Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

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Murphy’s law

Anything that has to go wrong, will go wrong.

Plan B (Restart human civilisation with fertilised eggs) was always the real plan. Plan A was just a facade to get people to attempt this mission in order to save mankind. Prof. Brand lied to everyone. But Murphy Cooper fixes things later.

In the end Dr. Brand finds the only inhabitable place out of the 3 planets. This was Edmund’s planet. The person whom brand loved. And the reason why she said she would rather go to Edmund’s planet even though the data on Mann’s planet was more promising at that moment. She believed in her love and it won in the end. Mann on the other hand fabricated false data to get someone to help him escape.

In the movie ‘Love’ becomes the 5th dimension. Love is what humans add to the universe. ^2edcac

What does the poem ‘Do not go gentle into that goodnight’ really convey?

The poem in some sense originally conveys the fight against death. But in Interstellar we can repurpose it as a fight against time. Against our cosmos being driven towards nothingness by entropy. The true antagonist of the film.

Dialogues

Dr. Brand: The only thing that can move across dimensions, like time, is gravity. to/check

Dr. Brand: Love isn’t something that we invented. It’s observable, powerful. It has to mean something.

Coop: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing…

Dr. Brand: We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that?

Coop: None.

Dr. Brand: Maybe it means something more, something we can’t yet understand. Maybe its some evidence, some artefact of higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know, have probably died. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.

Dr. Mann: Don’t judge me, Cooper. You were never tested like I was. Few men have been. The survival instinct. That’s what drove me. It’s what drives all of us. And it’s what’s gonna save us.

Dr. Mann: We can care deeply, selflessly about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight

One of the finest definition of Newton’s third law:

The only way humans have ever figured out getting somewhere, is to leave something behind

Coop: I don’t care much for this pretending were back where we started. I want to know where we are. Where we’re going.

Coop: Mankind was born on earth, it was never meant to die here.

Coop: Once you are a parent, you are the ghost of your children’s future.

Murph (Old): Nobody believed me. But I knew you’d come back

Coop: How?

Murph (Old): Because, my dad promised me.

Prof. Brand: The last people to starve will be the first to suffocate. And your daughter’s generation will be the last to survive on Earth.

Prof.Brand: We must reach far beyond our own lifespans. We must think not as individuals, but as species.

Prof.Brand: I’n not afraid of death. I’m an old physicist. I’m afraid of time.

Research

According to Einstein’s Special theory of relativity published in 1905: The greater the acceleration of an object, the slower that it will move through time.

He developed the General theory of relativity in 1915 which said: The greater the gravitational force you experience, the slower it will move through time.

Neil deGrasse Tyson says:

We live in a four dimensional world. Its a common mis conception that we live in a three dimensional space but if you think about it — Let’s say, you decide to meet Rhea. You’d always tell her the coordinates/location on the map which is 2D, then add on the information of which floor of the building which adds the third dimension. And then tell her what time will you be meeting her. As much as you guys have to meet at the correct place, its important that you meet at the correct time. You’d never lock an appointment by just telling the location or just telling the time you’ll meet. (Of course some times its understood intuitively but that doesn’t mean the same as the absence of that information). But the only problem is — That we can access all points in our 3 dimensional world (Like jumping to move up/down, walking left, right but we are prisoners to the 4th dimension of time. I can only be in the present. Forever transitioning from the past into the future)

In the movie ‘Love’ becomes the 5th dimension. Love is what humans add to the universe.

If your whole timeline is laid out in front of you, what does it even mean to go in any point in time to relive it and change something?

Philosophy

The stories of those who went on some kind of journey. Coming home for them is rarely so much about the spatial element as it is about the passing of time. It is the realization that life has moved on in your absence, it is knowing that no matter how you move within the spatial dimensions, you cannot escape time. All of us experience this to some extent when we reconnect with old friends or family members, when we revisit places where we might have lived years ago or when we get back from a long trip. We find out that things have changed or perhaps even that, we have changed. That we are no longer in touch with that which once felt familiar. Again not because of changes in space but because of this passing of time that forever dooms us to experience fundamental loss. Whether this loss is as significant and traumatizing as missing out on the lives of your loved ones or as insignificant as missing out on a moment of a movie after going to the bathroom. All of us inescapably suffer under arrow of time. In Interstellar, this harsh reality of time is taken to the extreme by enlarging it through the science of gravitational time dilation. Yet it still shows us something essential about the way in which we experience time in our own lives. lives?

Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later do they become memorable by the scars they leave.

Our lives are a strange journey through time - Aaron Stewart-Ahn

Related

- Kinematic time dilation. [YouTube]

- Doppler beaming effect.

- MC Escher - Dutch graphic artist with surrealistic illustration style like the 3D time space shown in Interstellar

- This movie tells us to think about the future. That its our kid’s kids or something like that. People who are not very concerned about the future generation are the ones who doesn’t really take actions to solve all these climate problems etc.. An opposite school of thought here will be to think of how we are also asked to live in the present, unconcerned with the future. In the movie, Dr. Mann was shown as someone who didn’t think of the far future but mostly was concerned or fell for his emotional weakness to call for help by means of lie, to save himself now but endanger the future of mankind.

- French film made with photographs: La Jettée, by Chris Marker (Inspiration for Interstellar)

Resources

- Book: The science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne. Suggested by Neil deGrasse Tyson

- [Transcending Time | Interstellar's Hidden Meaning Behind Love and Time]

- The Go-Between by L.P Hartley (Christopher Nolan really appreciated the opening of this novel)

- Selected poems from T.S. Eliot has interesting references to the concept of time.

- Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. It’s a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military.