alaska! 8-)

                      I have been out at sea, on watch with all lights out at night, and after a while I could see the stars twinkling in color... thought I was having hallucinations at first, but then other people said they could see it too.

            • 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.

              Well you can find out! Go look at an image of the Andromeda galaxy. Then go to a dark site and look at the summer Milky Way. Compare the two.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Evtim ( 1022085 )

          I disagree.

          First, the dome [or sphere] of stars is majestic enough; if you are able to choose your position in space I am sure there are spectacular views. I mean we have them on Earth, just looking at the sky while in the desert for instance...

          Secondly, the planets. And moons. Breakfast in orbit of a planet - bring it on..

          Third - there are probably all kinds of interesting large scale phenomena [black holes eating something, that kind of stuff] where a lot is happening outside the visible part of the spect

      • 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.
      • Exactly. Just how many people would notice and / or care?
      • A large percentage of the non-geek public don't understand much of anything anymore. That's why Jupiter ascendant bombed. The movie was basically about a woman who was an illegal Russian immigrant snuck in as a child who turns out has the same genetic signature of the dead leader of this vast galactic corporation who seeds planets with human life so they can harvest them after 100000 yrs for genetic materials to make an immortality elixir only the uber rich can afford. The woman is rescued by a merc for h

      • Blame Dr. Who.

    • I thought it was a shitty rewrite of 2001. I was completely disappointed by the film. If they'd cut 30 minutes off of it, at least one could not have accused it of being overly long.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rakarra ( 112805 )

        If they'd cut 30 minutes off of it, at least one could not have accused it of being overly long.

        I'd like them to cut out the entire section of the movie with Matt Damon. He's given the worst, eye-rolling pop psychobabble dialog and doesn't really do anything than show why his planet was uninhabitable and break their space ship.

        • This and 'serious scientist' Hathaway arguing in favor of love as an interstellar communication medium are the main two reasons this movie is vastly over-rated. It's not a horrible movie, but top 25 all time as votes by IMDB users? That's a total joke.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rakarra ( 112805 )

            It's not a horrible movie, but top 25 all time as votes by IMDB users? That's a total joke

            That's not unusual, the top 25 is often skewed by very recent releases. By default, it should probably edit out any film released in the last year; over time, the rankings get more accurate, while shortly after release it's skewed by fan boy votes.

      • > I thought it was a shitty rewrite of 2001.

        Yeah, I wasn't impressed with him ripping off that video montage sequence either but I could understand why he did it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by doccus ( 2020662 )
      Well, they could have saved a lot of money simply by having the effects studio make the image of the distant galaxy get smaller the closer you get.. too boring?

  • There are two people you cannot satisfy with film (Score:3, Insightful)

    by halivar ( 535827 ) <bfelger&gmail,com> on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:20PM (#49096583)

    Bibliophiles and science-literates. The lesson is: stop trying.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 )
      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Those who complain deserve the goat-se edition of the wormhole

    • Wormholes have never been observed in nature.

      Therefore, there is no science behind them. There is only faith.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Neither have electrons.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by sexconker ( 1179573 )

          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.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        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).

  • In other words, some "real" scientific theory is much too boring for Hollywood.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by oh_my_080980980 ( 773867 )
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Rakarra ( 112805 )

        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!

        Did you watch the movie? If you did, it sounds like you missed the ending, where they figured out the wormhole was made by future-humans to create a time paradox that saves current Earth.

      • 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.
        • That footage is amazing, and it's retarded for people to fault Nolan for choosing not to use something that looks so...normal? lol. I think they should put the original footage of the "real" transit on the DVD extras, so everyone can see it without a net connection. I was confused though because the footage made it seem that Gargantuan was located many galaxies away...what's wrong with Sagittarius A? How would the "future humans" make it billions (possible trillions) of light-years away in the first place?

      • 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... [latimes.com]

        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.

  • ... 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.
    • 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.

    • Re:Well, if they wanted to make it more realistic. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:37PM (#49096705)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ecuador ( 740021 )
        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?

        • 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.

        • 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 p

      • 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?

      • In the supermassive black hole in this PDF [nasa.gov], 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 wit

      • 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.
    • 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.

  • Just release a special edition Bluray (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MetalliQaZ ( 539913 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:39PM (#49096731)

    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.

    • This.. this is... genius!! I would pay real currency for a theatrical cut, director's cut, and Kip Thorne's cut of Interstellar!

    • >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."

      There wouldn't be much left, then.

      As much as Kip Thorne and NDT have touted the science of it, anyone with even a basic understanding of physics would develop a severe allergic reaction from watching the movie.

      No, Nolan, disconnecting an object travelling with you doesn't magically boost you out of a gravity well.

      • Anybody notice that the first planet they visited was so close to the black hole that there was humungous time dilation, but the mothership stayed a little ways up where there was no dilation? It's not an on-off thing, guys, it's continuous....

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          It is pretty close to an on/off thing. Relativistic time dilation is highly non-linear. IIRC it was even in the dialogue that the ship would stay far enough away that the time dilation wasn't too bad, while the shuttle would go down to the planet, where it was severe.

          • Really? When I looked at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], it gave the dilation formula as (H + h) / H, where h is the height and H is a constant. That looks to me to be a fairly smooth function. (I also don't completely understand what they mean by the dilation, which appears to increase with height.)

            I may well be misunderstanding this, but that's what I was able to come up with.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              The formula you've quoted is for a particular set of observers in flat spacetime (spacetime near a black hole isn't flat). The Wikipedia article is unclear about what H is, and the link to the Rindler coordinates article doesn't specify either. Also, you have to be careful with the Td(h) formula because it's not giving a simple, straightforwardly intuitive measure of time dilation.

              If you look lower down at the "Outside a Non-Rotating Sphere" section, they give another formula:

              t0 = tf * sqrt[1-(2GM)/(rc^2)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        The ship clearly had the engines on when it ditched the shuttles. Disconnecting boosters or fuel tanks when they're expended is a rather well established technique for increasing delta v. They even showed shots of the fuel gauges and the shuttle engines cutting out.

        If you mean the scene near the end where they skim the event horizon, you don't need much delta v at all to get out. You're in orbit. If you mean the bit where they stop on the high tau planet and then leave, that's not realistic and various

        • Detaching boosters does not provide boost.

          They ran out of fuel, and then just barely escaped the falling into the black hole in the slingshot maneuver by disconnecting the dead weight, which magically accelerated backwards propelling the spacecraft it detached from magically into Mars orbit.

          There's artistic license (like the drawing of the wormhole, which is whatever, it doesn't bother me), and then there's a landing shuttle which can magically boost in and out of a .99999C gravity well without ill effect o

          • Yeah because a movie where everybody dies with absolutely no drama is going to be very entertaining. Perhaps you should stick to the Hallmark channel; at least there you won't have any actual real-world experience or knowledge by which to judge the "realness" and you can then be entertained.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            You missed the fuel gauge showing the shuttles running out of fuel, detaching, and the main engine still having fuel. There are lots of things in movies to pick on without exercising your nerd rage on the things they got right.

  • I am outraged (Score:5, Funny)

    by paiute ( 550198 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @04:39PM (#49096733)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You should move to the attic.

  • Real life is boring... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello, this is why we have entertainment. I wish I could visually enhance and add special effects to my drive to work!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'd hire Micheal Bay to direct my drive to work!

  • Reality is disappointing?

    This is why we create fiction in the first place.

  • This is normal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Atrox666 ( 957601 ) on Friday February 20, 2015 @06:14PM (#49097375)

    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.
     

  • just like we want our cars to sound badass
    http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]

    i predict once we get laser weapons in space, we'll play cool FX to hear the sound they're not making.

  • 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

    • 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 - i

      • Sigh. The point of the blight is not that it happened in the movie, but that it's stupid, and I'm not too fond of your explanation. Fixing nitrogen so we can't breathe it? We don't breathe nitrogen, except in the sense that it comes in our lungs and goes out unchanged. Nor is there any sign that anybody's having problems breathing on Earth (except with the dust). The idea of a blight that methodically wipes out one crop after another need some serious explanations.

        Did anybody mention a large war? I

        • Fixing nitrogen so we can't breathe it? We don't breathe nitrogen, except in the sense that it comes in our lungs and goes out unchanged.

          Umm... Yes we DO breathe it, in a sense that its presence or absence in the air that we breathe are detrimental to our health.

          Pump more of it in the atmosphere we breathe, changing pressure, we get drunk [wikipedia.org] on it.
          Pump it out of the atmosphere, bind it into ground, and we poison ourselves with the remaining oxygen or CO and CO2 - as both the air pressure and concentration of gasses in the air now changes completely.

          Nor is there any sign that anybody's having problems breathing on Earth (except with the dust).

          You have issues with being able to movie too?

          It is a future problem, which would eliminate mo

  • 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.

  • 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, an

  • 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.

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