Ramirez-Ruiz, Enrico, 93
Randall, Lisa, 195–198, 200, 269, 285, 308
Reasenberg, Robert, 38
Rebca, Glen, 36, 291
Rees, Martin, 277, 279, 280, 303, 308
Reiss, Adam, 206
Reitze, David, 153
Riazuelo, Alain, 78, 79, 84, 280
Rifkin, Don, 299
Roeder, Rob C, 85, 293, 308
Roman, Thomas, 132, 283, 289, 306
Rose, Carol, 299
Rosen, Nathan, 128
Roseveare, N. T., 285
Rosswog, Stephan, 93, 306
Rubakov, Valery, 200, 285, 306
Sagan, Carl, 1, 2, 130, 246, 266
Saroff, David, 175
Schmidt, Brian, 206
Schmidt, Maarten, 88, 89
Schrödinger, Erwin, 28
Schutz, Bernard, 278, 308
Schwarz, John, 187, 188, 284
Schwarzschild, Karl, 51, 279, 288
Shapiro, Irwin, 38
Sheehan, William, 285, 305
Sherman, Eric, 300
Shostak, Seth, 282, 308
Shreve, Jeff, 299, 300
Sibiryakov, Sergei, 200, 285, 306
Simon, Mel, 105, 108
Singh, P. Simon, 277, 308
Snyder, Hartland, 51
Soloway, Keara, 302
Spielberg, Arnold, 4
Spielberg, Steven, x, 3, 4, 7, 299
Stewart, Ian, 285, 308
Sundrum, Raman, 196, 197, 269, 285
Swanson, Erika, 178, 179
Tchekhovskoy, Alexander, 281, 307
Teo, Edward, 21, 279, 308
Teukolsky, Saul, 154, 171, 172, 284, 306
Thomas, Emma, x, 7, 13, 299
Thompson, Andy, 8, 299
Thorne, Kip, vii, x, 6, 9, 47, 229, 278–280, 284, 287–289, 307, 308; see also Index of Subjects: Kip Thorne
Toomey, David, 289, 308
Vessot, Robert, 36
Vilenkin, Alex, 277, 309
Visser, Matt, 282, 309
von Tunzelmann, Eugénie, 10, 11, 85, 96–98, 140, 141, 143, 299
Waldseemuller, Martin, 28
Wasserburg, Gerald, 112
Weiss, Rainer, 151
Wheeler, John Archibald, 29, 57, 127, 129, 130, 134, 154, 224, 226, 227, 230, 287, 307, 309
Wiita, Paul, 295, 296, 307
Will, Clifford M., 36, 278, 286, 309
Winstein, Carolee, 2, 10, 300
Witten, Edward, 200, 285, 309
Yang, Huan, 171, 173, 284, 309
Yung, Yuk, 112
Yurtsever, Ulvi, 132
Zenginoglu, Anil, 309
Zhang, Fan, 309
Ziffren, Kenneth, 300
Zimmerman, Aaron, 171, 284, 309
Znajek, Roman, 91, 92
Zwicky, Fritz, 204, 205
INDEX OF SUBJECTS
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book.
You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
accretion disks around black holes, 92, 97, 98, 99
visually impressive to astronomers, 89
creation by black hole tearing apart a star, 93–94, 148–149, 280
how they work, 90–92
spin black holes up or down, 61
gravitational lensing of, 94–97, 96, 97
astrophysicists’ simulations of, 280–281
Gargantua’s disk, see Gargantua, Interstellar’s black hole
AIDS virus, 108
Andromeda galaxy, 19, 70
anomalies, see gravitational anomalies
Anti-deSitter (AdS) sandwich, 199–201, 199, 215, 219, 285; see also bulk
Anti-deSitter (AdS) warp of space, 196–201; see also bulk
Aurora Borealis, 24–25, 24
Bicep2, 156–157, 156
big-bang origin of our universe, 17–18, 29, 135, 155–157, 277
gravitational waves from, 155–157
black-hole flight simulator, Andrew Hamilton’s, 288
black holes:
introduced, 21–22
observational evidence for, 51–53
observed at the centers of galaxies, 19
observed at center of Milky Way galaxy, 51–53
observed at center of the Andromeda galaxy, 19–20, 70
number in our Milky Way galaxy, 53
how they are born, 22
properties predicted by Einstein’s relativistic laws, 51
all properties determined by mass and spin, 57
maximum possible spin rate, 59–62
made from warped spacetime, 22, 45–49
warping of space around, 45–49
slowing of time near, 35, 47–49; see also event horizon
whirl of space near, 48–50, 60–61, 77, 80–82, 91–92, 97, 149, 163–164, 175, 193, 247, 284, 295
circumference proportional to mass, 22
radius of black hole, defined, 59
appearance as seen from the bulk, 40–41, 46–49, 49
appearance as seen inside our universe—shadow and gravitational lensing, 12, 50–51, 50, 75–84, 75, 79, 81; see also Gargantua, Interstellar’s black hole; gravitational lensing by black holes
vibrations of, 170–173, 284
typical orbits around, 72, 101, 280
orbital navigation near, 71–72
zoom-whirl orbit, 121
tidal gravity of, 41–42, 44
tidal gravity tears apart stars, 148–149
environment near, is lethal, 100–102, 281
intermediate-mass black hole, see IMBH
small black hole spiraling into a large black hole, 186
collision and merger of two black holes, 151–152, 154–155, 151, 155
Schwarzschild and Kerr metrics for, 51
Paczynski-Wiita approximate description of black hole’s gravity, 296–297
some black-hole formulas, 292–293
references on, 279
see also accretion disks around black holes; critical orbit around a black hole; event horizon; Gargantua, Interstellar’s black hole; gravitational lensing by black holes; jets from black holes; singularities inside black holes
blackboards, Professor Brand’s, 14, 32, 33, 192, 201, 212–213, 220, 221, 274, 286, 295–296
Blandford-Znajek effect, 91–92
blight in crops:
nature of blight, 109–110
specialist vs. generalist, 110–111
Interstellar’s blight:
burning blighted corn, 31
possibility of occurrence, 31–32, 105–106, 109–111, 281
branes:
our universe as a brane in a higher-dimensional bulk, 32, 187–188
predicted by superstring theory, 187–188, 227
used to visualize the warping of space, 37–41
humans, and all known nongravitational particles and fields, confined to our brane, 49–50, 192–193
gravitational field lines bent parallel to our brane, see bulk, confining gravity in
confining branes, 199–201, 285
instability of confining branes: danger of brane collision and destruction of our universe, 219
see also bulk; fifth dimension; Professor Brand’s equation; tesseract
bulk:
descriptions of, 32
used to depict warping of space in our universe, 37–41, 39, 40, 46–49, 46, 47, 48, 49, 62, 128, 129, 131, 135, 139, 141, 142, 155, 186