Interstellar science

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Movies

Always enjoying confusing my mind by trying to understand theoretical physics, I tried hard to understand the movie Interstellar.   Without giving away any plot, I will only say it has a little to do with black holes, worm holes, the warping of spacetime, and most intriguing of all -time distortion.

 

Black holes, at their simplest of levels, can be understood.  They have such huge mass that their gravitational pull even keeps light from escaping.  Hence, the name black holes.

 

It is the time distortion that is the hardest to comprehend.  As you travel farther from a large gravitational pull, time slows down.  Or speeds up, come to think of it I am not sure which.  If you could travel faster that the speed of light, which according to Einstein you cannot do, you could see into the past.   Let's say you travel at the speed of light, and go to a planet ten light years away (which would take ten years). If you then look at earth with a really big telescope, you will see things as there were just the second after you left, ten years earlier.  I don't know why you would want to, but you could.

 

Long ago the idea of flying probably seems to be an impossible fantasy.  I wonder if some day we will say that about time travel.

 

 

 

 

Comments

Fred Klein

Does all this slow the advent of a 60th birthday?
Rona Gura

As a Star Trek nerd, I have to confess that stories that include time travel are usually my favorite. I love trying to wrap my head around those problems or, not wrapping my head around it and just enjoy the story.

Submitted by NULL (not verified) on Sun, 11/16/2014 - 01:28

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Ok. I was going to write something about time travel (which I love to read about) but then Fred hit me with "60"th birthday.....whose 60th birthday would that be?
Corey Bearak

I thoroughly enjoyed science and the like while in school but other than the practice of problem solving, I do not find it part of my everyday life

Submitted by Erik_Scheibe on Tue, 11/18/2014 - 14:03

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Erik Scheibe

Loved the movie Interstellar, although it was challenging to fully grasp. I thought the best part of it was the way the overwhelming immersement into science and science fiction was consistently trumped by the raw exploration of the most fundamental emotions of human nature

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