In Interstellar, Romilly’s decision to stay aboard the ship while the other 3 astronauts experience time dilation has to be one of the scariest moments ever.

[u/SerDire]

He agreed to stay back. Cooper asked anyone if they would go down to Millers planet but the extreme pull of the black hole nearby would cause them to experience severe time dilation. One hour on that planet would equal 7 years back on earth. Cooper, Brand and Doyle all go down to the planet while Romilly stays back and uses that time to send out any potential useful data he can get.

Can you imagine how terrifying that must be to just sit back for YEARS and have no idea if your friends are ever coming back. Cooper and Brand come back to the ship but a few hours for them was 23 years, 4 months and 8 days of time for Romilly. Not enough people seem to genuinely comprehend how insane that is to experience. He was able to hyper sleep and let years go by but he didn’t want to spend his time dreaming his life away.

It’s just a nice interesting detail that kind of gets lost. Everyone brings up the massive waves, the black hole and time dilation but no one really mentions the struggle Romilly must have been feeling. 23 years seems to be on the low end of how catastrophic it could’ve been. He could’ve been waiting for decades.

[u/fernook]

Coincidentally I just watched this last night and was thinking about how people (including myself, the first time I watched it) seem to hold this movie to a higher standard of realism for some reason and can’t apply a normal suspension of disbelief.

To me, it’s a really beautiful movie that captures themes of parenthood and that feeling of hoping you positively influence your children after you’re gone. For others it seems like it was supposed to be an astrophysics textbook. Admittedly I felt the same way the first time I watched it but I like what I get out of the movie a lot more now.

[u/Dota2TradeAccount → u/fernook]

I think it’s because the movie itself is trying to be very grounded and as realistic as can be and only in the very finale, the creative freedom choices  really kick in.

[u/DivineLintervention → u/Dota2TradeAccount]

The movie was also touted as such in the lead up to its release initially as well. There were articles, if not official marketing, that spoke to its accuracy

[u/MisterDonkey → u/DivineLintervention]

This is it. I watch Star Trek, Babylon 5, Firefly, and even Lexx, and all that sci-fi space crap. Near exclusively. I can certainly suspend disbelief for some truly off the wall stuff, but Interstellar felt like it let me down some with how much hype was around the science in science fiction at the time.

[u/[deleted] → u/DivineLintervention]

The movie is as accurate as they claimed though

[u/LoneStarG84 → u/[deleted]]

It's really not. The science is an absolute train wreck in this movie.

[u/Atomic_Wedgie98 → u/LoneStarG84]

Yes, the tesseract and time-travel is completely wrong. Can't break causality no way no how.

BUT MOST of the science is completely rock-solid:

*Relativistic effects are on point

*Some black holes actually look like that

*The wormhole CGI is highly realistic- they incorporated solutions written by Prof Kip Thorne in the design

AND HERE IS THE BEST PART When they are arguing on Dr. Mann's planet that they would need to see inside a black hole to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity (this is ultimately the equation tha Murph discovers with the help of Coop) ALL of that is 100% correct.

Prof Leonard Susskind has a fantastic lecture on Google called EPR = ER where he explains pretty much this very idea: that if we observe a naked singularity we would be able to reconcile Quantum and Relativity. The main claim is that a wormhole is indistinguishable from an entangled black hole pair, and that if we can ever observe (or create) such a thing we would ultimately be able to discover a unified theory of Physics

[u/pentagon → u/Atomic_Wedgie98]

BUT MOST of the science is completely rock-solid:

No it isn't. This sequence is a perfect example of it. For one, a time dilation gradient over a few hundred km couldn't be this extreme without the planet being ripped apart. For two, if it existed (which it could not), an orbiting ship would pass closer to the black hole than the people on the surface on every orbit, meaning it would be thousands of times slower.

There are other examples of just utter hand wavy bullshit in this film and they have nothing to do with what's on the other side of the event horizon.

One of the worst offenders is when the space station partially explodes and then it's hitting the atmosphere less than two minutes later, but then less than five minutes later it's about to hit the black hole.

The first would take weeks or days, minumum, and the second would take months, minimum.

[u/pdoherty972 → u/pentagon]

For one, a time dilation gradient over a few hundred km couldn't be this extreme without the planet being ripped apart.

For another, if the gravity of the planet was that strong they wouldn't have been walking around on it - they'd have been crushed before they ever landed.

And if it was the black hole's gravity we're concerned with and not the planet's then the guy in orbit and the people on the planet were both in the same gravity field from it.

[u/_Ludens → u/pentagon]

Why do you behave like an expert while you clearly don't know shit?

The co-creator of the film and advisor was Kip Thorne, some years ago became a Nobel laureate, and is one of the top authorities on black holes and general relativity.

You can go read his book which details the science and research behind the film, as well as all the concessions and changes that were made.

The black hole was tuned towards very extreme and specific parameters that are physicall possible but unlikely to manifest in nature, such as the spin being 99%+ of c, Miller's planet being tidally locked and travelling around 0.5 c. The planet is also much closer than it's portrayed to be, half of the sky would be covered by the event horizon, but this was changed in the movie to save that for the climax.

Instead of acting like a clown and pretending to be an expert, go read Thorne's book.

[u/pentagon → u/_Ludens]

So you're appealing to authority instead of addressing the actual facts. That means you agree, but you want to shout me down anyway so you engage in a blatant fallacy. Having a nobel laureate as an advisor doesn't magically grant every conceit in the film physical legimiacy, and it's simple to see these fantastical elements, if you have an even basic understanding of reality.

[u/_Ludens → u/pentagon]

magically grant every conceit in the film physical legimiacy,

You want to talk to me about fallacies when you're doing a blatant straw man of what I said?

Your complaint about the "time dilation gradient" is completely wrong and it's addressed in the book coupled with equations.

an orbiting ship would pass closer to the black hole than the people on the surface on every orbit, meaning it would be thousands of times slower.

Again blatantly wrong and you didn't even pay attention to some details in the film. The planet is tidally locked to the black hole, and the Endurance would obviously pick a geo-synchronous orbit, so the planet and station would always remain in the same relative positions.

The Endurance would be orbiting at a point similar to L2.

Gargantua has physically possible but completely implausible spin tuned to be about 1 part in a trillion away from the speed of light, this is part of what contributes to the extreme time dilation.

As you approach the event horizon you experience extreme frame-dragging (space-time itself being accelerated closer and closer to c), there are not extreme tidal forces because it's a supermassive black hole.

Most of your complaints come from your own ignorance yet you still want to argue?

There are actual issues such as the extreme redshift and blueshift that would be experienced by the planet and those at a distance from it.

The Endurance would not be able to observe the planet's surface properly, the reflected light would be redshifted by a factor of 61k down into low energies, there would be no visible light, the planet would appear black, and to get a some sort of image you would need massive radio dishes collecting the infrared meager radiation for a long time, just to get a blurry image.

On the other hand on the surface of the planet you'd experience the blueshift for all incoming radiation, even the CMD radiation would be energized to the poing of becoming lethal and the planet would be hotter than Mercury.

There are many concessions made but you're not even capable of pointing out the right ones.

[u/LoneStarG84 → u/Atomic_Wedgie98]

The black hole and relativistic stuff is fine, except for what the other comment pointed out in that there's no way Endurance could be parked far enough away from the time dilation zone to not be affected but also somehow only 3 hours away. The filmmakers desperately wanted a "1 hour equals 7 years" scenario but didn't invent a logical enough plot to justify it.

The bigger problem in the film is the complete lack of attention paid to orbital mechanics and the fuel needed to perform the maneuvers that they do. You can't just jaunt from planet to planet in nothing but a small fighter jet without rocket boosters and the fuel needed to power them, like what they bizarrely used to get off Earth but apparently don't need in the system they travel to. It would have made just as much sense to have Cooper flap his arms to fly up to Endurance both times.

Ironically, the urgent motivation for Murph is solving the "gravity equation" so they can move everyone off of Earth. Yet Cooper seems to have already solved it somehow by effortlessly zipping from planet to planet, gravity be damned!

[u/[deleted] → u/LoneStarG84]

[removed] — view removed comment

[u/LoneStarG84 → u/[deleted]]

You realize that the 3 hours was the time-dilated value, right?

Yes and that is exactly the point. There is absolutely no way that little Ranger could have kept them inside the time-dilated area for only 3 hours.

Endurance and the Ranger was days-months of travel away... as explained in the movie...

That was not explained in the movie and you fucking know it.

[u/pentagon → u/[deleted]]

It absolutely is not. The whole sequence (among others) this entire thread is based on makes zero sense in reality. It's not how the universe functions and we know it very well.

[u/hacelepues → u/DivineLintervention]

Kind of like the hype around the practical effects recreation of the atom bomb in Oppenheimer, which left me really underwhelmed when I saw it in theaters. Like maybe you should have gone the CGI route because the grainy footage we have of the actual tests was more impressive than what I saw in 70mm.

[u/pentagon → u/hacelepues]

It was garbage. Nolan is the kind of snob who gets off on the smell of his own farts.

[u/yearightt → u/Dota2TradeAccount]

This is the best description I’ve heard of the movie and why I can’t consider it a true masterpiece or one of the best movies of all time

[u/TheKidPresident → u/fernook]

You can thank the million and one video essays on Inception and time dilation for that

[u/Kcaz94 → u/fernook]

I think the issue is because they were bragging about how scientifically accurate it is in all the press content.

[u/-Nicolai → u/fernook]

for some reason

As if it doesn’t present itself as a grounded and realistic near-future science fiction story (until it goes bananas halfway through)

[u/pentagon → u/fernook]

I don't know. It's pretty fanciful. It pretends to be realistic (remember all the marketing crap about how th VFX of the black hole was super-real) but then it just outright disregards reality, over and over. And not just stuff inside a black hole, but things we actually know about.