Interstellar: Can Coop Escape Gargantua?


For me, Interstellar was a little confusing. It's three hours of weird discoveries, space exploration, time dilation, heartbreak, and tense moments. It was a lot to take in and process since the ideas and concepts it dealt with were pretty complex, but overall it was a good movie. Towards the end of the movie, Cooper and TARS, the robot, dive headfirst into the black hole Gargantua. For what reason? I'm not exactly sure. After crossing the event horizon, they fall into what is called the 'tesseract', a 3-dimensional representation of space and time. This way, Cooper can communicate with his daughter through the bookshelf. After that whole heartstring-pulling interaction, he is sent back out of the wormhole for future NASA to find him. However, there is an issue with this. In a black hole, the gravitational force is so strong, not even light can escape. So for Cooper to get out of Gargantua after crossing the event horizon, his escape velocity must have exceeded the speed of light. but to our knowledge, nothing moves faster than the speed of light, or at least nothing we can create. This is unless he was never in the black hole and the "ultra-advanced beings" just transported him to the space-time cube. Either way, it doesn't fully make sense to me, but I guess that's kind of the point of the movie.

Comments

  1. Umm, the point of the assignment was to discuss some aspect of the physics on Interstellar, using the book The Science of Interstellar as your guide. There is no evidence this is what you actually did.

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