Much of the discussion around Interstellar and the science it contains surrounds space-travel via wormhole, and the relativity effects of black-holes on time. Time and Space. This discussion is, to be sure, a fascinating one (so much so that it’s the topic of this week’s podcast). Those of us who love science-fiction often carry a love of science and technology, too, and diving into the science-real or fictional-provides sci-fi with much of its unique cinematic value.
Editor’s note: below the image are spoilers for Interstellar.
Like most films by Christopher Nolan, Interstellar is a lot of movie. Some of that movie is rather silly (Love is quantifiable? Let love alone from your science-babble), but some of that movie is profoundly complicated, and worth giving some of our own precious time to unravel.
Time and space in Interstellar is one such endeavor.
Interstellar takes audiences from a dying Earth, through a wormhole just beyond Saturn, to distant alien planets orbiting a supermassive black-hole, and even beyond time and space itself, into an anomaly of both that exists in the bedroom of a child. If Interstellar is about time and its passage, it is also about movement through space. And how these things are one and the same.
After seeing the film, I was reminded of another science-fiction classic that played with these same principles. Andrew has already written about the best analogs for Interstellar at the movies (Contact is all over Interstellar). But with apologies to Andrew, he left off one of the boldest explorations of space, time, and space-travel in the genre’s history; a film whose legacy and impact on Interstellar cannot be overstated.
Spaceballs.
If you want to understand the science of Interstellar, you have to return to experimental science of Mel Brooks.
In Interstellar, the question of human space-travel through the galaxy is undertaken with the help of a wormhole, placed in the vicinity of Saturn, that bends the curvature of space-time to allow Coop and his team to jump untold distances almost instantaneously. It is a trick of movie-magic, but one that finds it’s origin in the realities of math and physics, our keys to understanding the universe.
In Spaceballs, meanwhile, similar speeds of travel are undertaken by the massive spaceship commanded by Dark Helmet, Spaceball One. Understanding the math and the complex nature of FTL travel in space, Dark Helmet knows that Light Speed is Too Slow to accomplish his pursuit of the escaped Captain Lone Starr. As a result, Dark Helmet orders Spaceball One to skip Light Speed and Ridiculous Speed and go directly to Ludicrous Speed. As every physicist worth their weight will tell you, Ludicrous Speed opens Spaceballs, and our minds, to the tricky realities of Einstein’s Relativity.
Spaceball One goes to plaid.
Now, where have we seen that image recently?
Another? In Interstellar, Director Christopher Nolan creates a direct homage to Brooks in his tesseract vision of “gone to plaid” from Spaceballs, Coop finds himself inside a space-time anomaly at the center of the black hole, where he is able to interact with his daughter through code (both Morse and binary). In this anomaly, time as a force is bent around the force of gravity. Time now appears to pass and stand still at once, allowing Coop to pass information on to his daughter as both a child and a grown woman.
In Spaceballs, the paradox of time and the complications of general relativity is even more obvious, and yet still more profound. The passage of time in Brooksian understanding is both fluid and constant. Whether it is effects of Ludicrous Speed (current or previous uses), the force of time within Spaceball One has been altered from the passage of time experienced by the filmmakers who exist outside of time and space as perceived in Spaceball One.
This is made evident when the filming of Spaceballs the movie actually catches up to the activities taking place within the world which the film-makers hope to capture. The profound implications of this time-space anomaly are not lost on the passengers of Spaceball One, who are forced to reconcile their previous understanding of time with a new, altered reality: “Everything that happens now, is happening now.” Christopher Nolan couldn’t have said it better.
Leave a Reply