Anybody appalled by the science errors in the movie INTERSTELLAR 6

[2dye4]

It's a good movie as things go these days. Actually if you didn't notice the science problems
you might love the movie. So I expect the lay people to like it as they should.

Here is what bothers me.

The science problems could have been mostly fixed VERY easily and still make just as interesting
script for the screen. Supposedly they had scientific consultants.

But how can you excuse or fail to rewrite a sub plot line where the crew descends to a planet surface
and returns in 3 days to find 21 years has passed on their orbiting mother ship.

And there are dozens of dozens of good points raise on the internet about the weak science.

The weak science was obvious and surely could have been fixed with minor script changes.

Well I will play my card. Is there a conspiracy to dumb down the public WRT science??

Consider that a movie like 2001 a space odyssey would never get made in todays world.
And that makes me really really sad...

 

[KENAT]

Once I too cared about such things.

thread730-179253

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[ScottyUK]

"Is there a conspiracy to dumb down the public WRT science?"

The public seem to be getting there without any need for a conspiracy.

 

[CheckerHater]

Is there a conspiracy to dumb down the public WRT science??

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert"
Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the future

 

[SomptingGuy]

I was (as always) frustrated by the lack of any realistic treatment of orbital mechanics. Maybe I should bury that one and just try to enjoy the multiverse explanations of paranormal phenomena.

Steve

 

[urgross]

I'm appalled by movie prices so I didn't see it.

 

[JNieman]

I think this is the first time I've ever actually seen a popular movie portray the nature of time being less-than-constant in space. I'd say it's a leap ahead in intellectual progress in movies.

It's a bitter, bitter person who takes a look at a movie that is miles better than its predecessors in intellectual content and complains about a couple remaining errors. I applaud the film and its achievements. It's cannot be easy to make a popular movie that profits in today's market while still making it scientifically engaging and groundbreaking. The vast, vast majority of scientific outlets I've seen speak about the movie were all quite flattering. The ones who pointed out errors or criticisms did so in good nature and without detracting from their overall praise.

Your tin foil hat needs calibration.

_________________________________________
NX8.0, Solidworks 2014, AutoCAD, Enovia V5

 

[TheTick]

They got relativity backward. The orbiting ship would experience slower time due to its speed. That is, unless the gravity on the planet was bone-crushingly high...

 

[IRstuff]

Star Trek was rife with errors. Didn't stop it from making all sorts of advances in story telling.


As for 2001, that was a Kubrick film, so comparison to ordinary directors is really not possible.

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529


Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
There is a homework forum hosted by engineering.com:

http://www.engineering.com/AskForum/aff/32.aspx

 

[TenPenny]

Some times I wonder if the movie going public understands the concept of fiction. I always assumed that engineers were above that.

Now I'm not so sure.

 

[urgross]

I can understand it quite simply-3 days with my mother-in-law seems like 21 years.

 

[MintJulep]

It's science-fiction.

If this sort of thing prevents you from enjoying a movie, then don't go see them.

 

[JNieman]

@TenPenny,

To paraphrase what is likely a completely butchered quote by Mark Twain:
'The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.'

(which, maybe he never actually said that, which would be all the more fitting)

_________________________________________
NX8.0, Solidworks 2014, AutoCAD, Enovia V5

 

[HamburgerHelper]

Isn't this a Christopher Nolan trait. He goes for the feeling of something rather than having a tight plot. Batman Begins I think is the only movie of his that felt like it had a tight plot.

 

[GTTofAK]

They might have exaggerated the time dilation for story telling but there would be time dilation given the black hole.

 

[beej67]

They got relativity backward. The orbiting ship would experience slower time due to its speed. That is, unless the gravity on the planet was bone-crushingly high...

Sure if the ship was orbiting the planet, but it wasn't. The ship and the planet were both orbiting the black hole. The planet was closer to the black hole, and it was that proximity to the supermassive object that caused the difference. I doubt Nolan did the Lorentz Transform to prove it, and I honestly question whether many in here could do it. And if you did, you'd discover one of the greatest discontinuities in special relativity - that the relative time approaches an asymptote at the event horizon when you're falling in, so you never quite get there. Or rather, the clocks out in orbit reach infinity before your clock ticks again. He couldn't have fallen into the black hole at all, if Einstein was correct.

If you're looking for silliness in the movie, you don't have to dig very deep. The very idea that some famous scientist stranded on an alien planet doesn't know how airlocks work should be enough to plant your tongue firmly in your cheek. Or solid methane crystals that aren't subject to gravity for some reason. Not to mention how the entire plot hinged around the (quite famous) Bootstrap Paradox. In the end, as with all movies, you have to suspend disbelief. I did so, and I rather liked it. If nothing else, for their depictions of the accretion disk.

For what it's worth, Christopher Nolan screws up time in just about every movie he does. In the last Batman movie, basically no time elapses in the outside world while Batman rehabs a broken spine for a month or two. Memento was told completely backwards in time. Inception played very loose with time.



Hydrology, Drainage Analysis, Flood Studies, and Complex Stormwater Litigation for Atlanta and the South East -

http://www.campbellcivil.com

 

[IRstuff]

I think that while time could do that near a black hole, to get a 2557x ratio, the gravity differential would really gigantic. The GPS satellites, as a point of reference, are faster by 45 microsecond/day

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529


Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
There is a homework forum hosted by engineering.com:

http://www.engineering.com/AskForum/aff/32.aspx

 

[marty007]

This reminds me of an inter-discipline event that my university put on each year for E-week (Engineering Week). They would sit us all down in the theater for a science-fiction movie and each department was challenged to pick out how many engineering/science errors were made in the film. One year we watched The Core (where they drilled into the earth and let off a few nukes to re-start the inner flow of the earths magma). It was entertaining to say the least, every department was into the hundreds of impossibilities... Good times.

 

[KENAT]

Well, the first error to be pointed out should probably always be the improbably high average level of attractiveness of the cast.

However, that goes for almost any genre of film except ones about their own industry or modelling etc.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[GTTofAK]

The very idea that some famous scientist stranded on an alien planet doesn't know how airlocks work should be enough to plant your tongue firmly in your cheek.

Its not an error at all. The entire movie is a criticism of much of modern science and alarmist movements.

"“We’re sort of in this moment in which humans are obsessed that we’ll prove our own undoing—that we’ll poison the planet, we’ll destroy ourselves, and all these things,” Jonathan says early on in an interview that accompanies the screenplay. “But I thought it would be more interesting to find a slightly less personal Armageddon, or the idea that the universe obliterates you or the planet turns itself toxic because it doesn’t care about you and me because we’re an accident in outer space.” (Emphasis mine.) Later on, he drives this point home: “That’s the fascinating question of why is it that humans are so obsessed with not just the idea of their own Armageddon, but their own culpability.”

As Christopher notes later on in the interview, man’s obsession with his own self-destruction is, at least in part, a function of ego. “Every generation believes they’re the last generation on Earth. Maybe one generation will eventually be right. I certainly hope it’s not ours,” he says. Interstellar rejects that idea. “It’s about the way in which human beings adapt and transcend natural movements—apocalyptic type movements.”

Dr. Mann is a famous scientist but that does not mean he is a good scientists. Manny famous scientists are only famous because they are media personalities. Dr. Mann is a typical post normal scientists. He is willing to lie, cheat, and in this case kill to keep from living his life in obscurity.

"Dr. Mann: No. I tried to do my duty, Cooper. But I knew, the day that I arrived here, this place had nothing and I resisted the temptation for years. But I knew that if I just pressed that button, then somebody would come and save me."

Dr. Mann dies doing something so stupid to show that just because a scientist is famous in this media age doesn't mean he is a particularity good or relatively smart scientist.