The Problem With Interstellar's Black Hole that Everyone Ignores

[Music] black holes worm holes and time dilation all concepts of general relativity that Christopher Nolan wo into his 2014 film Interstellar in a manner we had never seen before while many loved its groundbreaking scientific take on the dangers of intense time dilation as his group of astronauts in search of a new home for Humanity found themselves losing years in minutes there were certainly elements of the film and its ending that seemed strange towering waves sweeping around planets black holes that you can enter and use to reach across time and space using gravitational forces Interstellar at

times felt like it strayed from science into science fiction but what is the science and what is the fiction what did the film get right where did it take artistic license and diverge from our current scientific knowledge can you really use a black hole to communicate ideas across space and time I'm Alex molan and you're watching astrom join me today as we learn the truth about Interstellar we will explore the numerous scientific phenomena of this film that underpin wormholes and black holes and discover the realities of what happens when you bend SpaceTime to its extreme

for those of you who need a reminder let's begin with a quick plot recap in the film a disease referred to as the blight takes hold of crops on Earth and starts killing them causing a population collapse and technological Decay as Humanity focuses on farming instead of space fairing our protagonist a former NASA pilot named Cooper finds himself at a hidden NASA base where they are working on plans to save Humanity hope has arrived in the form of a wormhole a tunnel through SpaceTime that they have detected near the orbit of Saturn half a century

ago which is thought to lead to potentially habitable planets in the film they show the Wormhole not as a cliche portal but through distortions of stars near Saturn so here we have our first piece of science to evaluate this portrayal of a wormhole makes sense a wormhole is an extreme Distortion of the fabric of the universe similar to a black hole and would only really be visible through the light near its edges becoming warped wormholes are interesting we have the theory and Mathematics behind them somewhat solved already thanks to Einstein and relativity wormholes connect SpaceTime

to itself resulting in a shortcut that joins separate points in space and even time to one another the film uses a classic analogy for this showing a pencil piercing a short cut through a piece of paper representing SpaceTime sadly though although we have the theory we don't actually have the means to make them even if they can be made at all there are a couple of problems with with wormholes to begin with their creation the scientific adviser for the film Kip Thorn released a few physics papers after the film to discuss the scientific advancements they

made in its production in a paper titled visualizing interstellar's Wormhole he notes that it is difficult to create a wormhole out of nothing as it would require the existence of backwards time travel you see once the two ends of a wormhole were linked they would stay linked then if you could time dilate one end for another by moving it very quickly causing it to move slower in time than the other end you could enter the end further along in time and emerge at the point further back in time thus entering your own past you could

then for instance grab yourself and stop yourself from entering the first portal in the first place creating a paradox where you both enter and do not enter the portal breaking reality and also my brain there are lots of mathematical arguments that Advocate against this sort of thing such as Steven Hawkings chronology protection conjecture simply put it states that the laws of physics would prevent wormholes these closed Tim likee curves from appearing in the first place admittedly this hasn't been proven and relies on a bit of an appeal to Common Sense Loops can't exist because we

would struggle to imagine how they can exist this is a problem we return to later in the film however the time travel aspect isn't the only problem with wormholes traveling through them is theoretically tricky too you see if a wormhole were to be created the throat of the Wormhole would soon pinch off and the shortcut through SpaceTime would be sealed due to gravity forcing it to close in on itself so the moment Cooper tried to enter the Wormhole it would instantly close ending his mission before before it started which would make for a boring film

to make a wormhole persist long enough that people can travel through it we would have to use a mathematical hack we pretend as if some exotic matter exists which has negative Mass this negative Mass would then have to be placed at the throat so that it can create opposing curvature which would counteract the tendency of the Wormhole to close keeping it open in perpetuity you might be thinking that this sounds made up and you'd be right we have never found negative mass and have no idea how to make it so this seems like a mere

mathematical curiosity so while worm holes are allowed for in scientific fact actually traveling through one is so far just science fiction still without it the rest of the film couldn't really happen so you can understand why Nolan decided to keep it in whether or not this conjecture is true this backwards causal relationship is baked into the movie not just because of the existence of the Wormhole which implies it but also with a reveal at the climax of the film which we will return to later while the existence of the Wormhole require some suspension of disbelief

the stunning visuals of the Wormhole do not in fact the team behind the film used the theory of general relativity to mathematically model what a real Wormhole would look like which was in fact an impressive breakthrough of mathematical modeling in a bonus scene for patrons and members we explain how they were able to bring the Wormhole and black hole from Mass equations to the IMAX screen make sure to check it out now let's move on to the next piece of science to evaluate after the crew makes their Way Through the Wormhole they arrive near a

super massive black hole called Gargantua orbiting Gargantua are two promising PL planets that may be able to Harbor life the first one Miller's planet is deep in the gravitational well caused by the black Hall some of the crew go down onto the planet but within just a short couple of hours have skipped forward decades into the future much to The Misfortune of the crewmate they left behind who had to live out those years at normal speed this part of the film is absolutely plausible this is gravitational time dilation in action and is Thoroughly proven experimentally

gravitational time dilation is a result of the bending of SpaceTime caused by Massive objects time itself runs slower when you are gripped by stronger gravity it even takes place here on Earth between us and our orbiting satellites much like the crewmate left outside the gravity well experiencing faster time a clock placed at the orbit of GPS satellites records 45 extra micros seconds per day day compared to a clock on the Earth's surface GPS must take this effect into account to get calculations of your position right if they didn't your Google maps location would quickly diverge

from your actual position it's crazy to think that the same underlying theory that explains black holes and time travel also helps us find our way home when we are lost that in itself is Nobel Prize worthy of course in interstellar the time dation effect is taken to the extreme in the ultra strong gravitational well of a super massive black hole an orbiting Planet could be experiencing severe time dilation compared to an observer much further out so really the only thing to nitpick here is the size of the black hole in the sky from the view

of the planet in the science of interstellar Kip Thorn states that Gargantua is 100 million times the mass of our sun and that this would mean that the black hole would take up half of the entire entire Sky of Miller's planet to make the calculations work out however Nolan decided to make it look smaller in the sky so that it would appear more striking when it's the focus of the story later on here is an example of where Aesthetics went out over true scientific exactitude now much like the crew down on the water Planet let's

jump further ahead in time we have the strangest most mindbending scene of the whole film to explore the part where Kuba and enters the black hole in a bit to save the mission and to get at least some of the crew to the final Planet Cooper has to sacrifice himself catapulting himself into the heart of the black hole to give others enough momentum to escape its gravity ironically though this isn't the certain Doom it first appeared at the heart of the black hole Cooper finds a tesseract a representation of five dimensional space where time is

a physical Dimension that he can move around in he's able to use gravitational forces here to reach out to his daughter back on Earth across space and time and bizarrely is able to give her the knowledge she needs to start the mission to the other planets in the first place so let's ask the big question here is any of this theoretically possible let's start with simply the concept of entering the black hole in a previous video I've made about black holes I spoke about how they're actually quite hard to get into angular momentum can become

near relativistic the closer you are to the black hole requiring you to shed momentum before you can fall any deeper that accretion disc you see around Gargantua is matter that is doing exactly that spinning so fast as it tries to shed momentum to fall deeper into the abyss that the friction involved has turned it into a bright plasma seeing as this plasma can reach temperatures of millions of degrees C this might prove fatal for poor Cooper but let's say that Cooper manages to find a route that does not turn him into superheated plasma on the

way in what would happen firstly as he crossed the Event Horizon the boundary after which even light can't escape the light bouncing off his body would make it appear as if he were moving slower if you were viewing this from the outside you'd see the image of his body freeze and persist on the Event Horizon before gradually turning invisible because the light is being stretched by the EXT ex Distortion of SpaceTime its wavelength would increase and the light you receive later on would be more and more red shifted until Cooper vanished from your view entirely

Cooper meanwhile depending on his angle of Entry would start to experience an effect known as spaghettification essentially as parts of his body started to experience the passage of time slightly differently due to the gradient of gravity he was falling into he would find himself slowly becoming more and more stretched this pull would eventually snap him in half as the force of it overcame the bonds between his molecules this would happen again and again until he was just a stream of molecules falling into the black hole's heart this would not necessarily happen exactly at the Event

Horizon The Event Horizon itself is not truly a physical object but rather is simply the mathematical point between gravity that is escapable and gravity that is inescapable Cooper might not notice he was crossing it if it weren't for an obstacle known as the Photosphere there is a point in space along the edge of the Event Horizon where gravity pulls just the right amount to not let any light escape the black hole but also doesn't pull enough to drag it in deeper in effect at this precise distance from The Singularity any photons of light that arrive

enter an orbit they never leave over time the amount of light here would gradually increase and increase most likely when Cooper entered this specific Zone he would suddenly encounter a previously invisible massive Spike of radiation that could very easily kill him assuming he wasn't already dead from the accan disc plasma or the spaghettification there are lots of ways you can die when falling into a black hole but let's say that he manages to get past all of that could he then actually attempt that last point to speak across time and space using gravity honestly it's

a little unclear the physics Beyond The Event Horizon is murky at best so scientists don't really know for sure what happens down there but strangely it does bear some passing resemblance to our current mathematical Solutions on the subject our maths as it stands says that space curves so much that all the paths you can travel Just Lead You Down Deeper into the black hole but there are some weird scenarios where you can end up arriving at points in your own past which could allow you to influence what you do there which brings us once again

to the idea of paradoxes paradoxes are all through the film Interstellar what if Cooper did something in the black hole that killed his past self that's four kinds of dead now for those keeping track thus stopping himself from going back in time later then he would never have gone back to kill his past self thus saving his past self's life but that would mean he was able to go back so could kill himself and on and on it goes in a circle the film attempts to get around this circle using something known as a bootstrap

Paradox where everything in the film always happened the way it was once it was influenced Through Time Travel Cooper used the black hole to teach people back on Earth data that they needed for a gravity equation which allowed them to launch Cooper's ship in the first place but the film showed that Cooper's interdimensional fumblings were present at the start of the film too Cooper did what he did and he had always done it in a way this closes the loop but this is a little unsatisfying as it still opens the question of what would have

happened if Cooper had decided not to share gravity equation data with the past it removes free will as soon as Cooper realized that he was in a bootstrap Paradox he had to do what he'd always done or the whole thing would collapse this happens even more broadly as we learn that future humans now sufficiently Advanced were the ones who created the Tesseract that allowed humans to be saved in the first place but what if they decided to not create it then we're back in Paradox territory where the universe has to solve a thing happening and

not happening at the same time time we don't really have an answer in physics for what happens with that so this is an area where Interstellar becomes less scientifically certain however it does make for a mind-bending story in the end despite some divergences from science taken for dramatic purposes interstella helped showcase the fascinating Concepts from Modern physics to a mass audience it was able to show how time isn't just a rigid Arrow but rather as the doctor said a wibbly wobbly timey wiy thing going at different speeds depending on what gravity Fields you are moving

through there is actually too much in this film to fully evaluate in one video so I may return to this film one day in that second part I'll discuss the planets of interstellar and how plausibly habitable they really are what did you think about Interstellar and the signs it portrayed what was your favorite concept from the movie let us know in the comments below sadly we can't go back in time to fix things that have gone wrong or pains we felt in the past but that doesn't mean that some reflection on our lives isn't helpful

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