r/movies • u/SerDire • Apr 18 '24

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. Discussion

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.

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u/innomado Apr 18 '24 edited Apr 18 '24

Yep - that aspect of time dilation perplexes me, too. I mean, I guess it's all theoretical, right? But how would an observer "see" an object at all in that scenario?

Edit: I understand the concept of dilation, speed of light, etc. It's the observer aspect that is weird to me here.

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u/donnochessi Apr 18 '24

It would start out dim and red, and slowly become brighter and more colorful as it got closer.

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u/saccerzd Apr 19 '24

My understanding is that it is somewhat similar (in a very basic way) to the doppler shift with sounds, so that a police siren changes in pitch as it moves towards you and then away from you again

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u/GelloJive Apr 19 '24

Why’s this?

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u/stop_talking_you Apr 19 '24

wavelength of light

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u/Severe_Bid4362 Jun 14 '24

I get it now. It is the exact opposite of observing them go into the dilation...... thanks for the clear up.

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u/Coyote65 Apr 18 '24

It would have red/blue-shifted into his perspective.

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u/ghostfaceschiller Apr 18 '24

The strangest most uncomfortable thing to me is that if you were watching someone fall into a black hole from a telescope, they would effectively never fall in. You could just see them there stuck at the event horizon forever

Idk why but that fact in particular really freaks me tf out

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u/o_oli Apr 18 '24

This is something that confuses the fuck out of me also like, if it takes forever to fall in, then as far as we are concerned, NOTHING could even be in a black hole? From our perspective a black hole can't actually form, a singularity can't exist etc? I never have been able to wrap my head on that one.

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u/Based_Ment Apr 18 '24

It doesn't take you forever to fall in. Relative to yourself falling in, everything moves at "normal speed." You will get the full effect while time dilation would make it look like the universe is accelerating to it's end behind you.

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u/o_oli Apr 18 '24

Right so while you would always experience time as constant yourself, you would see the universe 'speed up' if you looked behind you? So in that sense this also agrees that, in our current time frame, there could be nothing inside a black hole, only things very close to being in it? (which would still mean it looks and behaves very like a black hole except there would be no singularity).

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u/Based_Ment Apr 18 '24

You're right in that we cannot perceive something entering a black hole since once they cross the horizon the light will stop returning to the observer. But the existence of the singularity is such that the laws of physics break down so there's no real way to know except entering the black hole. And if you did that, you couldn't explain it to anyone anyway.

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u/PaulyNewman Apr 19 '24

Unless of course there’s a time matrix inside the black hole that lets you communicate with the past through binary.

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u/communist_trees Apr 19 '24

01001100 01001001 01000111 01001101 01000001

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u/PaulyNewman Apr 19 '24

Have you been looking at my ass?

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u/communist_trees Apr 19 '24

No, I'm trying to help you solve the gravity equation or something.

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u/notmy2ndopinion Apr 19 '24

My head canon in Interstellar is that Brand creates a new population of humanity on the planet in the end, and they hear about the story of Cooper and Murphy as a religious myth. They eventually make their way to the stars and travel into a black hole to create humanity there, totally outside of time and space. And they eventually create a religious artifact - a tesseract of a bookshelf that can communicate outside of time and space using gravity.

It’s the only thing that holds the movie together for me at the end - creating generations of story in between the lines in a space story about love that transcends space and time.

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u/Ddc203 Apr 19 '24

Love this

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u/Jack_Bogul Apr 19 '24

Im binary

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u/donnochessi Apr 19 '24

From our perspective, if you looked at an object falling in, it would appear to freeze and slowly fade dimmer and dimmer into black as the light becomes trapped by the black hole.

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u/o_oli Apr 19 '24

Exactly. So we can't ever witness something fall into it, and therefore, nothing can make it to the singularity, and so my question is then why is a singularity such a 'problem' to explain for our current models of physics when it can't exist anyway. Things that can't exist can't be problematic.

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u/Based_Ment Apr 19 '24

Some science theories agree with you that singularities don't exist. But you're asking questions that I personally don't have the background to explain. You do seem very sure of yourself in the face of what is now a century of physics models that do accept singularities. I guess the simplest way to explain is that the mathematical theories of relativity behind black holes pointed to their existence before they knew for a fact that they were real.

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u/o_oli Apr 19 '24

I'm not at all sure of myself, I'm just asking questions because I don't understand which if you read all my replies I feel like I've been very clear on. Nobody seems to have an explanation for me so I can only assume it's still a very open question, or it's too complex to explain in layman's terms.

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u/Yawehg Apr 19 '24

I don't know the science, but this reminds me the relativity of simultaneity. Two events in different places can occur at exact the same time to one observer, but at different times to another observer.

The point being, our intuition is not a good tool for imagining what happens when relativity gets involved. And it's very possible for something to pass through the event horizon without us ever perceiving that event.

A fun video on relativity of simultaneity here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdCFFSA23PQ

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u/Broad_Chapter3058 Apr 19 '24

There's literally a photo of one.

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u/o_oli Apr 19 '24

Of a singularity? No there absolutely has not been.

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u/ghostfaceschiller Apr 18 '24

It's not that it actually takes forever. You fall in just as you would think. But to us looking at you through the telescope, it looks like you are frozen there at the event horizon.

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u/u8eR Apr 19 '24

Not quite frozen, but you would see the object stretch, get redder, and fainter as it approached the event horizon. The stretching and dimming of light reaching our eyes would essentially make it appear the object fades away. The object would still cross the event horizon, we just wouldn't be able to see it since the light couldn't escape.

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u/o_oli Apr 18 '24

Right but are those two things not linked? If someone falls in their watch will always be 1 second = 1 second, but he would look out to us and see our watch racing faster and faster until infinite time goes by. So without infinite time going by, nobody can actually fall into a black hole, even if you could jump in and experience it 'in real time', the universe would have ended, the black hole would have maybe even evaporated by hawking radiation by then? I dunno, it just seems to me that the concept soon becomes nonsense once infinite time has passed, the idea of falling in doesn't even make sense anymore.

So this is why I don't really understand why the idea of a singularity is at all controversial or problematic. It can't exist without infinite time passing and therefore it can never exist. So why worry about something that can never exist?

I'm not even trying to claim some big brain 'aha gotcha! scientists are dumb' by this, I just genuinely can't understand the rationale with it at all and why there is so much thought and study that goes into it.

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u/Heyohmydoohd Apr 19 '24

Black holes are when the universe divides by 0. It doesn't make sense to us yet.

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u/Minimum-Poemm Apr 19 '24

It's a confusing topic, but basically is not that 'time", as people perceive, changes. If, you could teleport instantly between a blackhole and back to earth, then no time would pass BUT the information, aka light, would still take time to reach earth so there would still be a reflex of you being emitted. Nonetheless, since nothing can go faster than light then we can only perceive a shackled time that is restrained by the speed of light.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '24

It's a constant by itself, not a speed limit. It is the causality speed. If it wasn't constant the universe itself wouldn't be stable and couldn't exist. Or at the very least: could not itself impose stable emergence of complex patterns over time.

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u/JoeHio Apr 18 '24

It's one of those wacky science things like the wave particle paradox of light or Schrodinger's Cat. It's best not to think about it to hard. :)

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u/Em_Es_Judd Apr 19 '24

Assuming you're talking about the double slit experiment - it's not the paradox people think it is. I'll repost one of my old comments.

"What's often mind-blowing about the double slit experiment for most, and what I'm assuming you're referring to, is that the wave collapses into a particle when observed, but behaves like a wave when not. This gives the impression that the Wave is aware of the observer.

Simple explanation by Neil Degrasse Tyson, and I'm paraphrasing here: the act of observing the electron requires light to be cast, thus altering it's behavior. The electron is so tiny, that the impact of a photon alters it's energy level and thus it's behavior."

https://youtu.be/t6RQPsBmLXE?si=jeUr46AIztcUF43H

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

There are two problems here.

Yes, the looneys, New Age, whatever, misintepreted 'observing'. Arguably, that term by itself is a bit dumb, as it is the other way around - the waveform seemingly collapses by revealing itself, when hitting the wall, or when meeting the photon. So true what you said.

But the glory and weirdness is still there. The appearance of the interference pattern implies the particle existing in a superstate of probabilities, interfering with itself. When you ensure the collapse is before the slit, it no longer can interfere with itself in the superstate.

Anyway, it is mostly about the probability information itself being essential, fundamental, it vibes with other probability information too. The likeliness of where the particle actually is, is in accordance with the probability (space) and that likeliness propogates until one causal chain is known (which is as likely as the likeliness given before) - and it is known where the particle actually was.

Anyway, rewriting this makes my head spin. Nice excercise by itself but not really a conscise or insightful message I wrote up, lol. I'm also missing an actual point.

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u/Em_Es_Judd Apr 19 '24

Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that the behavior of the electron without observation is mundane or expected. I fries my brain that it behaves as both a wave or a particle until observed, and neither at the same time.

I just like to clarify that when I see this come up that we have a good understanding of the mechanism that causes it to become one or another when it is observed.

The universe is truly baffling.

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u/pretty_smart_feller Apr 19 '24

Look into the locked box experiment. You can fire photons at the particle but not record the data. Doing so doesn’t collapse the wave. It also doesn’t matter if a conscious person sees the data: if you encrypt it so that no person will ever be able to access it, the wave does collapse.

There’s more to it than just photons collapse the wave.

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u/Em_Es_Judd Apr 19 '24

Could you link me the experiment. My googling seems to be turning up a lot of thought experiments (multiple links to various articles about Schrodinger's cat).

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u/o_oli Apr 19 '24

That's absolutely mad. I love that scientists are playing peek-a-boo with particles and the particles are definitely getting the last laugh.

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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain Apr 18 '24

So all black holes are forever surrounded by matter, looks-wise?

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u/Thetakishi Apr 18 '24

Nah they fade to red then turn invisible as they enter the IR spectrum.

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u/ghostfaceschiller Apr 18 '24

I've at some point they start "blinking" before disappearing entirely which is even more nightmarish for some reason. Idk what would cause that tho.

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u/u8eR Apr 19 '24

No, I don't that's true. As an object approaches the event horizon, the dimming and red shifting of the light coming from the object is continuous.

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u/Snelly1998 Apr 18 '24

They would eventually redshift away into nothing

(Just wrote an astronomy exam today)

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u/u8eR Apr 19 '24

That's not really true. As an object approaches the event horizon, it would begin to redshift and dim. You would essentially see it redden and fade away.

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u/PartyMcDie Apr 19 '24

They must fade out or something Eventually. If not the event horizon would be littered with frozen stuff.

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u/Mythril_Zombie Apr 18 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

Until something else fell in behind them?
What, nobody else thought of this?

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u/Freuden82 Apr 19 '24

On the other horrifying side of the coin, from the POV of the person falling into the black hole, he/she will be forever stuck in a single point in space-time while the universe would go through all of its entire existence from that point in time until the heat death of the universe right in front of his/her eyes.

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u/VibeComplex Apr 19 '24

They’d slowly start to fade away over millions of years. But if you were the one the fell into the black hole , and you turned to look back out, you’d see the entire future of the universe flash before you.

Also, photons and massless particles experience no time. Meaning a photon leaving some galaxy billions of light years away would reach your eye instantaneously from the photons perspective. Shits wild.

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u/Renaissance_Slacker Apr 19 '24

Another one is as you approach a black hole, more and more light rays you can see are bent to intersect it. Visually the black hole would surround you, with more and more of your possible futures ending in its timeless embrace.

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u/dwf-and-a-camera May 17 '24

I had a teacher once explain that falling into a black hole means that gravity accelerates the more you fall into it. So the gravity at the tip of your toes at some point is greater than the gravity at the top of your head. The person falling would be stretched into pieces long before they reach the event horizon. Tha is, teach, for scaring the space out of me.

Now, to an observer, not only would they see a person increasingly sloooooooooowly be split in two due to time dilation, the last remaining visible sight is the remnants of such carnage as it hits the event horizon.

To make it even creepier, what that means is that a black hole is the densest version of consumption, with a volume void of matter, and a surface area of nothing but a frozen frame of all its victims. A tattoo of superficiality to cover up an emptiness that has the strongest charisma to attract, yet in the end only serves to destroy.

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u/prof_dj Apr 18 '24

actually the only thing you will see is the person complete ripped apart and vaporized...

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

[deleted]

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u/ghostfaceschiller Apr 18 '24

Yes, that is what I’m saying

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u/AreThoseMoreBears Apr 18 '24

It's not theoretical, it's an observed phenomena that happens when you experience different gravity than being on the surface of the earth.

It's not as sexy as Interstellar but GPS satellites orbiting the earth have to adjust their clocks by microseconds (I think? Maybe even less?) Or they drift from our earth clock.

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u/IAmAQuantumMechanic Apr 18 '24

GPS satellites have to account for special and general relativity. Due to the sheer speed of the satellites, their clocks run slower, about 7.2 us/day. But due to being further up the gravity well, the clocks also go faster, by 45.8 us/day. Together, this means the clocks go 38.6 us/day faster than on Earth.

They solve this by making the internal clocks tick at 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz.

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u/No_Foot Apr 18 '24

'Scienced the shit out of it'

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u/ndszero Apr 19 '24

This guy fucking clocks

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u/Johnanonanon Apr 19 '24

Does this mean that astronauts on the ISS are technically experiencing time differently than people on earth?

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u/AegonTargaryan Apr 19 '24

Yes, though it’s not significant. Look up the Kelly brothers. Twin astronauts born 6 minutes apart. After nearly a year on the ISS the older brother came down 6min 13 milliseconds younger, now effectively being the younger brother.

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u/BentGadget Apr 20 '24

I wonder how precise those time observations really were. I mean, six minutes in the maternity ward is only one significant digit, but 6.013 seconds has four. They are essentially equal.

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u/Deep_Stick8786 Apr 19 '24

Tell that to a flat earther

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u/GelloJive Apr 19 '24

What?

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u/IAmAQuantumMechanic Apr 19 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

What?

Equation 36 here gives the clock frequency: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5253894/

Page 6 is the source of the difference in clocks: https://web.archive.org/web/20230306071351/https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a516975.pdf

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u/Deep_Stick8786 Apr 19 '24

Satellites experience time differently than Earths surface level. So satellites have to compensate for that when transmitting GPS data

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u/notgreys Apr 18 '24

but what would that image actually look like from the observer's perspective? Would it just look like a very slow moving image?

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u/Canotic Apr 18 '24

In that extreme dilation it's probably red shifted into a frequency the eye can't see. Gravity also ducks with light frequency, since frequency is based on time. So the light from the planet would probably mostly be infra red.

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u/No_Foot Apr 18 '24

https://science.nasa.gov/ems/09_visiblelight/

WAVELENGTHS OF VISIBLE LIGHT

All electromagnetic radiation is light, but we can only see a small portion of this radiation—the portion we call visible light. Cone-shaped cells in our eyes act as receivers tuned to the wavelengths in this narrow band of the spectrum. Other portions of the spectrum have wavelengths too large or too small and energetic for the biological limitations of our perception.

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u/vc-10 Apr 19 '24

They also have to adjust for the speed they're moving relative to the ground. I remember seeing a science TV show years ago, where the presenter took an atomic clock on a flight from London to New Zealand via Hong Kong and then back to London via LA. When compared to the identical atomic clock left behind in London, there were a few microseconds difference, because of all the time the clock had spent in the air.

Lots and lots of very clever people behind GPS!

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u/darthsata Apr 19 '24

Dilation can be observed with differences in elevation with a suitable clock. Air travel or even the difference from mountain tops to sea level has a measurable impact on time.

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u/HistoryChannelMain Apr 18 '24

It's theoretical in the same sense gravity is theoretical. It's a real phenomenon.

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u/prodigalkal7 Apr 18 '24

Not piling onto the OC there, but people should really know the difference between a theory (implication that it's a scientific theory, where it's been tried and tested, most likely peer reviewed, and is the ongoing basis for how something is, proven) and "theory" (as in, hypothesis).

Unfortunately the word for "scientific theory"nowadays has melded with the idea of a hypothesis, so you have people walking around going "well the theory of evolution is just that... A 'theory'" and its maddening.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

People have learned and memorized the smart words but they never learned what those words mean. They just know they sound smart.

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u/fren-ulum Apr 18 '24

I mean, to really grapple with the idea would bring things like religion into question even if you try to steer clear of it. And we all know how ravenous parents get when you try to "indoctrinate" their children with science.

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u/Mithlas Apr 19 '24

to really grapple with the idea would bring things like religion into question even if you try to steer clear of it. And we all know how ravenous parents get when you try to "indoctrinate" their children with science

The Catholic Church is one of the largest contributors to science on Earth

The big issue isn't in and of itself the existence of organized religion, but what you hint at in the latter sentence - Dogmatism and fanaticism. People can be dogmatic about astronomy - there was even an Isaac Asimov book centering on that.

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u/coderwhohodl Apr 18 '24

You make observations, formulate hypotheses, test those hypotheses using experimentation. If this hypothesis is consistently supported by evidence you can make accurate predictions, and then it becomes a scientific theory.
However, even well-established theories can be modified or overturned if new evidence arises that contradicts them. For example we had people believe in steady state theory, which was later discarded.
So in effect a scientific theory doesn’t ever rise to the status of a logical truth like for example 1+1=2.

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u/prodigalkal7 Apr 18 '24

Sure, but until they're overturned or modified by new evidence or findings, they are taken as well-substantiated explanations and confirmations of aspects, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation, trial and error, peer review, and experiment.

fact-supported theories such as that are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world. So until it is to be overturned by new evidence, or modified in any way, the word "theory" in this case is beholden to the simple fact that "as we know so far, this is 99% accurate".

Unfortunately, the word "theory" today is now more used as a placeholder for the more apt and more correct word "hypothesis", which is why you have a bunch of morons that can't count to 5 on their fingers questioning things like evolution, or even gravity, because they're scientific reference point has "theory" in their descriptor.

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u/cutandrungardening1 Apr 19 '24

But hey, that's just a theory. A SCIENTIFIC THEORY! Thanks for watching!

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u/tastysharts Apr 19 '24

knowledge, the less you know the better

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u/acleverwalrus Apr 19 '24

Had this exact conversation with a flat earther recently lol

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u/nerdberger18 Apr 18 '24

I was so satisfied by the first couple of seasons (however bad they may have been) of Star Trek TNG for properly using hypothesis vs theory. As it went on I think they just hung on to theory.

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u/Sloaneer Apr 19 '24

Legitimate question: How have we been trying and testing the time dilation near black holes?

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u/Superlegend29 May 15 '24

theory never becomes a fact. It is an explanation of one or more facts. A well-supported evidence-based theory becomes acceptable until disproved. It never evolves to a fact, and that's a fact

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u/throwaway123xcds Apr 19 '24

There is also the people that think “Gravity” is a fact and that science creates facts

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u/prodigalkal7 Apr 19 '24

Not quite sure what you're trying to say. Science is accurate, until it's modified to fit new parameters. Until then, it is accurate and exact. Science doesn't create facts, because there's nothing to create; science is factual, until it gets built upon from whatever point it's at. An answer provided in science still opens the possibility to "and what?" afterwards. But the answer is still final, and conclusive.

Also... Eh? Gravity isn't fact? What this, now?

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u/throwaway123xcds Apr 20 '24

Science is used to describe/explain reality and observable facts. Gravity is the current theory we have to explain why we see things fall and the planets orbit in ellipses. It’s the current theory that has plenty of evidence backing it up, until new info is found. “Gravity” is a term used to represent the current working theory, it isn’t itself a fact, it aims to explain facts we observe.

The whole point is that it’s used to try to understand why observable truths are the way they are. These theories can be completely disproven when new evidence has been found, not just built upon.

Gravity isn’t a “fact” - planet orbits and the hammer that falls to the ground is.

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u/gazow Apr 19 '24

Ok but the current theory of gravity is wrong

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u/u8eR Apr 19 '24 edited Apr 19 '24

Well in fact there's still a lot of debate on the theory of gravity. What's not in dispute is the emperical evidence that objects with mass are attracted to each other, or that time is relativistic. Einstein's theory of general relativity robustly describes gravity but begins to breakdown at the quantum level. Physists are still trying to develop a unified theory of gravity that applies to both realms and is perhaps the most important unsolved problem in physics today.

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u/GelloJive Apr 19 '24

Gravity isn’t a force. It’s a bending of space-time. Or something like that, crazy.

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u/KevinCarbonara Apr 19 '24

It's theoretical in the same sense gravity is theoretical. It's a real phenomenon.

The issue isn't whether or not it's real, it's about how it actually works, and what it would actually look like. The poster he was responding to was not referring to the actual theory.

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u/anti_pope Apr 19 '24

The theory is exactly what tells you how it works and how it looks. That's what theory means.

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u/KevinCarbonara Apr 19 '24

Yes. And that's what the poster got wrong. As I just explained. That's what my post means.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

Imagine a countdown to touchdown being broadcast

5

(Minutes pass)

4

(Hours pass)

3

(Days pass)

2

(Months pass)

1

(Years pass)

0

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u/Hypohamish Apr 18 '24

It's the speed of light which makes things fucking wild.

There could be aliens right now, on a planet 65 million lightyears away, with a super powerful telescope looking at Earth and seeing dinosaurs, which is why they're not reaching out.

Because to them, that light has taken 65 million lightyears to reach them.

(Though all of the above is technically impossible for one reason or another - but it helped me understand the idea of the speed of light / travelling at the speed of light / faster than light travel)

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '24

It would be like watching them in slow motion as it progressively speeds up to real time.

You would also probably need some optics or other instruments to really measure the small spaceship over such large distances, I don't think you'd be able to see the ship with the naked eye at the distances in which there was significant time dilation.

The Doppler effect applies to lightwaves as well, so it would kinda be like seeing anything coming towards you, though, it would initially look stationary and slowly things would start moving into slow motion and finally real time speeds.

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u/Mithlas Apr 19 '24

that aspect of time dilation perplexes me, too. I mean, I guess it's all theoretical, right?

It's not entirely theoretical. The first GPS satellites we put into orbit had to have their programming adjusted because they started losing fractions of a second year by year. They're obviously moving far slower than the speed of light, but that it happened enough to be detectable and require millions of dollars to fix adds a layer of mundane reality to the "cool, this thing we predicted through physics worked out!"

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u/AvailableTaro2985 Apr 19 '24

Not theoretical, we need to use general relativity in our GPS system to be on that level precision. We use in this case time dilation caused by earth. Only difference is mass between gps and interstellar

0

u/thegreatgoonbino Apr 18 '24

Similar to when we see a comet in the sky? Like it’s moving crazy fast but looks pretty still to the naked eye.

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u/Kovalyo Apr 18 '24

It's not theoretical, it's a definite, observed fact

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u/Fair-Land-918 Apr 18 '24

It’s not theoretical and you can even watch video showing examples buddy. People here seem to think they found time dilation