Interstellar: A Visual Masterpiece with Disappointing Writing and Physics

[tionis]

Pete Cortez, you are obviously very knowledgeable. What do you think of my alternative version:

The movie could have been much better and more plausible if they would've:

-1. Joined with Relativity Media LLC and made a kick-ass logo for the beginning of the film were their swirling spheres turn into a black hole.
0. Started with some actual footage of Einstein walking around and stuff. Then maybe do a reenactment of Karl Schwarzschild in the trenches discovering his GR solution.
1. Move to the present era and create a mini-black hole here on Earth after restarting the LHC at maximum power.
2. Managed to contain it in some form of magnetic field.
3. Place it on a spacecraft and send it on a trajectory away from the planet, but somehow, by some mechanical fault, the rocket changes trajectory and gets pulled into the sun.
4. Have the BH start acting up inside the rocket ship and destroy it swallowing a couple of planets (Venus and Mercury come to mind) in the process, thus increasing in size.
5. Have it arrive at the sun, and start doing it whatever it is BHs do when they are close to another body.
6. Have people on Earth watch in horror as the sun gets torn apart and ultimately swallowed by the BH while the planet slowly grows dark and cold.
7. With no hope of saving humanity, scientists (enter Kip) get together and hatch out a plan to travel to the BH and test the strong field regime and other hypothesis.
8. Humanity is doomed and the Earth's orbit is wacky.
9. Astronauts depart and people on Earth weep.
10. Astronauts arrive at the BH and get fried by an unseen gravitational-wave-firewall-wind blowing away from the event horizon of the BH.
11. Earth soon suffers the same fate and gets burned by the BH. All the other planets, too. As soon as it's done eating all the planets, the BH fires its jets and spews the electrical charge leftovers, thus neutralizing itself in the process. No more charge. Only spin and mass.
12. Cut into a scene where there is another civilization out here watching us with their telescopes and wondering what those jets are. The End.

 

[Pete Cortez]

Pete Cortez, you are obviously very knowledgeable.

I'm not. I'm an EE whose math topped out diff eq and linear algebra, physics at electrodynamics and optics, and has spent just about his entire career writing productivity software. I'm just like a ton of other guys here and elsewhere who occasionally take a stab at trying to pick up something new but never follow through--despite the fact that there's a ton of FREE resources--hell, reams and reams of text and audio and video--out there for people who want to learn more math and physics or dust off what they've forgotten. And on this topic I just happened to read Kip Thorne's book.

What do you think of my alternative version:-1. Joined with Relativity Media LLC and made a kick-ass logo for the beginning of the film were their swirling spheres turn into a black hole.
0. Started with some actual footage of Einstein walking around and stuff. Then maybe do a reenactment of Karl Schwarzschild in the trenches discovering his GR solution.

I'm not a big fan of gratuitous geek porn and trivia for trivia's sake. And in this case why Einstein and Schwarzschild? Neither one discovered the EFE solutions depicted in either Nolan's film (a rotating mass) or the treatment you present below (a charged mass).

1. Move to the present era and create a mini-black hole here on Earth after restarting the LHC at maximum power.
2. Managed to contain it in some form of magnetic field.

The probability of TeV-scale black holes emerging from LHC is considerably more negligible than the probability of TeV-scale black holes resulting from cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere. In other words, your premise now depends on some conveniently improbable accident that just so happens to occur within the lifetime of not only this planet, but the operational life of a single collider.

This is already a less compelling premise than Interstellar, which at least has its wormhole appear by artifice.

3. Place it on a spacecraft and send it on a trajectory away from the planet, but somehow, by some mechanical fault, the rocket changes trajectory

So go re-capture it. It'll be easier this time since it's in freefall.

and gets pulled into the sun.

After decelerating 30 km/s, presumably on a time scale that's actually interesting to the plot (though no time scale is short enough to avoid the fatal plot flaw of 3.).

4. Have the BH start acting up inside the rocket ship and destroy it swallowing a couple of planets (Venus and Mercury come to mind) in the process, thus increasing in size.

So now Venus and Mercury are in conjunction with the Sun and this rogue black hole.

5. Have it arrive at the sun, and start doing it whatever it is BHs do when they are close to another body.
6. Have people on Earth watch in horror as the sun gets torn apart and ultimately swallowed by the BH while the planet slowly grows dark and cold.

This applies to points raised above, but what makes you think your TeV BH will eat faster than it evaporates? Again, cosmic rays hit planets and stars all the time.

Interstellar has a far more compelling (if only because it's actually plausible) existential crisis. You can read more about it in Chapters 11 and 12 of Thorne's book.

7. With no hope of saving humanity, scientists (enter Kip) get together and hatch out a plan to travel to the BH and test the strong field regime and other hypothesis.
8. Humanity is doomed and the Earth's orbit is wacky.
9. Astronauts depart and people on Earth weep.
10. Astronauts arrive at the BH and get fried by an unseen gravitational-wave-firewall-wind blowing away from the event horizon of the BH.
11. Earth soon suffers the same fate and gets burned by the BH. All the other planets, too. As soon as it's done eating all the planets, the BH fires its jets and spews the electrical charge leftovers, thus neutralizing itself in the process. No more charge. Only spin and mass.
12. Cut into a scene where there is another civilization out here watching us with their telescopes and wondering what those jets are. The End.

This is no longer a story. It's a string of non-sequiturs and suicides following a string of unlikely coincidences. That's just my opinion. You should start a new thread with a poll asking others what they think.

 

[Drakkith]

The movie could have been much better and more plausible if they would've:

Your list of items would make the movie completely and utterly terrible. Interstellar was, in my opinion, a very good movie that I enjoyed quite a lot. The cast did an excellent job, the special effects were both realistic and stunning, and the plot was more plausible than about 75% of movies I've seen at least.

 

[Pete Cortez]

Your list of items would make the movie completely and utterly terrible.

That's a shorter way to put it. ;)

 

[tionis]

I'm not. I'm an EE whose math topped out diff eq and linear algebra, physics at electrodynamics and optics, and has spent just about his entire career writing productivity software. I'm just like a ton of other guys here and elsewhere who occasionally take a stab at trying to pick up something new but never follow through--despite the fact that there's a ton of FREE resources--hell, reams and reams of text and audio and video--out there for people who want to learn more math and physics or dust off what they've forgotten. And on this topic I just happened to read Kip Thorne's book.I'm not a big fan of gratuitous geek porn and trivia for trivia's sake. And in this case why Einstein and Schwarzschild? Neither one discovered the EFE solutions depicted in either Nolan's film (a rotating mass) or the treatment you present below (a charged mass).The probability of TeV-scale black holes emerging from LHC is considerably more negligible than the probability of TeV-scale black holes resulting from cosmic ray collisions in the upper atmosphere. In other words, your premise now depends on some conveniently improbable accident that just so happens to occur within the lifetime of not only this planet, but the operational life of a single collider.This is already a less compelling premise than Interstellar, which at least has its wormhole appear by artifice.So go re-capture it. It'll be easier this time since it's in freefall.After decelerating 30 km/s, presumably on a time scale that's actually interesting to the plot (though no time scale is short enough to avoid the fatal plot flaw of 3.).So now Venus and Mercury are in conjunction with the Sun and this rogue black hole.This applies to points raised above, but what makes you think your TeV BH will eat faster than it evaporates? Again, cosmic rays hit planets and stars all the time.Interstellar has a far more compelling (if only because it's actually plausible) existential crisis. You can read more about it in Chapters 11 and 12 of Thorne's book.This is no longer a story. It's a string of non-sequiturs and suicides following a string of unlikely coincidences. That's just my opinion. You should start a new thread with a poll asking others what they think.

Thank you. I actually enjoyed your response. And that bit about ''string of non-sequiturs and suicides'' cracked me up.
BTW, I received Kip's book today. I'm on page 27 and LOVING IT!

 

[Evo]

Please do not start any new threads on this movie. All posts about the movie need to be in one thread.

 

[AngelLestat]

The movie does not give much details about distances, black hole mass, etc.
But this is not an excuse to criticize the movie searching the worst parameters where this would not be possible. That is an easy task, but if we know about physsics; we will try to find a case were this may happen as we see it in the movie.

Or when you have an equation in front of you, you just search the values where the equation is false instead solve it?

I came here to see if I could have some explanations about hard physsics from the movie which I don't understand, but it seems some of you (gold members) are a lot more confused than me.

The movie has a good science base with some artistics and action flow disparities as any movie should have.

Millers planets moves at 0,55c at 1,5 Au from event horizon because is a very fast spinning black hole of 100 million sun mass (event horizon radius 1Au).
It has a time dilation of 1 hour equals to 7 years at earth.

This explain the waves, there is also the fact that the planet is almost tidal locked to gargantua with a small wobbling, to give 1 hour difference between waves but avoiding extreme heat due tidal friction. The shape may not be accurate, but again.. artistics/plot purpose.

 

[Pete Cortez]

The movie does not give much details about distances, black hole mass, etc.

The companion piece does (Chapter 6), and there are some problems with Gargantua's depicted scale in certain scenes. Thorne places' Endurance's initial parking orbit at around 5 radii, at which Thorne says Gargantua should subtend 50 degrees of the local sky (while the movie depicts 2.5). By the time we get to MIller's, Gargantua only consumes about 20-30 degrees.

But this is not an excuse to criticize the movie searching the worst parameters where this would not be possible.

Agreed. And it's always a good sign when you actually have to do some work to confirm what the movie got right (or didn't).[/quote]

 

[tionis]

It's my opinion that if a movie lacks memorable quotables, then it wasn't that much of a good film.

 

[Higgs Boson]

The Slate article was written by Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, by the way.

Some of the points he mentions are:
-habitable planets around a black hole, with sunlight!
-a planet orbiting the black hole near the event horizon(way past the Roche limit)
-said planet having tidal waves(i.e., not being tidally locked)
-vastly egaggerated gravitational time dilation
-accretion disk being cold
-no spaghettification

But more importantly, he makes a point that the characters don't talk or act like people. This coupled with the general clumsiness of the plot and hamfistedly telegraphed messages makes it impossible to overlook the dodgy science.

He is correct, (as any hobby astrophysicist knows), on all of those points, but his spelling is heinous ... or was that you? "egaggerated gravitational time dilation?" You meant "eggsaggerated" gravitational time dilation, did you not?

 

[Bandersnatch]

his spelling is heinous ... or was that you?

It was me, you cheeky bastard. Looking at it now, and at the distance between the letters on my keyboard, I realize I simply must like g's much more than I like x's.

 

[tzimie]

BTW isn't the planet so close to the event horizon, that it is below the photon sphere?
There are no stable orbits below the photon sphere...

 

[stevebd1]

BTW isn't the planet so close to the event horizon, that it is below the photon sphere?
There are no stable orbits below the photon sphere...

Like the marginally stable orbit, the photon sphere also reduces with increase in spin, staying within the MSO, see equation 22 in http://www.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de/~kokkotas/Teaching/Relativistic_Astrophysics_files/GTR2009_4.pdf (the equations to calculate the MSO are 26 to 28). Technically there would be two photon spheres (and MSO's), one prograde (rotating with the frame dragging) and another retrograde (rotating against the frame dragging).

 

[Pete Cortez]

He is correct, (as any hobby astrophysicist knows)

Plait is not (as apparently he knows himself on the most salient points, and as Kip Thorne knows on https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393351378/?tag=pfamazon01-20). Basically, Phil started with the same basic mistake most critics do--he assumes we're talking about a stellar mass black hole in a dead binary system. By the time he issues his partial retraction, he apparently hasn't had enough time to contemplate how much richer a stellar system can be around the now acknowledged supermassive black hole--in fact, how rich it has to be in order to explain how you even approach Miller's planet in the first place.

 

[John M. Carr]

No, I don't think the film relies on visuals as much as Gravity did.

Yeah, but the visuals they used for Interstellar took a staggering amount of time to render and data storage. As someone who's dabbled in 3-D modeling and animation from time to time, my mouth literally dropped open when I heard the figures.

 

[Drakkith]

Yeah, but the visuals they used for Interstellar took a staggering amount of time to render and data storage. As someone who's dabbled in 3-D modeling and animation from time to time, my mouth literally dropped open when I heard the figures.

Now that I can believe!

 

[John M. Carr]

The most expensive modelling in astrophysics performed in recent years were Big Bang simulations, supernova explosion simulations, modelling of mergers of neutron stars and BHs. *These* simulations required large CPU clusters and months of run time, and development of complex software which takes into account multiple branches pf physics - GR, nuclear reactions, hydrodynamics, electromagnetism... *That* is expensive.

100 hours rendering time for some frames on top-of-the line equipment is rather expensive.

 

[nikkkom]

100 hours rendering time for some frames on top-of-the line equipment is rather expensive.

Complexity of accurate depiction of accretion disk and BH in the movie is nowhere near to the complexity of, say, this large cosmological simulation of galaxy formation:

http://www.illustris-project.org/

For one, movie makers needed to only take GR into account: they needed to raytrace the image of accretion disk, in curved spacetime. They did not model the disk itself: they just inserted its image as a starting condition. Real disk would look differently.

Illustris had to account for GR + nuclear reactions + hydrodynamics + electromagnetism.

Producing a decent image of curved spacetime is not that hard. Google "realistic black hole" image:

https://www.google.com/search?q=realistic black hole&tbm=isch

I see at least a dozen of images which look accurate. Following them, I find videos, such as these:

http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html
http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/rn.html[/PLAIN]
http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/lensearth_640x480.gif[/URL]

 

[Pete Cortez]

Complexity of accurate depiction of accretion disk and BH in the movie is nowhere near to the complexity of, say, this large cosmological simulation of galaxy formation:

http://www.illustris-project.org/

On the contrary. Illustris produced only 250 TB of output. Double Negative produced 800 TB of Gargantua related data. I'm not mathematician, but I recall that 250 < 800.

For one, movie makers needed to only take GR into account: they needed to raytrace the image of accretion disk, in curved spacetime. They did not model the disk itself: they just inserted its image as a starting condition. Real disk would look differently.

Illustris had to account for GR + nuclear reactions + hydrodynamics + electromagnetism.

Nonsense. An accretion disk is undergoing fusion and is an hydrodynamically rich target of study.

Producing a decent image of curved spacetime is not that hard. Google "realistic black hole" image:

And yet 800 TB. And please explain to us why you think this:

looks as realistic as this:

 

[AngelLestat]

But that disk in not in fussion process, is an remainder of a accretion disk in cooling process.
It has temperatures close to the sun surface, for that reason its in the visible spectrum without radiation danger.

 

[nikkkom]

On the contrary. Illustris produced only 250 TB of output. Double Negative produced 800 TB of Gargantua related data. I'm not mathematician, but I recall that 250 < 800.

You are measuring correctness of simulations in gigabytes? LOL

Nonsense. An accretion disk is undergoing fusion and is an hydrodynamically rich target of study.

The real accretion disk - maybe.
The "accretion disk" _in the movie_ is just several stacked images of an artist drawn gloving ring fed into GR-aware raytracer.

From your previous posts I know that you are a demagogue, but replacing my _animated_ gif with one _static_ frame from it is beyond demagoguery. You are knowingly distorting what I said. Stop doing that.

 

[Pete Cortez]

You are measuring correctness of simulations in gigabytes? LOL

I'm measuring complexity in terms of output.

The real accretion disk - maybe.
The "accretion disk" _in the movie_ is just several stacked images of an artist drawn gloving ring fed into GR-aware raytracer.

Says you.

From your previous posts I know that you are a demagogue...

Aw, that's precious. I'm not the amateur pooh-poohing the fantastic work of others by presenting other fantastic work by others with barely a notion of how either work was created.

...but replacing my _animated_ gif with one _static_ frame from it is beyond demagoguery. You are knowingly distorting what I said. Stop doing that.

Blame the forum software. The image is precisely the one you posted. And I don't think anyone cares whether or not your gif was animated or not.

 

[Pete Cortez]

But that disk in not in fussion process, is an remainder of a accretion disk in cooling process.

A disk with length exceeding the circumference of Earth's orbit and radiating such that it delivers sufficient power to warm an hospitable planet almost 7 AU certainly fuses, whether it's cooling or not. Again, recall the scale of this monster.

 

[nikkkom]

I'm measuring complexity in terms of output.

Then the output of "dd bs=1G count=1G </dev/urandom" is the most complex and wonderful simulation, ever. It's exabyte long, you know. LOOOOL.

> The "accretion disk" _in the movie_ is just several stacked images of an artist drawn gloving ring fed into GR-aware raytracer.

Says you.

Yep. Because a real high-quality simulation of accretion disk would show differential rotation.
It would show Doppler red- and blueshifting of disk's light (one side of the disk moves towards us, another recedes from us).
It would show relativistic beaming of the disk's light.
None of this is shown.

 

[Pete Cortez]

Then the output of "dd bs=1G count=1G </dev/urandom" is the most complex and wonderful simulation, ever. It's exabyte long, you know. LOOOOL.

Good point. The Illustris output represents north of 10^33 times more volume than the Interstellar output in a third of the space, with all the attendant loss of resolution.

Yep. Because a real high-quality simulation of accretion disk would show differential rotation.

It would show Doppler red- and -blueshifting of disk's light (one side of the disk moves towards us, another recedes from us).

It would show relativistic beaming of the disk's light.

You confuse photorealistic, realtime models with simplified, pedagogical ones. That's your problem, not Double Negative's.

I do congratulate you on at least attempting to dig up a project on the scale of what Double Negative achieved, even if what you picked one that was considerably less expensive ($750,000 from NSF, $685,000 http://www.research.gov/research-portal/appmanager/base/desktop;jsessionid=XlvXJGLW9L7WgQBspTk1bCYLJkClFmKLNWC6YNnVhZJB3SLqwDsm!-1928657939!1097029825?_nfpb=true&_windowLabel=T31400570011264188753337&wsrp-urlType=blockingAction&wsrp-url=&wsrp-requiresRewrite=&wsrp-navigationalState=eJyLL07OL0i1Tc-JT0rMUYNQtgBZ6Af8&wsrp-interactionState=wlpT31400570011264188753337_action%3DviewRsrDetail%26wlpT31400570011264188753337_fedAwrdId%3DNNX12AC67G&wsrp-mode=wsrp%3Aview&wsrp-windowState=) and by first glance far less complicated.

 

[AngelLestat]

I dint said that it cant, just mention that is not triggering fussion as I read.

But about that. Somebody really knows how much energy is radiated depending the distance and time dilation?

Or how the process would work? I know that the disk has a lot of area, and radiation depends on the Area. But how energy radiated from the disk reach the planets depending their time dilation with respect the disk?

Someone knows the math equations to see energy lost due to red shift, or how much the frequency change by this effect.

Not sure if the black hole rotation change this effect in other way.

 

[Pete Cortez]

I dint said that it cant, just mention that is not triggering fussion as I read.

But about that. Somebody really knows how much energy is radiated depending the distance and time dilation?

We know Miller's planet was warm enough for liquid water at something approaching standard temperature and pressure. That implies 1 kW/m^2 incidence at Miller's distance from its radiating source(s).

Or how the process would work? I know that the disk has a lot of area, and radiation depends on the Area. But how energy radiated from the disk reach the planets depending their time dilation with respect the disk?

Fairly similar to how stellar thermonuclear processes work, considering the disk is radiating at that scale.

Also, it is not clear what the disk's rotation is wrt to Miller's planet, or the rotational contribution to Doppler shifts for the updraft. I suspect we'll know more when Thorne releases his preprints.

Someone knows the math equations to see energy lost due to red shift, or how much the frequency change by this effect.

Not sure if the black hole rotation change this effect in other way.

As you've guessed, it's not that simple. We're dealing with free falling rather than stationary observers and a rapidly rotating black hole; most redshift calculations you're thinking about concern a "hovering" observer--one stationary with respect to the field.

 

[John M. Carr]

The real accretion disk - maybe.
The "accretion disk" _in the movie_ is just several stacked images of an artist drawn gloving ring fed into GR-aware raytracer.

Okay, then. You do know they had to customize their rendering engine before they could render anything, right? As in go into the API and rework things by hand. Why do you think Kip Thorne sent them the raw equations? Raytracers do not come with "GR-awareness" on their own--you have to specify the physics if there's something to account for that's not in the default settings. You have to do this, even for out-of-the-box consumer-grade software. And for something as unique and computationally intensive as a realistic wormhole or a realistic black hole...? If I tried to render even one frame of that stuff, my computer would lock up so fast, I'd have no choice but to do a hard-reset.

Also, the fact that it took 100+ hours on certain frames suggests strongly to me that it's all CGI. If the computer had premade drawings/illustrations to work on, instead of rendering individual "particles" (the word CGI artists use for, well, the most basic units that make up something like an accretion disc or cloud or smoke or the like,) that rendering process would have taken much less time per frame. It is true that's a shortcut used pretty often in that business, but I don't think it was used in this case. (Note: I could be wrong about this second point, but it does bear considering.)

 

[nikkkom]

Okay, then. You do know they had to customize their rendering engine before they could render anything, right? As in go into the API and rework things by hand. Why do you think Kip Thorne sent them the raw equations? Raytracers do not come with "GR-awareness" on their own--you have to specify the physics if there's something to account for that's not in the default settings. You have to do this, even for out-of-the-box consumer-grade software. And for something as unique and computationally intensive as a realistic wormhole or a realistic black hole...? If I tried to render even one frame of that stuff, my computer would lock up so fast, I'd have no choice but to do a hard-reset.

"unique and computationally intensive as a realistic wormhole or a realistic black hole"? PHLEASE. Yes, the objects in question are unique, but by now, thousands of astrophysicists spent decades studying them.

I already gave links to videos produced by people who clearly managed to render GR-accurate images and videos of black holes without use of any fancy hardware.

Those pages carry a "© 1997, 1998 Andrew Hamilton. These pages last modified 19 Apr 2001" note. This software existed 10 years ago.

 

[nikkkom]

> Because a real high-quality simulation of accretion disk would show differential rotation.
> It would show Doppler red- and -blueshifting of disk's light (one side of the disk moves towards us, another recedes from us).
> It would show relativistic beaming of the disk's light.

You confuse photorealistic, realtime models with simplified, pedagogical ones. That's your problem, not Double Negative's.

So the disk as depicted is "simplified, pedagogical one" according to you.

Just yesterday you said the complete opposite: apparently it was "most physically accurate depiction":

Kip Thorne worked "full time" for months with Tunzelmann and James from Double Negative on all visualizations invoking GR. The result is not only the most physically accurate depiction of these exotic objects in the history of cinema, but likely most accurate--as well as the most encompassing and certainly the most expensive--modeling performed in the history of computational physics.