Kip Thorne - The Science of Interstellar

Ranger scraping ice clouds when landing on Mann’s planet, 177

crew on Mann’s planet, 178–179

Dr. Mann describing Professor’s struggle to understand gravity, 229

Romilly urging Cooper to seek information from Gargantua’s singularities, 234

scenes back on Earth:

the Professor and Murph in the Professor’s office, 213, 221

the Professor dying, 222

Endurance ’s explosion above Mann’s planet, 181–182, 181

Endurance ’s plunge and rescue near Gargantua’s critical orbit, 237–244

Cooper and TARS plunging into Gargantua, 234, 242–244, 247–251

Endurance ’s launch off critical orbit toward Mann’s planet, 244–245

Cooper rescued by the tesseract, 251–252

Cooper in tesseract, communicating backward in time with young Murph, 255–261, 265–266, 270–271, 297

Cooper touching Brand across the fifth dimension, 193, 272

Cooper in the space colony, 274–275

Cooper sets out in search of Brand, 275

interstellar travel, 115–123, 282

with twenty-first-century technology, 117

with far-future technology, 117–123

via thermonuclear fusion, 118–119

via laser beam and light sail, 119–120

via gravitational slingshots, 120–123

via wormholes and other space warps, 123, 282

references on, 282

inverse square law for gravity, 26, 26 , 27, 34, 194–196, 198–199, 202–204, 216, 219, 274, 292, 295; see also bulk, confining gravity in

Io (moon of Jupiter), 168

jets from black holes:

visually impressive to astronomers, 87

in the quasar 3C273, 88–89, 89

powered by whirling magnetic fields, 91–92

missing from Gargantua, 94

astrophysicists’ simulations of, 280–281

Kip Thorne (me):

photos of, 6 , 9 , 11 , 213 , 221

roles in LIGO, 151, 154, 224

roles in Interstellar , 1–14

roles in computer simulations of warped spacetime, 154

discovery of tendex lines, 41

maximum spin of a black hole, 61

the Blandford-Znajek mechanism to power black-hole jets, 92

wormhole research, 2

time-travel research, 268

bet with Hawking about naked singularities, 227–229

law of time warps, Einstein’s, see time warps, Einstein’s law of

laws of physics, 27–34, 278

shape and control our universe, 27

Newtonian laws, 27–30; see also inverse square law for gravity

Einstein’s relativistic laws, 28–32; see also warped spacetime

Einstein’s formulation of, 37–38, 203–204

Einstein’s law of time warps, see time warps, Einstein’s law of

same predictions as Newtonian laws when gravity weak and speeds small, 43

extension into five spacetime dimensions, 200, 220, 269, 286

quantum laws, 28–30, 32, 34

nature of, 223–225

their primacy over Newtonian and relativistic laws, 223–225

discard fluctuations to recover Newtonian and relativistic laws, 224

references on, 287

quantum gravity laws (tera almost incognita), 29–30, 32

and superstring theory, 187–188, 284

their nature encoded in singularities inside black holes, 225–227

references on, 287

power of multiple viewpoints on laws of physics, 44

revolutions that upend established laws, 34, 275

power that mastery of the laws gives to humans, 275

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory):

how it works, 152–153

the LIGO international collaboration, 153

see also gravitational waves

magnetic fields, 22-25

bar magnet and field lines, 22–23, 23

Earth’s, and Aurora Borealis, 23–25, 25

neutron star’s, 25, 30

accretion disk’s, 90–92

power a black hole’s jets, 91–92

magnetic levitation, 23, 23

confined to our brane, 192, 215, 296

Mann’s planet:

orbit of, 174–175, 175 , 298

lack of a sun, 175

ice clouds, 176–177

geological data—signs of life, 177–179

Milky Way galaxy, 19, 52–53, 279

Miller’s planet:

used to infer properties of Gargantua, 58–62, 292

orbit of, 62–63, 62 , 161–162

image of, above Gargantua’s disk, 98

slowing of time on, 59–61, 163

rotation of, 163, 165–166

rocking of, 165–167

Gargantua’s tidal gravity acting on, 58, 163

Gargantua’s whirl of space near, 163–164

giant water waves on, 164–166, 165

past history of, 166–168

appearance of Gargantua from, 168–169, 169

scenes in Interstellar , 58–59, 161, 164–165, 165

neutron stars:

born through implosion of a star (supernova), 206

masses and circumferences, 22, 22

magnetic fields, 25, 25 , 30

jets from, 25, 25

torn apart by black holes, 148–149

as pulsars, 25, 30

slingshot off, in Interstellar , 68–70

torn apart by black holes, 146–149

Newtonian laws of physics, see laws of physics, Newtonian laws

Nolan, Christopher:

foreword to this book, vii

collaboration with his brother, Jonathan, 4, 8, 262

negotiations to rewrite and direct Interstellar , 7, 8, 233

Kip’s interactions with, 8–10, 59, 69–70, 151, 189, 213, 246, 249 , 250, 256, 264

knowledge and intuition about science, 8–9, 189

commitment to science accuracy, vii, 8–9, 83, 94–96, 182

some science choices and ideas, 9

gravitational slingshots, 69–70

slowing of time on Miller’s planet, 59, 163

water waves on Miller’s planet, 164–166

spin of Gargantua for visualizations, 76, 97–98

anemic accretion disk, 94

size of Gargantua on sky, 63, 168–169

accident is the first building block of evolution, 100

wormhole’s gravitational pull, 139

wormhole’s handles, 139–140, 144

remove gravitational waves from Interstellar , 150–151

explosion in space, 182

bulk beings as descendants of humans, 193

number of dimensions for the bulk, 196

Endurance ’s near capture by Gargantua, 252

bulk beings save Cooper from singularity, 247

which singularity, 249

what it looks like inside a black hole, 250

rule set for time travel, 263

complexified tesseract, 252–253, 256–261, 264–266

moving forward and backward in our universe’s time by moving through the bulk, 261, 271

science compromises to make film great, 61–62, 63–64, 97–98, 144–145, 168–169, 196

science compromises to make film accessible to mass audience, 69–70, 76, 150–151, 242

Kip’s overall view on his science compromises, 9

use of sets instead of computer graphics, 13–14

communicating rule sets to audience, 262

oxygen cycle, 281

pathogens, 108–111, 113

planets of our solar system, 20–21, 21 , 71, 71

Professor Brand’s equation, 200–201, 212–222; see also blackboards, Professor Brand’s

Kip’s discussions with Christopher Nolan about what the equation should be, 9 , 213

and the Professor’s struggle to understand gravity, 213–220

and controlling gravity’s strength, so as to lift colonies off Earth, 212, 221, 223, 263, 273–274

specific form of the equation, 220

explanation of equation, 220–221

solving the equation—what that means, 221

iterations in solving the equation, 221–222, 221

quantum data, see quantum gravity data

quantum fluctuations, 28–29, 155–156, 197, 223–225, 268, 273, 287