★★★☆☆ How to see black holes and wormholes

The Science of Interstellar

Kip Thorne

This is how every explanation of science to a general audience should begin

If your struggle [to understand] is fruitless, then that’s my fault, not yours, and I apologize.

There are far, FAR too many people who thinking that being hard to understand is a sign of genius. This belief is as wrong as it gets. The sign of a real genius (and Kip S. Thorne is that) is making the most difficult ideas understandable to everyone. In a foreword, Chris Nolan (director of Interstellar) writes of Thorne

He saw his role not as science police, but as narrative collaborator—scouring scientific journals and academic papers for solutions to corners I’d written myself into. Kip has taught me the defining characteristic of science—its humility in the face of nature’s surprises.

Now, Thorne's words do hint at one limit. He mentions "your struggle". He's not promising to slip the comprehension effortlessly into your brain. If you want it, you have to work for it -- he can't entirely do that part for you. It's a fair demand. He has surely worked very, very hard, most of his life, to understand these things he's trying to explain. On top of that, he worked hard on the film and on this book.

A warning for kindle users: there are lots of pictures, most of them are in color, and you will not understand them without the color. I read the text on my kindle paperwhite, which doesn't do color, but kept a copy open on my desktop computer for the sake of the pictures. This worked pretty well for me.

I am a scientist and a mathematician. I am far from an expert on gravity, but I have studied it. Still, I learned a lot. I remember when I saw Interstellar, many of my friends complained that the film presents an unrealistic picture of what happens when one falls into a black hole -- that in reality your body would be shredded to atoms on encountering the singularity. I thought the same, but was willing to let it go -- it's science fiction, after all. Turns out we were all wrong. The singularities (plural -- yes, there are three) of a black hole may be more gentle than I or my friends had any idea of. Thorne doesn't tell you that it's possible to survive falling into a black hole. Indeed, he says in his opinion, it is unlikely. But that is just his opinion, not proven fact.

I do have one complaint. Too much of the book read like a HOWTO for producing images of blackholes and wormholes. Of course this was a big deal for Thorne and the Interstellar team, who worked hard to produce the extraordinary (and Oscar-winning) realistic visual effects. A lot of new and original science by Thorne and visual effects lead Paul Franklin went into this. Very cool. But honestly, I didn't really want it explained in quite so much such detail.

In summary, The Science of Interstellar is a great work of science explanation, and is also interesting for showing how a scientifically realistic science fiction movie got made.

Amazon review

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