Interstellar – A journey into the miracles in store for the stellar traveller

Yes, you guessed it right. This is my take on the movie Interstellar.

By some quirk of fate all of the family was at home mid-week today. And we spontaneously made this plan of watching this highly rated movie on the big screen. We thought Rachna doesn’t dig sci-fi and Gautam doesn’t understand such hi-fi movies, anyway. So it might be a good idea for Sid and me to go for it. But the rest of them protested and they were promptly included into our plans. And, boy, did we all come home satisfied! It’s one of those movies which we come out of with more questions than answers 🙂 Each one of us had numerous questions and the others would chip in with their understanding and then promptly they ask their own question 🙂

Until now we had movies where the movies were entirely science fiction like Star Wars and Star Trek or movies like Gravity which borders on sci-fi and reality but doesn’t scratch profound theories of interstellar physics like worm-holes, time dilation or black holes. I am amazed at how my 12 year son, Sid, has a grasp of such profound theories of interstellar physics. He has nothing to learn from my knowledge of black holes or concept of time in universe. More on him later 🙂

Here are some things that bamboozled me about the movie(spoiler alert, if you haven’t watched it already);
1. Cooper sees gravitational anomalies at his home due to which they find the co-ordinates of the super-secret NASA center. Which in-turn eventually triggers his selection to captain the space flight to discover new habitable planets. Which in-turn leads him to get stuck in a black hole where he is able to see his young daughter and communicate with her in morse code. Which in turn leads to the co-ordinates of the NASA center being given by Cooper. This leads you to think of this as a cyclic chain of events which don’t have a start, you see?

2. How does Cooper manage to transmit the data of singularity to the seconds hand of the watch given to Amelia? And how does it keep replaying? Does it even keep replaying? These events seem super-natural, at best. It is hard enough to communicate profound concepts of physics in pure english and think how hard it must be to convey it in morse code!

3. How does a person come out of a black hole, even if he is not crushed to a small ball? What is a tesseract? Reminded me of Thor 🙂 Black hole, afaik, is a ball of infinite mass which attracts anything closeby to its core. Not even light escapes its attraction.

4. On earth can you create conditions that would make time dilate? That is go slow with respect to the time outside the test area? Scientists have spent billions to create the particle collider at CERN to create god particle. This can be another project they must consider 😉 A person walks into the test area and spend a few minutes and walk out to find that his children have grown up 🙂 Wow!

5. And, boy, where does god fit in these scheme of things? Is he the one who creates the worm holes 🙂

6. Last, but not the least, we think we know a lot about the universe and, particularly, the solar system. It looks to me like we have hardly scratched the surface of the things yet to be discovered in the universe.

Once again we get to see a power-house performance from Mathew McConaughy. He might be in for a back to back Oscar this year! Loved the moview, as you might’ve guessed by now. Not to be missed if you are a science lover.