Friday, November 7, 2014

Scientific accuracy of Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar"

Christopher Nolan's film, "Interstellar" to premier today 11/7/14, has been highly anticipated. After Matthew McConaughey's performances in True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club, many are waiting to see where he goes next. Interstellar is a science fiction adventure film, where space travelers travel through a wormhole. To ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible, the production hired the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. It was stated that because the film will be the first time significant finances will be available for the rendering of the black hole, it is one of the most realistic and accurate renderings of a black hole we ever had. The VXF department took Kip's mathematical data and formatted it into a visual representation of what a black hole would look like. Dr. Thorne worked with about 30 computer effects artists in order to simulate many of the sourced theoretical equations. "Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, and ultimately resulted in 800 terabytes of data."(wikipedia). Through this filmmaking process has gathered an opportunity for the physics community and the special effects community to learn new things about the nature of black holes. 



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