I am no movie buff. Although Interstellar has been around in theatres for quite some time now, I only watched it today…that too when someone insisted on accompanying them.
I must admit – it was a movie worth watching. May be I should watch it a 2nd time. It leaves your mind so dazed – with spectacular cinematography and time-space concepts – it is very hard to wrap your head around it. You are sure to walk out of the theatre in one of two states – in complete silence wondering about all the puzzles and questions that the movie leaves you with OR in complete silence as if just woken from a deep sleep!
Before we get into the movie itself, there are a few concepts one needs to understand (at least functionally) before one can even begin thinking about the movie to have an opinion.
The two main concepts are dimensionality of the word and time-dilation.
Dimensionality – On Earth, we live in a 3-dimensional (3D) world – represented commonly with x,y,and z – allowing us to move forward/backward, sideways, and up/down. There is a 4th dimension of time. But in our day-to-day experience it is an independent variable and we just experience it linearly without affecting it or having the option to move in time (peek into the future, glance into the past, or communicate with someone in past/future,…).
There are other higher-dimensions (Interstellar invokes 5D) where time could be yet another dimension that’s accessible. In here, in the context of interstellar, beings can use gravity to communicate with other lower-dimensional beings.
Aside – In the Indian philosophy, there are accomplished yogis who seemingly transcend space and time. Meaning, they can be ageless and appear at any point and disappear from any point (in space). They have no dependency on oxygen or food. For them it’s all energy or some form of it. They can travel back and forth in time to see the past, present, and the future.
Time-Dilation – This comes from special theory of relativity. It’s known to be experimentally verified. Essentially, moving clocks tick slower. That is, if someone’s moving (higher the speed, more pronounced the experience), they will witness slowing down of time – they will age much slower.
Wormhole – Is a tunnel like feature that provides a shortcut in space-time. It enables faster travel between galaxies.
On to the movie, this is what happens –
Human race is on brink of extinction due to some blight destroying all agricultural produce except corn. But the corn too is in danger of falling victim to the blight. Focus is on one family, the father and daughter in particular – Cooper and his daughter Murphy. Cooper is a former pilot with NASA and is currently into farming. He’s the most experienced pilot alive.
Murphy sees some ghost like activities in her room. Later she and Cooper discover it be some sort of gravitational anomaly that’s sending them some messages. The initial set of messages are – “Stay” and another message giving them coordinates to a site – which turns out to be a secret NASA center.
Who is sending these messages and why are “they” sending it to Murphy’s room – This is revealed towards the end of the movie. The messages are being sent by the Future-Cooper to the Past-Cooper & his daughter Murphy. The future humans have evolved to live in 5D and are helping Cooper to reach out to humanity to help them escape the inhospitable environment of the earth.
Aside – Here the linearity of time is lost and time itself is a variable (in a circular sort of way). In the beginning of the movie they bring in some Indian connection – through a solar UAV. I am not sure if that was meant to invoke some aspects of the Indian philosophy and metaphysics into the whole scheme.
These communications are accomplished in either Morse code or Binary. Using gravity as a tool, future-Cooper send the signals by some arrangement of books and coded alignment of sand-dust (from a storm). This is encoded by past-Cooper and Murphy.
Some question that can arise here –
Q1) Why send signals in a code? If you have the ability to use gravity to send across notes, write the entire god-damn thing down – move the chalk on the board in the required pattern, put everything down in the dust of the sand-storm,…..why use morse or binary code?
Q2) Why is the first message to “STAY” and the next message for the NASA coordinates?
– A possible explanation is that Future-Cooper takes moment (in his time-dilated frame of reference) to understand everything. At first he is confused and thinks there’s nothing better than Earth. When he learns (through TARS – an ‘intelligent’ robot) about future-humans and 5D stuff, he knows better and send out the coordinates for NASA.
Meanwhile on Earth, Cooper and Murphy set out to the coordinates and discover it to be NASA where Prof. Brand (a former boss of Cooper) is working with his team to save mankind. They have two plans –
Plan A – Find another hospitable planet that will support life and migrate mankind. For this to happen there are a few key challenges –
a) He needs to find those viable planets in the first place. A team has already set out and 3 of them have been sending what appears to be positive signals.
b) Even if a planet was to be found, he’d need some way to move people from Earth – mass exodus. For this he needs to solve his equation that needs “quantum data” from a black-hole. He knows he can’t get it. But he lets everyone believe there’s hope and keeps them in ignorance.
Plan B – On the spaceship Endurance, they have fertilized human ova that can be used to re-start the human species if and when they find a suitable planet.
Cooper agrees to be a part of this project – Project Lazarus. He leads a group of 4 explorers to check out those 3 planets from which they are receiving signals. They use a wormhole for their journey. In a mixture of drama and time-dilation where 23-years of earth time has elapsed to just a few hours of Cooper’s-time, they have lost two colleagues to accidents and found two of the three planets to be inhospitable.
In order to reach the third planet, they use the gravity of the black-hole Gargantua to slingshot themselves and Cooper sacrifices himself and TARS into the black hole for a two-fold purpose –
1) To reduced the weight on Endurance to help it escape the gravity of Gargantua and travel to the third hopeful planet.
2) To gather “quantum data” on the black hole – with the help of TARS – and transmit it back to Murphy who is now a scientist at the NASA center and working to completely solve the equation that Prof. Brand could not complete before dying.
During his descent into the black hole, Future-Cooper finds himself, after much initial turbulence and destruction, trapped in a 4D cube sort of thing – Tesseract. TARS and Cooper then come to the analysis that it is the future-humans helping them by building this Tesseract and placing the wormhole etc.
He then gets from TARS the Morse code for the “quantum data” of the black-hole and transmits it to his daughter Murphy who is then able to solve the equation that enables them to use gravity for mass exodus from Earth.
In the end, Cooper is released from the Tesseract (presumable with the help of future-humans) and is found by Rangers from Cooper Station that’s orbiting near Saturn. They pull him aboard and help him unite with his daughter Murphy. Murphy then sends him away to that third planet to seek out the final colleague – Dr.Brand – daughter of Prof. Brand.
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Another grouse that I have with the movie – While the concept of time-dilation is very well weaved into the entire plot and the sequence of events, there is another concept of relativity that’s grossly & conveniently overlooked – LENGTH CONTRACTION. Shouldn’t they be getting shorter?