The universe is fraught with many mysteries. The structure and features of various, the possibility of interplanetary travel attract the attention of not only scientists, but also science fiction lovers. Naturally, the most attractive is that which has unique properties, which, due to various circumstances, has not been sufficiently studied. Such objects include black holes.
Black holes have a very high density and an incredibly strong gravitational force. Not even rays of light can escape from them. That is why scientists can "see" a black hole only due to the effect that it has on the surrounding space. In the immediate vicinity of a black hole, the matter is heated and moves at a very high speed. This gaseous substance is called an accretion disk, which looks like a flat luminous cloud. Scientists observe X-ray emission from the accretion disk in X-ray telescopes. They also fix the huge speed of the movement of stars in their orbits, which occurs due to the high gravity of an invisible object of huge mass. Astronomers distinguish three classes of black holes:
Black holes with stellar mass
Black holes with intermediate mass
Supermassive black holes.
A stellar mass is considered to be between three and one hundred solar masses. Black holes are called supermassive, having from hundreds of thousands to several billion solar masses. They are usually found in the center of galaxies.
The second space velocity or escape velocity is the minimum that must be achieved to overcome the gravitational attraction and go beyond the orbit of a given celestial body. For the Earth, the escape velocity is eleven kilometers per second, and for a black hole it is more than three hundred thousand, that's how strong its gravity is! 
The boundary of a black hole is called the event horizon. An object that gets inside it can no longer leave this area. The size of the event horizon is proportional to the mass of the black hole. To show how huge the density of black holes is, scientists give the following numbers - a black hole with a mass 10 times greater than the Sun would have a diameter of about 60 km, and a black hole with the mass of our Earth would be only 2 cm. But this only theoretical calculations, since scientists have not yet identified black holes that have not reached three solar masses. Everything that enters the event horizon region moves towards the singularity. Singularity, to put it simply, is a place where density tends to infinity. It is impossible to draw a geodesic line through a gravitational singularity. A black hole is characterized by a curvature of the structure of space and time. A straight line, which in physics is the path of light in a vacuum, becomes a curve near a black hole. What physical laws work near the singularity point and directly in it is still unknown. Some researchers, for example, talk about the presence of so-called wormholes, or space-time tunnels, in black holes. But not all scientists agree to admit the existence of such wormhole tunnels.
The theme of space travel, space-time tunnels serves as a source of inspiration for science fiction writers, screenwriters and directors. In 2014, the premiere of the film "Interstellar" took place. A whole group of scientists worked on its creation. Their leader was a well-known scientist, a specialist in the theory of gravity, astrophysics - Kip Stephen Thorne. This film is considered one of the most scientific among science fiction films and, accordingly, high demands are placed on it. There has been much debate about how the various moments of the film correspond to scientific facts. There was even a book published, The Science of Interstellar, in which Professor Stephen Thorne explains various episodes from the film from a scientific point of view. He talked about how much of the film is based on both scientific facts and scientific assumptions. However, there is also a simple artistic fiction. For example, the Gargantua black hole is represented as a luminous disk that bends around light. This is not at odds with scientific knowledge, because. not the black hole itself is visible, but only the accretion disk, and light cannot move in a straight line due to powerful gravity and curvature of space.
Gargantua's black hole contains a wormhole, which is a wormhole or tunnel through space and time. The presence of such tunnels in black holes is just a scientific assumption that many scientists disagree with. Fiction includes the ability to travel through such a tunnel and return back.
The black hole of Gargantua is a fantasy of the creators of Interstellar, which in many respects corresponds to real space objects. Therefore, for particularly fierce critics, I would like to remind you that the film, nevertheless, is science fiction, and not popular science. It shows the beauty and grandeur of the world that surrounds us, reminds us of how many unsolved problems there are. And to demand from a science fiction film an accurate reflection of scientifically proven facts is somewhat unlawful and naive.
More recently, science has become reliably known what a black hole is. But as soon as scientists figured out this phenomenon of the Universe, a new, much more complex and confusing one fell on them: a supermassive black hole, which you can’t even call black, but rather blindingly white. Why? But because it was precisely such a definition that was given to the center of each galaxy, which glows and shines. But once you get there, and besides blackness, nothing remains. What kind of puzzle is this?
Memo about black holes
It is known for certain that a simple black hole is a once shining star. At a certain stage of its existence, they began to increase exorbitantly, while the radius remained the same. If earlier the star "bursted", and it grew, now the forces concentrated in its core began to attract all other components to itself. Its edges "collapse" on the center, forming an incredible force of collapse, which becomes a black hole. Such “former stars” no longer shine, but are absolutely invisible objects of the Universe from the outside. But they are very noticeable, as they literally absorb everything that falls into their gravitational radius. It is not known what lies beyond such an event horizon. Based on the facts, any body with such a huge gravity will literally crush. Recently, however, not only science fiction writers, but also scientists have been holding the idea that these could be some kind of space tunnels for traveling long distances.
What is a quasar
A supermassive black hole has similar properties, in other words, the core of a galaxy, which has a super-powerful gravitational field that exists due to its mass (millions or billions of solar masses). The principle of formation of supermassive black holes has not yet been established. According to one version, the cause of such a collapse is too compressed gas clouds, the gas in which is extremely discharged, and the temperature is incredibly high. The second version is the increment of the masses of various small black holes, stars and clouds to a single gravitational center.
Our galaxy
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is not among the most powerful. The fact is that the galaxy itself has a spiral structure, which, in turn, forces all its participants to be in constant and fairly fast motion. Thus, the gravitational forces, which could be concentrated exclusively in the quasar, seem to dissipate, and increase uniformly from the edge to the core. It is easy to guess that things in elliptical or, say, irregular galaxies are the opposite. On the "outskirts" space is extremely rarefied, planets and stars practically do not move. But in the quasar itself, life is literally in full swing.
Parameters of the quasar of the Milky Way
Using the method of radio interferometry, the researchers were able to calculate the mass of the supermassive black hole, its radius and gravitational force. As noted above, our quasar is dim, it is difficult to call it super powerful, but even the astronomers themselves did not expect that the true results would be like that. So Sagittarius A* (that's the name of the core) equates to four million solar masses. Moreover, according to obvious data, this black hole does not even absorb matter, and the objects that are in its environment do not heat up. An interesting fact was also noticed: the quasar is literally buried in gas clouds, the matter of which is extremely rarefied. Perhaps, the evolution of the supermassive black hole of our galaxy is just beginning now, and in billions of years it will become a real giant that will attract not only planetary systems, but also other, smaller ones.
No matter how small the mass of our quasar would be, most of all scientists were struck by its radius. Theoretically, such a distance can be overcome in a few years on one of the modern spacecraft. The size of a supermassive black hole is slightly larger than the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, namely 1.2 astronomical units. The gravitational radius of this quasar is 10 times smaller than the main diameter. With such indicators, naturally, matter simply cannot singulate until it directly crosses the event horizon.
Paradoxical facts
The galaxy belongs to the category of young and new star clusters. This is evidenced not only by its age, parameters and position on the map of space known to man, but also by the power that its supermassive black hole possesses. However, as it turned out, not only young ones can have “ridiculous” parameters. Many quasars, which have incredible power and gravity, surprise with their properties:
- Ordinary air is often denser than supermassive black holes.
- Getting to the event horizon, the body will not experience tidal forces. The fact is that the center of the singularity is deep enough, and in order to reach it, you will have to go a long way, not even suspecting that there will be no way back.
Giants of our Universe
One of the most voluminous and oldest objects in space is the supermassive black hole in the OJ 287 quasar. This is a whole black hole located in the constellation of Cancer, which, by the way, is very poorly visible from Earth. It is based on a binary system of black holes, therefore, there are two event horizons and two points of singularity. The larger object has a mass of 18 billion solar masses, almost like a small full-fledged galaxy. This companion is static, only objects that fall within its gravitational radius rotate. The smaller system weighs 100 million solar masses and also has an orbital period of 12 years.
dangerous neighborhood
The galaxies OJ 287 and the Milky Way have been found to be neighbors - the distance between them is approximately 3.5 billion light years. Astronomers do not exclude the version that in the near future these two cosmic bodies will collide, forming a complex stellar structure. According to one version, it is precisely because of the approach to such a gravitational giant that the movement of planetary systems in our galaxy is constantly accelerating, and the stars are becoming hotter and more active.
Supermassive black holes are actually white
At the very beginning of the article, a very sensitive issue was raised: the color in which the most powerful quasars stand before us can hardly be called black. With the naked eye, even in the simplest photograph of any galaxy, you can see that its center is a huge white dot. Why then do we think it is a supermassive black hole? Photographs taken through telescopes show us a huge cluster of stars that the core attracts to itself. Planets and asteroids that orbit nearby reflect due to their close proximity, thereby multiplying all the light present nearby. Since quasars do not drag all neighboring objects at lightning speed, but only keep them in their gravitational radius, they do not disappear, but begin to glow even more, because their temperature is growing rapidly. As for ordinary black holes that exist in outer space, their name is fully justified. The dimensions are relatively small, but the force of gravity is colossal. They simply "eat up" the light without releasing a single quantum from their banks.
Cinematography and a supermassive black hole
Gargantua - this term mankind began to use widely in relation to black holes after the movie "Interstellar" was released. Looking at this picture, it is difficult to understand why this particular name was chosen and where the connection is. But in the original script, they planned to create three black holes, two of which would have been named Gargantua and Pantagruel, taken from a satirical novel. After the changes were made, only one "rabbit hole" remained, for which the first name was chosen. It is worth noting that in the film the black hole is depicted as realistically as possible. So to speak, the design of its appearance was carried out by the scientist Kip Thorne, who was based on the studied properties of these cosmic bodies.
How did we learn about black holes?
If not for the theory of relativity, which was proposed by Albert Einstein at the beginning of the twentieth century, no one would probably even pay attention to these mysterious objects. A supermassive black hole would be regarded as an ordinary cluster of stars in the center of the galaxy, and ordinary, small ones would go completely unnoticed. But today, thanks to theoretical calculations and observations that confirm their correctness, we can observe such a phenomenon as the curvature of space-time. Modern scientists say that finding the "rabbit hole" is not so difficult. Around such an object, matter behaves unnaturally, it not only shrinks, but sometimes glows. A bright halo forms around the black dot, which is visible through a telescope. In many ways, the nature of black holes helps us understand the history of the formation of the Universe. At their center is a point of singularity, similar to the one from which the entire world around us previously developed.
It is not known for certain what can happen to a person who crosses the event horizon. Will gravity crush him, or will he end up in a completely different place? The only thing that can be said with complete certainty is that the gargantua slows down time, and at some point the clock hand finally and irrevocably stops.
Released in early November, the film "Interstellar" can rightfully be considered the main event of the season. And not only cinematic. The events shown in the picture - space flights through hyperspace, falling into black holes and time travel - caused heated discussions both among fans of science fiction and in pseudo-scientific circles. Not surprisingly, the film was consulted by the famous theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. And where it comes to modern theoretical physics, very often it turns out that only yesterday what was a frenzied fantasy today turns out to be a respectable scientific theory.
*Beware, there are spoilers in the text.
Mole Hole
The main events of the film begin with the flight of the main characters through a wormhole unfolded near Saturn. Physically, it is a tunnel connecting two distant regions of space-time. These areas can either be in the same universe or connect different points of different universes (within the concept of the multiverse). Depending on the ability to return through the hole, they are divided into passable and impassable. Impassable holes quickly close and do not allow a potential traveler to make the return trip.
For the first time, Ludwig Flamm discovered solutions to GR equations of the wormhole type in 1916. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen became interested in them in the 1930s, and later John Wheeler. However, all of these wormholes were impassable. It wasn't until 1986 that Kip Thorne proposed a traversable wormhole solution.
From a mathematical point of view, a wormhole is a hypothetical object obtained as a special non-singular (finite and physically meaningful) solution of the equations of general relativity (GR) of Albert Einstein. Wormholes are usually depicted as a bent two-dimensional surface. You can get from one side to the other by moving in the usual way. Or you can make a hole and connect both sides with a tunnel. In the visual case of a two-dimensional space, it can be seen that this can significantly reduce the distance.
In 2D, wormhole throats - the openings from which the tunnel begins and ends - have the shape of a circle. In 3D (as in the movie), the mouth of a wormhole looks like a sphere. Such objects are formed from two singularities in different regions of space-time, which in hyperspace (higher-dimensional space) are drawn together to form a hole. Since the hole is a space-time tunnel, you can travel through it not only in space, but also in time.
In Interstellar, the hole was passable and connected different galaxies in the universe. But in order to return back through it, the wormhole must be filled with matter with a negative average mass density, which prevents the tunnel from closing. There are no elementary particles known to science with such properties. However, they are likely to be part of dark matter.
The Planck length is approximately 1.62 x 10 -35 meters, which is 2 x 10 20 times less than the "diameter" of the proton. The numerical value of the Planck units (length, mass, time, and others) is obtained from four fundamental physical constants and delineates the applicability limit of modern physics.
It is believed that such a wormhole could be trapped in quantum foam, and then expanded and made potentially suitable for travel through hyperspace. Such foam represents space fluctuations on the Planck length scales, where the laws of classical general relativity do not work, since quantum effects must be taken into account.
Another way to create a wormhole is to extend one region of space, forming a hole with a singularity that, in hyperspace, reaches another region of space. In both cases, it is proposed to maintain the permeability of the hole by passing matter with a negative mass density through it. Such projects do not contradict the GR.
Exoplanets and time dilation
After flying through the wormhole, space travelers are sent to exoplanets that are potentially habitable according to intelligence received from reconnaissance missions. In order for a planet to be at least potentially suitable for human life, it must have stable light, temperature and gravitational regimes similar to those on Earth. The pressure in the atmosphere should be comparable to that of the earth, and the chemical composition should be suitable for at least some terrestrial organisms. A prerequisite is the presence of water. All this imposes certain restrictions on the mass and volume of the planet, as well as its distance from the star and the parameters of the orbit.
Currently, the most human-friendly time travel has been created in Earth orbit. The longer astronauts and astronauts are on board the International Space Station, which rotates at a speed of more than seven kilometers per second around the planet, the slower (compared to earthlings on the surface) they age. The time travel record belongs to Sergei Krikalev, who traveled into the future by about 0.02 seconds in more than 803 days.
At the same time, the first of the planets (Miller) turned out to be located very close to the supermassive black hole Gargantua with a mass of 100 million suns and 10 billion light years away from Earth. The radius of the hole is comparable to the radius of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and the accretion disk surrounding it would extend far beyond the orbit of Mars. Due to the strong gravitational field of the black hole, one hour spent on the surface of the planet Miller is equal to seven years on Earth.
Nothing surprising, says theoretical physics, this is due to the effect of time dilation in the strong gravitational field of the black hole in which the planet is located. In the special theory of relativity (SRT) - the theory of motion of bodies with near-light speeds - time dilation is observed in moving objects. And in general relativity, which is a generalization of special relativity with allowance for gravitation, there is an equivalence of inertia and gravitation, the long-term consequence of which is gravitational time dilation.
Supermassive black hole
After unsuccessful missions on exoplanets, the hero Matthew McConaughey (along with the robot) is sucked into the supermassive black hole Gargantua. Moreover, neither the hero McConaughey, nor his robot, when approaching the hole, was torn into a thousand little Matthew and robots from monstrous gravity. However, even here modern physics has an explanation.
Einstein put the local equivalence of the fields of acceleration and gravitation as the basis of general relativity. It is easy to illustrate with the example of a laboratory inside a falling elevator. All objects inside such an elevator will fall with the same acceleration, and their relative accelerations will be zero. In this case, the situation can be described in two frames of reference. In the first, inertial and connected to the Earth, the elevator falls under the influence of the Earth's gravity. In the second, associated with the elevator (non-inertial), there is no gravitational field. If an observer is inside the elevator, then he is not able to determine in which field: acceleration or gravity, he is. It turns out that in the local sense (when the acceleration of free fall has approximately the same values in a given region of space, that is, the gravitational field is homogeneous), inertia and gravity are equivalent.
A black hole is a massive object, the gravitational attraction of which, according to the classical version of general relativity, does not allow matter to leave its limits. The boundary of the hole with the surrounding space is called the event horizon. Passing through it, the body, as it is believed, cannot go back (at least in the same way).
There are several scenarios for the formation of such objects. The underlying mechanism involves the gravitational collapse of certain types of stars or matter at the centers of galaxies. Also, their formation during the Big Bang and during the reactions of elementary particles is not excluded. The existence of black holes is not in doubt by most scientists.
The strength of the gravitational field (in other words, the value of the free fall acceleration) of a black hole decreases with distance from it. This is imperceptible at a great distance, where the field of a black hole is local, homogeneous and significant at small distances: different parts of the same extended object fall into the hole with different accelerations, and the object is stretched.
This is how the tidal force of a black hole works. However, there is a loophole here. The tidal force is directly proportional to the mass of the black hole and inversely proportional to the cube of the event horizon radius. The radius of the hole's event horizon grows in proportion to its mass. Therefore, in order of magnitude, the tidal force is inversely proportional to the square of the hole's mass. For ordinary black holes, huge values of tidal forces are obtained, while for supermassive ones they are not so large, which is what the heroes of Interstellar took advantage of.
hyperspace
Inside a spinning black hole, hero Matthew McConaughey (and his robot) have discovered a five-dimensional universe. And here, frankly, they were lucky - if the black hole was not rotating, the travelers would continue to move towards its center - the singularity, and in this case the finale of the film would be completely different.
Mathematically, the concept of physical hyperspace arose at the end of 1910, when Theodor Kaluza invested the four-dimensional space of general relativity into the five-dimensional one, and thereby introduced a new dimension. Usually in theories with extra dimensions, the dimensions of the observable universe along the new dimensions are so small that they have almost no effect on the other four.
General relativity allows for the possibility of solutions to Einstein's equations, for example, in the form of the Kerr metric, whose analytic properties allow one to get away from the singularity. Such solutions have unusual properties, in particular, they imply the possibility of the existence inside a black hole of special space-time trajectories that violate the usual cause-and-effect relationships.
It can be assumed that the hero McConaughey (and his robot) managed to penetrate into such a black hole, avoid its singularity and travel inside it along a special trajectory that led him to a new universe. In it, the geometry turned out to be locally arranged in such a way that the four dimensions are spatial and simultaneous - temporal. Formally, this does not contradict GR.
And although a person, apparently, is able to perceive only three spatial and one temporal dimensions, in the film the main character in the new universe got the opportunity not only to travel through the temporal dimension, but also to observe projections of the four-dimensional in three-dimensional space.
"Equation of Gravity"
While Matthew McConaughey (together with the robot) flies through exoplanets and into a black hole, the professor who remained on earth, played by Michael Caine, is trying to solve some kind of "gravity equation" that would allow us to connect quantum mechanics and general relativity into one theory and thereby understand the physics of a wormhole and black hole.
Gribov-Hawking radiation suggests the evaporation of a black hole due to quantum fluctuations associated with the formation of pairs of virtual particles. One particle from such a pair flies away from the black hole, and the other - with negative energy - "falls" into it. For the first time, the Soviet theoretical physicist Vladimir Gribov spoke about the possibility of such a phenomenon. And in the first half of the 1970s, after a visit to the USSR, Stephen Hawking published a paper in which he predicted the existence of radiation from black holes (called Hawking radiation in English literature or Gribov-Hawking in Russian).
And, I must say, the hero of Michael Caine is not suffering alone. The creation of a universal theory linking general relativity and quantum mechanics is the main task of most modern mathematical physicists - specialists in string theory. The main task of the theory is the unification of all four known interactions: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational. The first three are described by quantum field theory (QFT), a mathematical model of modern elementary particle physics, and the last one by general relativity. At the same time, general relativity as a whole does not contradict QFT, since it speaks of phenomena on other scales of lengths and energies. But if general relativity deals with cosmological objects of huge masses, then QFT is applicable at the subatomic level.
The problem is that both theories come into conflict with each other on the Planck scales, since quantum corrections must be taken into account in GR for them. So, in a black hole, quantum effects lead to its evaporation. The quantum version of general relativity, obtained in a similar way to QFT, turns out to be non-renormalizable, that is, the observed quantities cannot be made finite. Most of the research in this area is devoted to the solution of this issue. The string theory itself (M-theory) is based on the assumption of the existence on the Planck scale of hypothetical one-dimensional objects - strings, the excitations of which are interpreted as elementary particles and their interactions.
In the film, intrepid explorers use a wormhole near Saturn's orbit to get to another planetary system. The viewer is shown that the "wormhole" is a spatio-temporal tunnel through which people can almost instantly move over vast distances.
If you pierce a sheet of paper - an imaginary universe - at different ends, and then bend it so that the two holes are opposite each other, then you get the same wormhole.
But is instantaneous travel between two distant points possible?
Professor Barstow:
I don't think wormholes really exist. This is something from the realm of science fiction. There is no direct evidence for the existence of such things in the universe. We know what black holes are, but we are just beginning to explore the possibility of space-time curvature.
Lee Billings:
I really hope that there are wormholes in space through which you can travel in five dimensions. But we have no idea if stable wormholes exist on a macroscopic scale. It seems to be much easier to travel the old fashioned way without relying on a miracle; perhaps solar sails will help in this matter. And there is no need to rush anywhere.
Falling into a black hole, you can't survive
In one of the key episodes of the film, one of the main characters, leaving the spaceship, falls into a black hole, and then gets out of it. But is it possible to survive falling into a black hole?
No. The gravitational field of a black hole is extremely strong and changes very quickly. Everything that gets into it is stretched by gravity and becomes like long thin pasta. Therefore, anything that falls into a black hole has no chance of surviving. It is also impossible to transmit signals from there.
Lee Billings:
Getting close to the accretion disk around a supermassive black hole, as shown in the movie, is a very bad idea. It is a big misconception that powerful radiation from incandescent material will allow you to slide along the event horizon and not melt. Inhabited planets are also represented differently here.
Is it possible to orbit a black hole?
The hero of the film uses the orbit of a black hole to get to one of the exoplanets. Is it possible?
You can orbit the black hole until you get very close to it. Astronomy shows us many systems in orbit around a black hole. And, as a rule, these are systems with stars. You can only see them when you are inside the event horizon.
If there are planets around the black hole, then they are probably not habitable.
The explorers in the film visit a planetary system that is not only near a black hole, but also has potentially habitable planets.
Nothing forbids planets to revolve around the orbit of a black hole, although there are no such examples yet. The problem is the stability of such planetary systems. Any planetary system near a black hole is likely to be swallowed up.
Lee Billings:
I think Interstellar is a movie for physicists, not planetary scientists. There are many inconsistencies associated with the planets in the film.
About the "light singularity"
The hero of the film says that there is only a “light” inside the black hole, which can explain some of the events in the planetary system that the researchers visit. But is there such a thing as a “light singularity” at all?
The important thing is that black holes can have different masses. The singularity is the center of a black hole. But there is a notion that all black holes have a finite mass that does not disappear in space. According to it, we actually find them - the mass affects the surrounding material.
Matt Kaplan:
We know little about the processes around a black hole. Nobody knows what lies beyond the event horizon. For now, we rely only on theory.
The aging process due to time dilation is accurately shown
Astronauts age much more slowly than their counterparts on Earth, thanks to the effects of time dilation. According to the theory, people traveling at speeds close to the speed of light slow down time. There is experimental evidence for this.
This is well known. Einstein's theory of relativity states that people traveling at different speeds experience time differently. For example, the astronauts who flew to the moon aged a little less than those who remained on Earth, although this was barely noticeable. But if you reach speeds close to the speed of light, which is quite difficult to do, this difference will be visible.
You can believe in artificial gravity on the Endurance spacecraft, but not in its fantastic engine
According to experts, the Endurance looked quite realistic. But the simplicity with which the spacecraft landed on the surface of the planets and rose from them, they considered implausible.
Lee Billings:
From the point of view of artificial gravity, which prevents the destruction of bones in zero gravity, the Endurance looks quite plausible. Doubts are raised by the propulsion system, which made it possible to ignore the influence of the forces of attraction of the planets, as a result of which the astronauts aged ten years in an hour.
Matt Kaplan:
I think for a story as big as this, some things can be overlooked.
Some of what is shown in the film is pure truth, some is based on scientific assumptions, and some is pure speculation.
Christopher Nolan's film "Interstellar" is called by many the most scientific in modern science fiction, but claims are made against him in all severity. Disputes about the merits and demerits of this picture make people bury their heads in physics textbooks. Let's try and figure out how Interstellar became what it is, and what is strictly scientific in it, and what is not quite.
CAREFULLY! SPOILERS!
Video version of this article.
The Man Who Invented Interstellar
The name of the famous physicist Kip Thorne pops up in every debate about the scientific nature of Nolan's painting. The scientist played a huge role in making the film. Thorne was not limited to the role of a scientific consultant - in fact, it was he who came up with Interstellar.
Profile: Stephen Kip Thorne
Specialist in the theory of gravity, astrophysics and quantum theory of measurements. For more than fifteen years he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). One of the world's leading experts on general relativity. Popularizer of science. Close friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking.
About thirty years ago, the famous Stephen Hawking arranged for his friend, young physicist and single father Kip Thorne, a blind date with Linda Obst, science editor of The New-York Times Magazine and aspiring television producer. The couple did not have a romance, but a strong friendship was formed. About ten years ago, Linda and Kip set about creating a film based on the achievements and knowledge of modern science. They wrote an eight-page sketch, which featured, among other things, as many as six wormholes, five black holes and a mysterious race of aliens living in a "beam" - a space that has at least five dimensions. One of the heroes was supposed to be Stephen Hawking, who personally went into space.
Offering his idea to the film studio, Thorne set a condition: all plot moves in the film must be scientifically reliable, or at least based on acceptable theories and speculation.
The Paramount studio became interested in the idea, and Steven Spielberg himself sat in the director's chair. The script was given to Christopher Nolan's younger brother Jonathan. But then difficulties began: due to the Writers Guild strike, John stopped working on the film, then he had to switch to The Dark Knight, and Spielberg did not share something with the Paramount bosses and left the project. Thorne lost heart, but Linda did not despair and in a couple of weeks she found a new director - Christopher Nolan.
The elder Nolan brought a lot of new things to Interstellar. Chris rewrote the script, combining it with his own ideas, originally intended for a completely different project. The final draft was nothing like the original eight-page draft, but Kip was not upset because, from his point of view, Nolan almost always adhered to the principle voiced by Thorne. Thorne categorically objected to the director only once - when Chris came up with a scene where the characters were moving faster than light. Kip spent two weeks arguing why it was completely impossible, and got his way.
At the same time, Kip understood that Chris was making a feature film, so he turned a blind eye to the small inaccuracies needed to enhance the drama, and only made sure that Nolan's fantasy did not take too far. Did he succeed? Let's figure it out.
Dusty world and pathogens
The beginning of Interstellar takes place on the Earth of the future, which looks extremely unattractive. A new pathogen has wiped out all crops except corn, starvation is threatened, governments have disbanded armies and research centers, and ordinary people are forced to become farmers to feed themselves. As if that weren't enough, residents suffer from regular dust storms that have turned most of the US into a "dust pot". Worse, the pathogen destroys the oxygen in the air, replacing it with nitrogen, so that those who do not die of starvation will simply suffocate.CLAIM: Wait! How could a single pathogen wipe out all plant life? As a rule, such things only affect certain types of plants, completely wiping out their population. The same diseases that affect several species at once, as a rule, are not so strong.
The history of the Earth knows examples of mass extinctions, when most of the living beings died due to drastically changed conditions. This happened when cyanobacteria arose, releasing oxygen, which in those days was a real poison for most species. Now a similar microorganism may well develop, which, for example, will release nitrogen into the atmosphere.
There is another possible scenario: the emergence of a new disease that affects the main varieties of plants on which we depend most. Biologists do not exclude such a possibility, although they find it extremely unlikely.
COUNTERARGUMENT: But why, in such a situation, cut spending on science? They, on the contrary, must be increased so that biologists develop new plant cultures that are immune to the virus, invent a vaccine, an antidote, or another way to deal with scourge. After all, this is how we are now fighting any disease that has even the slightest chance of causing a pandemic. Among other things, this is a giant business where you can earn a lot of money. Much more profitable than growing corn in Kansas.
Perhaps there were such attempts, but they failed. Even now there are diseases for which vaccines have not yet been found, although development has been underway for thirty years. Suppose, at first, the states really spent hundreds of millions on the search for a cure, but then the revenues to the treasury stopped, the budgets dried up, and funding had to be canceled.
COUNTERARGUMENT: But where does oxygen go from the air?
Oxygen in the atmosphere mainly comes from plant photosynthesis. If a new pathogen affects precisely this process, oxygen will no longer be a renewable resource. Now let's see how carbon dioxide is formed: either in the process of breathing of all living beings, or as a result of decay of organic matter, or in the form of industrial emissions from enterprises and car exhausts. Even if, after famine and the economic crisis, the population decreases and emissions into the atmosphere decrease, the dying vegetation will rot in the fields. According to some estimates, about a percent of the remaining oxygen reserves will be consumed during the decay process. In its place, carbon monoxide will come, which will make it difficult for sensitive people to breathe and raise the air temperature by ten degrees. Not fatal, of course, but pleasant enough.
However, it must be admitted that such a scenario is unlikely. It is used in the film not as a prediction of the future, but as a plot twist designed to force the characters to go into space.
Wormhole and Endurance
Taking advantage of a successfully turned up wormhole, NASA equips an interstellar expedition on the Endurance spacecraft in search of a new home for mankind. It's good that there is a hole near Saturn! Indeed, in Cooper's world, travel at the speed of light is impossible, and it would take thousands of years to fly to the stars.
CLAIM: Are wormholes real? Have physicists registered at least one?
No, but science admits their existence, or at least does not deny it. And what is not forbidden ... Recently, not without the participation of Mr. Thorne, the idea is gaining popularity in cosmology that space is not an endless void, but a kind of material that can be changed if there were the right tools.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Let's say. But to maintain a hole in working order, considerable amounts of negative or exotic matter are required. Yes, and opening a hole requires a source of huge gravity such as Gargantua, and the appearance of such in the solar system would plunge it into chaos.
And even if a wormhole were to appear - for example, due to the influence of Gargantua - it would be a one-way road. The return journey would require a similar source of gravity from the other side.
Yes, the very appearance of a hole is a necessary license. In the movie, the characters assumed that the wormhole was created by creatures living in 5D space to show us the way to salvation.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Professor Brand says that the wormhole appeared in the orbit of Saturn fifty years before the events of Interstellar. NASA was dispersed ten years before the start of the film. That is, for forty years no one knew anything about the appearance of a gravitational anomaly within the solar system? Yes, crowds of string theorists would have lined up at the Nobel Committee. This is the news of the century!
Half a century has passed since then, everyone managed to forget about some hole in space - there were enough problems. Only one crazy grandfather remembers her, who lives underground, mows down under Kip Thorne and collects spaceships on his knee.
CLAIM: Speaking of the ship! Why did the booster put him into orbit if he was able to take off from the planets Miller and Manna?
Firstly, the Endurance went into orbit, and the astronauts landed on the planets in the Ranger, a shuttle docked to the Endurance. Secondly, there are no gas stations on the way from Earth to Gargantua, so fuel must be saved.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Speaking of fuel. A lot of it is required for such a journey. Why don't we see giant fuel tanks in any frame from the Endurance?
Are you sure that the camera showed all the compartments? Why, for example, show cargo holds where nothing happens? In addition, on the way to Saturn, the members of the expedition could save fuel with the help of gravitational maneuvers - accelerate, slow down or change the direction of flight under the influence of the gravity of celestial bodies. This is how NASA launched the Cassini probe in the late 1990s. There was not enough fuel on board to get to Saturn, but NASA calculated the course so that Cassini would pass on the tangent of the orbits of Venus, Earth and Jupiter. Each such maneuver gave the probe acceleration.
To get from Earth to Saturn in two years, the Endurance must cover an average of 20 kilometers per second. Kip Thorne believes that with the help of maneuvers and increasing the efficiency of rocket fuel, by the end of the 21st century, humanity will be able to reach speeds of 300 kilometers per second. So flying to Saturn in such a time is quite realistic.
COUNTERARGUMENT: But how did they slow down in the orbit of Saturn and not fly further? The power of the ship's bow engines would clearly not be enough here.
On their own, perhaps, it would not be enough, but with the help of regular course corrections in the orbit of Saturn - why not? In addition, do not forget about the wormhole, which could well affect the location of gravitational fields.
Life orbiting a black hole
After passing through a wormhole, Cooper and the others find themselves at the end point of their journey - a planetary system near the huge black hole Gargantua. This celestial body is a source of special pride for both Kip Thorne and the special effects masters. When depicting the hole, calculations made by Thorne specifically for the film were used. The result stunned Kip himself. He guessed how black holes should look in reality, but the computer animation exceeded all his expectations.
CLAIM: No other celestial bodies are visible near Gargantua, except for a couple of planets. Where do the planets of Miller, Edmunds and Mann draw heat and light from?
From the accretion disk. Gargantua's gravity is so strong that it can capture an entire star. When a star moves straight into a black hole, its fate is deplorable and predictable. If its orbit lies next to Gargantua, then the attraction of the black hole simply tears the celestial body apart, and most of the matter that previously made up the star's body falls into Gargantua's orbit and forms an accretion disk. It emits light, heat, and radiation, so it could well replace the sun.
COUNTERARGUMENT: It turns out that it is impossible to live on these planets because of high temperatures and radiation. How did the crew of the Endurance not get fried just by flying by?
Perhaps several million years have passed since the last star fell into the gravitational grip of Gargantua. Then the gas that makes up the disk has cooled to a temperature of several thousand degrees and no longer emits such strong radiation, although it continues to give enough light and heat. The low temperature also explains the fading of the disk.
Gargantua is the most authentic black hole in the history of cinema. But even it is different from reality.
CLAIM: Where did the planets come from? Shouldn't they have been sucked into the hole?
In fact, science admits the existence of zones of ordinary time and space near giant black holes, even entire planetary systems that revolve around the central singularity in complex but closed orbits.
CLAIM: The accretion disk looks implausible. It should be somewhat flattened and asymmetrical. In addition, the model does not take into account the Doppler effect: one edge of the disk should be red, the other blue.
Yes, here Christopher Nolan deliberately went against the truth so as not to embarrass the audience. And he deliberately underestimated the speed of rotation of the black hole. In addition, given the distance from the black hole to the planet Miller, Gargantua should occupy half the sky, and the planet in this scenario would be inside the accretion disk, so it would mostly be visible only from the side of the planet opposite the hole.
Planets Miller and Manna
First of all, the astronauts go to the planet Miller. Time there goes slowly - one hour on its surface is equal to seven Earth years.
CLAIM: This is possible only near objects with a huge mass, for example, in the orbit of a black hole. But you need to be very close to the hole, almost above its surface. And a stable orbit around a black hole must be at least three times the diameter of Gargantua. Otherwise, Miller's planet would have been sucked in a long time ago. Taking into account the frames shown in the film, time on the surface of the planet should flow more slowly than on Earth, by only twenty percent.
This is true of non-rotating black holes, but with Gargantua, things are different. Gargantua is a supermassive rotating black hole, which somewhat changes its effect on the surrounding space. Under certain conditions, say, if it rotates very quickly, and the planet Miller is located close enough to Gargantua's circular orbit, such a time dilation is possible.
True, rotating black holes have a limit on the speed of rotation, and, as a rule, they do not reach a maximum. For the planet Miller to have such a time dilation, Gargantua would have to rotate only a little less than the maximum. This is real, although unlikely.
COUNTERARGUMENT: What about tidal waves? They are possible only if the difference in the gravitational attraction of the black hole on different sides of the planet is very large. But in this case, the planet would simply be torn apart!
Not really. Due to the gigantic size of Gargantua, the difference in the attraction of the black hole on different sides of the Miller planet is not large enough. Nevertheless, the force of gravity should have been enough to deform the planet. Miller's planet was supposed to look like an ellipsoid, compressed on the sides and elongated in length. In addition, if the planet rotated around its axis, then Gargantua's attractive forces would act in several directions, depending on the position of the orbits. In the film, we see that all giant waves move in approximately the same direction. From this follows the conclusion that the planet Miller is always turned to the black hole by the same side.
Another explanation is also possible: due to the deformation of the planet and the attraction of Gargantua, earthquakes constantly occur in certain areas, causing giant tsunamis.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Radiation, absence of the usual source of light and heat - the planet Miller does not look like a suitable place to live. Was it really necessary to fly to it in the first place, and was it really impossible to avoid this part of the expedition?
Of course it was possible. The planet Miller would never have become the first candidate for a new home for humanity if Cooper or other members of the Endurance crew had guessed to use for their intended purpose a bunch of scientific equipment that was brought aboard the ship for this purpose. Information about the suitability of the planet Miller for life could be obtained directly from orbit using telescopes and other instruments. The same ones that Romilly studied the black hole itself for almost a quarter of a century, while the rest fought the tsunami.
Without descending to the planet, it would be possible to study it from a safe distance, where the time lag is minimal. A simple spectral analysis would save the expedition's fuel and reduce the tension on the screen. Christopher Nolan needed this time dilation to show how the gap between father and daughter is growing.
As a last resort, if NASA really wanted to send a delegation of thinking beings to the planet, it would be quite possible to send a crew consisting of only robots to the expedition. Robots are able to survive in almost any conditions (judging by the film - even in a black hole), they are less demanding, not so capricious and endure loneliness more easily.
CLAIM: How justified are Cooper's maneuvers before landing on the planet Miller to avoid time dilation and the pull of a black hole?
In any case, he would not have avoided the slowdown of time - it increases inversely with the distance from the black hole. But save time by correcting the course of the ship due to the gravitational attraction of different celestial bodies as much as possible. In the film, Cooper decides to avoid Gargantua's pull by accelerating to great speed and then braking hard, hitting the neutron star's gravitational pull.
In fact, it would not have been possible to reduce speed in this way (and so that the ship and passengers would not be torn to pieces during sudden braking) with the help of a neutron star - this requires a small black hole the size of the Earth. But Nolan was adamant about the number of black holes in the film: one, only one!
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Fast forward to the planet Manna. The action takes place high above the surface, in the sky of which giant ice clouds hang.
CLAIM: How is it possible for such clouds to exist? And why don't they fall under their own weight?
Apparently, the planet Manna revolves around Gargantua in an extremely complex orbit and spends most of the time away from the black hole. Why? First, it was almost the longest flight to the planet Mann when the crew of the Endurance decided where to start. But when Cooper takes off from the planet, the Ranger is very close to Gargantua. And secondly, this is hinted at by giant ice clouds that freeze for the time that the planet is removed from the accretion disk.
And they do not fall thanks to a special kind of magic. Film magic. In fact, they should have collapsed to the surface long ago.
Fall into a black hole
CLAIM: After taking off from Mann's planet, the Endurance is gripped by Gargantua's gravity. Cooper manages to save the main module, but he, the TARS robot and the Ranger pass through the event horizon and fall into a black hole. How did they survive the whole process? They should have either been killed by the radiation and temperature of the accretion disk, or they should have been spaghettified - turned into an elongated thread due to the difference in the attraction of different parts of the body.
If Gargantua last captured the stars in her gravitational trap millions of years ago, then the disk became safe for casual travelers (and useless for the surrounding planets, by the way). As for spaghettification, it is again possible in small and non-rotating black holes. The size and speed of rotation of the Gargantua reduce the difference in the attraction of various parts of the body to zero, so that one can not be afraid of turning into spaghetti.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Does this mean that one can safely survive falling into a black hole?
Of course not. Going after TARS, Cooper signed his own death warrant and he knew it himself.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Suppose, by some miracle, Cooper survived. How did he expect to transmit the signal back home? After all, they experienced difficulties even with signal transmission through a wormhole. What can we say about a black hole, from which, as you know, nothing escapes.
It was believed that nothing, not even light, could escape the attraction of a black hole. But Stephen Hawking proved that black holes can also emit elementary particles, mainly photons. Some theories imply that information is basically unstoppable, but there is no consensus among scientists on this issue. However, they are unlikely to agree that a signal can be broadcast from a black hole, so this is, of course, an exaggeration.
CLAIM: What is this gravitational data, without which it is impossible to solve the equation of Professor Brand?
According to the film, the professor needed the data to help him understand gravity and its interaction with quantum mechanics. Subsequently, this would help raise new human colonies from the Earth. Of course, to solve such problems in real life, jumping into a black hole is not needed. And it is unlikely that such data can be transmitted in such a short sequence of signals.
CLAIM: After passing the event horizon, Cooper finds himself in a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube that allows you to measure time as a linear quantity and allows you to communicate with Murph at any point in her life. Is that also scientific?
From the moment of the jump into the black hole until the end of the film, the script ceases to focus on science and operates on pure speculation. Yes, scientists admit the existence of other dimensions, but their knowledge in three-dimensional space is not possible. And of course, it is impossible to scientifically prove that after jumping into a black hole, unknown forces will transfer a person to his daughter's room. All these mysterious phenomena Nolan writes off on the mysterious and mysterious "them" living in five-dimensional space.
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Nolan was filming science fiction after all, not documentaries, so he had the right to ignore some details. Interstellar was sometimes the victim of artistic design, visual solutions were made for the convenience of the audience and the film crew, and not for scientists. Nevertheless, the picture turned out to be much more scientific than most modern science fiction. Think about it: in what other session did we even need to know how real astrophysics works?
