This is my physicist’s interpretation of Brand’s words. And Chris interprets them similarly.
Touching Brand Across the Fifth Dimension
In Interstellar, with the quantum data safely in Murph’s hands, Cooper’s mission is finished. The tesseract, carrying him through the bulk, begins to close.
As it is closing, he sees the wormhole. And within the wormhole, he sees the Endurance on its maiden voyage to Gargantua. As he sweeps past the Endurance, he reaches out and gravitationally touches Brand across the fifth dimension. She thinks she has been touched by a bulk being. She has… by a being riding through the bulk in a rapidly closing tesseract. By an exhausted, older Cooper.
31
Lifting Colonies off Earth
Early in Interstellar, when Cooper first visits the NASA facility, he is shown a giant, cylindrical enclosure being constructed to carry thousands of humans into space and house them for many generations: a space colony. And he’s told there are others being constructed elsewhere.
“How does it get off Earth?” Cooper asks the Professor. “Those first gravitational anomalies changed everything,” the Professor replies. “Suddenly we knew that harnessing gravity was real. So I started working on the theory—and we started building this station.”
At the end of Interstellar we see everyday life back on even keel, inside the colony, floating in space (Figure 31.1).
How did it get lifted into space? The key, of course, was the quantum data (in my scientist’s interpretation, the quantum gravity laws) that TARS extracted from Gargantua’s singularity (Chapters 26 and 28) and Cooper transmitted to Murph (Chapter 30).
In my interpretation, by discarding quantum fluctuations from those laws (Chapter 26), Murph learned the nonquantum laws that govern gravitational anomalies. And from those laws, she figured out how to control the anomalies.
As a physicist, I’m eager to know the details. Was Professor Brand on the right track in the equations that covered his blackboards? (Chapter 25 and this book’s page at Interstellar.withgoogle.com.) Did he really have half the answer, as Murph asserted before getting the quantum data? Or was he way off? Is the secret to anomalies and controlling gravity something completely different?
Perhaps a sequel to Interstellar will tell us. Christopher Nolan is a master of sequels; just watch his Batman trilogy.
But one thing seems clear. Murph must have figured out how to reduce Newton’s gravitational constant G inside the Earth. Recall (Chapter 25) that the Earth’s gravitational pull is given by Newton’s inverse square law: g = Gm/r2, where r2 is the squared distance from the Earth’s center, m is the mass of the Earth, and G is Newton’s gravitational constant. Cut Newton’s G in half and you reduce the Earth’s gravity by two. Cut G by a thousand and you reduce the Earth’s gravity by a thousand.
In my interpretation, with Newton’s G reduced inside the Earth to, say, a thousandth its normal value for, say, an hour, rocket engines could lift the enormous colonies into space.
As a byproduct, in my interpretation the Earth’s core—no longer compressed by the enormous weight of the planet above—must have sprung outward, pushing the Earth’s surface upward. Gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis must have followed, wreaking havoc on Earth as the colonies soared into space, a terrible price for the Earth to pay on top of its blight-driven catastrophe. When Newton’s G was restored to normal strength, the Earth must have shrunk back to its normal size, wreaking more earthquake and tsunami havoc.
But humanity was saved. And Cooper and ninety-four-year-old Murph were reunited. Then Cooper set out in search of Amelia Brand in the far reaches of the universe.
Some Parting Thoughts
Every time I watch Interstellar and browse back through this book, I’m amazed at the enormous variety of science they contain. And the richness and beauty of that science.
More than anything, I’m moved by Interstellar’s underlying, optimistic message: We live in a universe governed by physical laws. By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes.
But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important.
I hope this book contributes to that understanding.
WHERE CAN YOU LEARN MORE?
For readers interested in the culture of Hollywood and the shifting sands of moviemaking, I highly recommend two books by my partner, Lynda Obst: Hello, He Lied: & Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches (Obst 1996) and Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business (Obst 2013).
For an overview of our entire universe with lots of great pictures, and with connections to what you can see in the night sky with your naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes, see Universe: The Definitive Visual Guide (Rees 2005). Many good books have been written about what happened in our universe’s earliest moments, its big-bang origin, and how the big bang may have gotten started. I particularly like The Inflationary Universe (Guth 1997); Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (Singh 2004); Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (Vilenkin 2006); The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (Barrow 2011); and Chapters 3, 14, and 16 of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time (Carroll 2011). For current research on the big bang, see the blog by Sean Carroll, Preposterous Universe (Carroll 2014) at http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/.
Richard Feynman, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century, gave a series of lectures for the general public in 1964 that delved deeply into the nature of the laws that control our universe. He wrote up his lectures in one of my favorite books of all time, The Character of Physical Law (Feynman 1965). For a more detailed, more up-to-date, and much longer book on the same topic, see The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (Greene 2004). Easier going, perhaps more fun, and equally deep is The Grand Design (Hawking and Mlodinow 2010).