The Science of Interstellar
By Kip Thorne
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014
ISBN: 9780393351378
Pages: 336
Foreword by Christopher Nolan
From acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan comes the film Interstellar, which takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system. In this book, Kip Thorne, the physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows that the movie's jaw-dropping events and stunning visuals are grounded in real science.
Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film and then moves on to the science itself. In chapters on wormholes, black holes, interstellar travel, and much more, his scientific insights – many of them triggered during the actual scripting and shooting of Interstellar – describe the physical laws that govern our universe and the truly astounding phenomena that those laws make possible.
The book is composed of seven parts with a foreword by Christopher Nolan and one additional chapter discussing the inception of Interstellar. Thorne starts by laying out introductory information about the universe, spacetime, physical laws, relativity, tidal forces, and black holes. The next section covers the supermassive black hole Gargantua, explaining its appearance and how it was created via CGI, as well as gravitational slingshots and a scientifically inaccurate statement by a character in the film. Thorne then shifts to Earth, discussing the crop-destroying blight, development of interstellar travel technologies, and another scientifically inaccurate statement in the film. The next part discusses the wormhole, explaining the basics of how wormholes work, how Interstellar's wormhole was rendered via CGI, and a method by which the wormhole could have been discovered in the film's universe via the detection of gravitational waves. Thorne then explores the development of planets orbiting a supermassive black hole and how the planets depicted in the film could form in real life. The next section discusses some of the more advanced and extreme physics depicted in the film, including large extra dimensions, warping the gravitational constant, and the different types of singularities inside a black hole, including the BKL, mass-inflation, and shock singularities. The final part discusses the climax of the film, including Cooper's plunge into the black hole Gargantua, the tesseract scene and four-dimensional space, and getting colonies of people off of the Earth.
This is Thorne's second full-size book for non-scientists after Black Holes and Time Warps (1994). The book includes bibliographical references (pages 305-309) and indexes.