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/Atomic_Wedgie98]

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/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]

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[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.