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Reaching even the nearest ones would take decades at speeds we humans have no idea how to attain. A former astronaut (McConaughey) gets recruited for one last flight, a desperate attempt to reach other star systems where humans can once again thrive.Īnd therein lies a problem. The story the filmmakers came up with is set in a dystopian near future when crops have failed and humanity is on the verge of extinction.

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“But the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is embedded in the fabric from the beginning-and it's great science-that was preserved.”Ĭhristopher Nolan and Kip Thorne give WIRED an exclusive look at the creation of Interstellar‘s black hole. “The story is now essentially all Chris and Jonah's,” Thorne says. Over the course of a couple months in early 2013, Thorne and Nolan delved into what the physicist calls “the warped side of the universe”-curved spacetime, holes in the fabric of reality, how gravity bends light. And while Chris Nolan was rewriting his brother's script, he wanted to get a handle on the science at the heart of his story. Eventually Spielberg dropped out Jonathan's brother Chris-known for directing mind-bendy movies like Memento and Inception (plus Batman) dropped in. Just before his retirement, Thorne and film producer Lynda Obst, whom he'd known since Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date three decades earlier, were playing around with an idea for a movie that would involve the mysterious properties of black holes and wormholes.īefore long, Steven Spielberg signed on to direct screenwriter Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan wrote a script. Sure, he's a famous theorist, but even before his retirement from Caltech in 2009 he was deeply interested in explaining the heady ideas of relativity to the general public. Thorne Isn't your average astrophysicist. Black holes, even fictional ones, can warp perception. Nolan, the consummate image maker, sees beauty. And alongside a small galaxy of Hollywood stars-Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Casey Affleck, John Lithgow-the simulation plays a central role in Interstellar, the prestige space travel epic directed by Christopher Nolan opening November 7. It's the product of a year of work by 30 people and thousands of computers. What does Thorne see in there? He's an astrophysicist his math guided the creation of this mesmerizing visual effect, the most accurate simulation ever of what a black hole would look like. Relatively speaking, time would seem to be going faster for me. And it gets weirder: If you were closer to a black hole than I was, our perceptions of space and time would diverge. Objects like stars and black holes do this so powerfully that they actually bend light and pull space and time with it. Einstein explained this: The more massive something is, the more gravity it produces. For example, their gravity is so strong that they bend the fabric of the universe. A glowing ring orbiting the spheroidal maelstrom seems to curve over the top and below the bottom simultaneously.Īll this is only natural, because weird things happen near black holes.

(That's gravity for you relativity is superweird.) In theory it was once a star, but instead of fading or exploding, it collapsed like a failed soufflé into a tiny point of inescapable singularity. It appears to spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the universe along with it. That's what it would do.” ¶ This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy.

Kip Thorne looks into the black hole he helped create and thinks, “Why, of course.

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