Scientist Praises the Science of Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’: “That was an incredibly accurate depiction.”

Interstellar has been consistently praised as one of Christopher Nolan’s best movies and as a movie that has not gotten the praise it deserves. A brilliant example of Nolan’s meticulous filmmaking method, Interstellar combines hard science with peak drama and is a movie that will remain a classic for all time.

And while the science of Nolan’s film has been consistently praised over the years, a new commentary on the movie was recently published by astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter, who praised the movie’s scientific accuracy in a new video.

Before we continue, here is the whole video:

In case you’re unable to watch it now, Sutter said the following:

So much good science in the black hole image. Light follows the curves, the hills and valleys of spacetime. And these curves are set by massive objects. This is one of the earliest tests of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

And black holes bend space a lot, and so what we are seeing is there’s a thing disk called an an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. But if you’re standing on one side of the black hole, light from the back end — which normally you wouldn’t see because you know, black hole in the way — there’s light that’s going up this way but then gets bent and curves right to you.

Newton’s third law is for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And this is in the fundamental basis for space travel. We push against the air to get our airplanes to go. But in space there’s no ground, there’s no air.

So we can only push against ourselves. If we throw something away from us, that propels us in the equal and opposite direction. So what I think he’s going for, old Cooper, is to get him away from that orbit, if he pushes something towards the black hole, that will nudge the spacecraft away from that orbit, and give it a safe escape.

The event horizon is the one way barrier. This is the edge of the black hole. This is the point of no return. That if you cross the event horizon, that gravity is so strong, that nothing, not even light can escape.

When Cooper first falls through the black hole, then he goes ‘oh, everything’s black.’ No, like you’re not the only thing falling into a black hole. There’s light from the entire rest of the universe that’s falling in with you.

For a supermassive black hole like this, like Gargantua in the movie, you’ve got a handful of seconds from the moment you cross the event horizon to the time you hit the singularity.

That was an incredibly accurate depiction. In fact, it is one of the most accurate depictions of the environment around a black hole ever made. I would give it a 9. Okay a point off because it is not actually dark in there. But honestly, we don’t know what actually happens inside of a black hole, so that’s fair game.

This is yet another confirmation of how important and good it is to make the science of a movie accurate, as well as how great of a director Christopher Nolan is.

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