“Interstellar” from 2014 is one of Christopher Nolan’s most successful movies and also one of the most popular sci-fi movies ever made. It presents the hypothetical future of a world where the Earth doesn’t have enough resources to feed its inhabitants anymore. Therefore, the scientific community had to look for solutions and guess what their idea was. Colonizing another planet, of course. A planet from our own Solar System was out of the question, which meant they needed a broader perspective.
In the main roles, we can find Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, a retired NASA pilot who decides to go for another cosmic ride for the fate of the Earth. We can also see Anne Hathaway as Dr. Brand, who will also be part of the crew that aims to find a new home for Earthlings. Michael Caine is also in the cast, as he plays Professor Brand, who tries to find the right equation to conciliate quantum mechanics with classical mechanics.
Cooper’s crew goes far away from Earth, taking advantage of a wormhole that exists near Saturn. They manage to reach another solar system from another galaxy. During their journey, they face the dreadful relativity of time, the mysterious features of a wormhole, as well as a black hole’s capability of making them travel in time. The question is this: how scientifically accurate are all these things? Let’s try to find out!
The wormhole: probable in theory, but that’s all
The math calculations indicate that it is possible for wormholes to exist somewhere in space, but the problem is that someone needs to build them somehow, just like in the “Interstellar” movie. The problem is, obviously, that we don’t know anybody who builds wormholes in his spare time or as a way of making some extra bucks. Nobody knows exactly how to create a wormhole, and furthermore, an enormous amount of energy would be needed for such a purpose, much more than our planet could ever produce.
Sure, superintelligent aliens might exist somewhere out there in the vastness of space, but as long as humanity hasn’t discovered any, it remains highly farfetched to find a wormhole in space.
A wormhole is a shortcut through space and time, and the best way to understand the concept is to compare a wormhole with a sheet of paper. Instead of going from point A to point B in a straight line, with each of them being very far away from one another, you can simply bend the paper and create a tunnel to connect the two points. That tunnel (a wormhole, in our case) that connects the two points will obviously be much shorter than the straight line between points A and B.
In other words, the wormhole from the “Interstellar” movie might be feasible in theory but not in practice.
Time’s relativity
As much as it may sound incredible for a person who doesn’t know a bit of physics, it is entirely true that time depends on gravity and speed. In other words, time can go much slower for us if we’re on a different planet than it will go on Earth, depending on the differences in size between the two planets and their gravity.
Time being relative is something that the great Albert Einstein discovered. He even revealed that if someone approaches the speed of light, his time will slow down a lot, up to the point that he can find the people he left on Earth decades older after only a few minutes spent on his journey.
Therefore, “Interstellar” doesn’t go bananas on the subject of time’s relativity, but the only problem is that when it comes to the real world, humanity has never laid foot on another planet so far, nor could it ever travel at the speed of light.
A black hole capable of making you travel in time
Cooper, the main character played by Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar,” decided at some point that it’s a good idea to jump directly into a black hole. While that scenario would almost certainly get a person killed in reality, black holes work differently in the movies. In “Interstellar,” Cooper’s black hole acted like a time machine, being able to make him travel back in time and see his daughter much younger. Scientists tell us that black holes are cosmic objects that generate infinite gravity that allows for anything to be absorbed in once it gets too close. Not even light can escape. In other words, black holes are highly destructive.
However, there’s a slight theoretical chance that black holes could act as wormholes, such as what happened in the “Interstellar” movie. That’s because nobody knows 100% what happens with the matter absorbed by a black hole, but again, that is only a theory and a very slight possibility. But that’s most likely why the writers of the movie decided to make a black hole behave as a wormhole.
The American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked during an interview if the scenario of “Interstellar,” specifically the part of falling into a black hole, can be feasible in reality. He said that most likely no and that such an idea was used in the movie, most probably for a dramatic effect.
Overall, it seems that the only major part the “Interstellar” movie has done right from a scientific standpoint is the one about the weirdness of time’s relativity. However, nobody says that the purpose of the famous 2014 sci-fi movie was to be scientifically accurate in the first place, so we can’t blame them! You can either like the movie or not, take it or leave it.
