Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Kip Thorne and the Science of Interstellar

Episode Date: December 2, 2014

Spoiler alert. Famed physicist Kip Thorne says you might be able to survive a plunge into a black hole after all! That’s just one molecule of the fascinating science behind the science fiction film he helped create. We’ll talk about the movie and Kip’s new book, “The Science of Interstellar.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kip Thorne and the science of interstellar, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, ready to take you into the fifth dimension with eminent physicist Kip Thorne, co-originator of the movie Interstellar and the film's primary science advisor. Bruce Betts has lots of stellar goodies waiting for us in this week's What's Up? And Bill Nye is back with big hopes for a NASA test mission. Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla also has big hopes regarding a couple of robotic missions. I think you want to begin with a Japanese mission that hopefully will be getting off within days as we speak.

Hayabusa 2 is on the launch pad. Unfortunately, weather has delayed the launch that was supposed to happen this weekend. But hopefully by this time next week, we'll be talking about the successful launch of Japan's next asteroid sample return mission. What can you tell us about New Horizons that also has a milestone coming up? Yeah, that's coming up on December 6th. New Horizons wakes up. Now, it's woken up before. It periodically hibernates during its long cruise to Pluto. But this is the last wake up. From this point on, from December 6th on, New Horizons will be awake and doing science as it begins to approach Pluto for the flyby in July of 2015. And we've been in touch with Alan Stern about this, and I guess he was encouraging the Planetary

Society to do something around this event. So we're going to. We're going to have a live event. It'll be Saturday evening, December 6th, as Emily said. Watch for an announcement at planetary.org. I think we'll have some fun with this one. Speaking of having fun, just before we spoke, you pointed me toward this amazing new film called Wanderers. Tell us about this. It's a short film that imagines human exploration on just about every location in the solar system I can imagine wanting to explore. There are wingsuits on Titan, which you totally could do. If you could get human astronauts to Titan somehow, you could fly around with just little wings attached to your arms.

They did base jumping on Miranda. They had a space elevator on Mars and strange dome cities on Iapetus's mountains. I don't know why you'd want to do that, but it looks really awesome. It is. Oh, gosh, is it awesome. It is just gorgeous. It is so beautiful to watch that you almost don't notice that Carl Sagan is narrating it. Something that I hope doesn't get the maker of this, an Eric Wernquist, in trouble. Anyway, thank you for pointing me to it,

Emily. And I'm going to blog about this at your suggestion. So there will be a link to this at planetary.org. And we'll put it on the show page as well. You don't want to miss this, space fans. And you don't want to miss hearing from Emily again next week right here. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Senior editor for the Planetary Society,

planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Now we move to another inspiring guy. It's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, good to have you back after Thanksgiving break. And it's a big week for space launches. Oh, man. So Orion's going to launch this week.

And this is NASA's next capsule into space, space, space. And this is designed to go aboard the Space Launch System, which is another name for a big rocket, which is supposed to be ready by 2017. And so it's a big deal to try this test. And the Planetary Society is going to have a couple of reporters on site at Cape Canaveral to record the sights and sounds of this amazing mission. real big step, Matt, because people have complained, everybody, especially people from the United States, have complained about the United States not having humans going into space anymore, have to get a Russian rocket to go to the space station. Well, the Orion and then the Boeing CST-100 and the Dragon capsule built by SpaceX, the company that's building the Falcon 9. It's a big week. And also, Matt, this week, the Planetary Society will be on Capitol Hill petitioning the Senate

to fund missions to look for life on Mars and Europa. It's a lot going on. And I look forward to talking to you about the results of that experience in D.C. next week when we will also be featuring Jason Davis, one of those colleagues of ours who will be at the Kennedy Space Center covering the launch of Orion, assuming that it has not been scrubbed a few times and has happened by the time we get to talk to him. You go down there and you wait, I say down there, you go south to Florida and you wait for the weather. And of course, as I believe you point out, nobody wants

anything to go wrong on the first one. so they're going to be super careful. There's no people on board, everybody, no people, but we're flying the capsule to see if the systems work properly. We can do that in the modern world of today. Heck, we fly drones on the other side of the world. We can shoot a capsule into orbit and bring it back. Many things to look forward to next week, Bill. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society.

Until 2009, Kip Thorne was Caltech's Richard Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics. He has now added emeritus to that distinguished title, but he is hardly retired. His research continues, and he has also had an adventure in filmmaking. Kip served as science advisor to Christopher Nolan and the other makers of the terrific science fiction tale Interstellar. As you'll hear, his involvement with the movie goes far deeper. A recent conversation at the Planetary Society also goes much deeper than what we have time for here. We've got a link on the show page to the complete interview

covering much more of the fascinating science behind Interstellar, including wormholes that tunnel through the mysterious space outside our universe that physicists call the bulk. For all its science, Interstellar is first and foremost a story about what we are willing to do for those we love. But that's a conversation for a different show. Kip, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt.

It was such a pleasure to have you two years ago for that tribute to your old friend Carl Sagan. At least as much of a pleasure to have you back now to talk about this movie, which people have heard me say on this show, I love this film. So did I. I'm glad. And that's pretty clear as well from the book. Yeah, well, let me say about this film. I first saw an early cut in June. I knew the script inside out because I had been over it and over and over it in consultation with Christopher Nolan as he was writing the screenplay. I still found myself crying even though I knew precisely what the next bit of dialogue was going to be. My wife asked me, am I going to cry at this movie? I said,

yeah, probably. I did. I don't know if you saw him on the blog that I wrote on the Planetary Society website, but I started it with my wife's suggestion. She said, well, this movie has the wrong name. This is the movie that should have been called Gravity. I don't know. What do you think? It was taken.

Yes, the name was taken. Gravity would have been a good title as well. But I think Interstellar does give you the sense that you are going out far beyond our solar system. Well, and beyond our galaxy. I don't want to give too much away. I'm going to tell the audience up front that we are going to talk about some of the deep science in this movie, which I am even more thrilled with now that I have read a good part of the book. Now, the book only came last night, so I stayed up for four or five hours going through it last night and this morning.

As I've already told you, it is my new favorite physics book. So I couldn't be happier. And I'm thrilled. Thank you. I've got to start with this, though. You mentioned in the book, in fact, the whole first section of the book is kind of how the movie came to be. There was some question for years, I guess, whether that would actually happen. This movie was started by Linda Oaks and me. Linda and I met on a blind date that was arranged by

Carl Sagan back in 1980. We became good friends. The romance didn't go anywhere, but we became very good friends. One day back in 2006, Linda called me and said, I have an idea for a movie I'd like to talk with you about. And I had never imagined being involved in a film in any sort of a deep way. I didn't have the deep desire that Carl had where he created Contact and wrote a screenplay from the outset. This happened. It was a big surprise to me.

But Linda and I brainstormed together in 2006 about a movie in which science would be embedded from the outset, in which the venue would be the warped side of the universe, by which I mean black holes and wormholes, beings that live in a higher dimension, warping of time, warping of space, things made from or phenomena that are based on the warping of space-time.

And so that was the vision, and that's what this film is. Linda and I also had a story back in 2006, but when Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan came on board, wrote the screenplay, then made the movie, they changed the story so extensively that it's not recognizable. It is their story. It is their film. But it is Linda's and my original vision for the venue of the film

and for the manner in which the science is thoroughly embedded in the film, in the Barry films fabric. But it sounds like you have nothing but enormous respect for these filmmakers, for Christopher Nolan, his brother, but also for the effects people that you got to work with. They are fantastic. These people are as brilliant as my physicist colleagues that I've worked with during my 50-year-long career in physics. They're as brilliant as the most brilliant of my colleagues. But they're artists. They are as creative as the most creative people I've worked with in my science career.

But they're not scientists. And so they've been an enormous joy to work with. And I've developed both a great affection for them and enormous respect. Some of the science that you contributed actually came back to you with dividends. And so we'll get back to that. One other note, though, you also had some interesting experiences with some of the members of the cast. This interesting meeting with Matthew McConaughey, he really got into this. Yeah, so McConaughey emailed me about two weeks before he was supposed to start filming. He was trying to wrap his head around the character Cooper that he plays

and around the science of the film. He is one of the very best actors of this era. No argument there. And he is because of the way in which he really struggles to understand, to become the character that he is. So we met in a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills where he had holed up for a few days in preparation. He removed all the furniture from this large living room

except for a love seat and a coffee table. He had 12 by 18 sheets of paper all over the floor and on the coffee table in which he had lots of notes. And he would pick up a sheet and we would talk, pick up another sheet and we would talk. He would write down notes. But then we wandered off. Besides talking about the science of the film, besides talking about his character, we talked about life, we talked about children, we talked about where do you get inspiration,

does inspiration come in the middle of the night, how does your mind work. It was just a fascinating and wonderful conversation. There was a really nice photo of you and Michael Caine on the set of, I think it was on the set of Endurance, the spacecraft. And you said that at least to some degree he apparently based his character, Professor Brand, on you. Let me tell you about the story of that photograph. They were shooting. It was

actually in the professor's office they were shooting. And I was there. I'd written equations on 16 blackboards. And he and Jessica Chastain were filming with Chris Nolan, the first assistant director in charge of the shoot. And overseas, everything came to me early in the morning as they were after they'd been going for maybe an hour and said, Michael Caine would like to have his picture taken with you. Is that all right? My jaw dropped. And so we had our picture taken, and I found out what was going on when about an hour later

his wife came in, sat down, and I sat beside her while they were shooting. And she said, Michael called me and said, I should come over to meet you. I said, why is that? And he said, well, Christopher Nolan told Michael that his character is based on you. Michael is trying to understand how you think. He's trying to understand how a physicist thinks. And he's just fascinated by the idea of a physicist and physics. I think you came off rather well then. I did. It was really amazing, an amazing experience for me. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. We'll continue our conversation about Interstellar when Planetary Radio returns. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here. Thank you for listening to Planetary Radio.

The Planetary Society has lots more ways for you to hear the latest news and see the greatest pictures from around our solar system. I lead a growing family of expert bloggers at Planetary.org. We cover nearly every angle on space exploration. And you can find us all over online, tweeting, and posting to our popular Facebook and Google Plus pages. We're also producing great new videos for our YouTube channel. There's no doubt about it, we really are your place in space. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say

it, folks, but it really is, and hilarious. See, Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetary society. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. I so wish we had time to include my complete conversation with Kip Thorne, executive producer of Interstellar. For that, you'll need to go to this week's show page reached from planetary.org slash radio. As the film's primary science advisor, Kip spent many hours with director Christopher Nolan and others in front of and

behind the camera. As he mentioned before the break, Kip even did some physics ghostwriting for Michael Kane's character. Those blackboards, you've got to talk about those some more because they are so important to the story, particularly one of those 16 blackboards that has what I think you wrote, you called the equation? Or my equation, because it is actually Michael Caine. It's Professor Brand who has written those. Of course, I ghost wrote the blackboards. But there are 16 of them. If your listeners want to see them, all 16 are on the website for the movie Interstellar. It's interstellar.withgoogle.com.

On there, you can click on something that is Kip Thorne's book. In the film, the professor is trying to understand gravitational anomalies. Gravitational anomalies are things totally unexpected about gravity. We've seen gravitational anomalies in things totally unexpected about gravity. We've seen gravitational anomalies in the past that had a huge transformative effect on science. The perihelion shift of Mercury that could not be explained and turned out to be telling us that Newton's laws of gravity were wrong and you had to go in Einstein's direction and have curved space-time to explain gravity. Dark matter and dark energy have been discovered through gravitational anomalies. Well, in the movie, the central theme is gravitational anomalies that start happening on Earth.

And the professor is trying to understand these in order to solve the problem of the future of the human race. It's central to understand these. The movie is set in a five-dimensional universe, what physicists would call a brain world universe. Brain means membrane. Our universe has three space dimensions. It's a three-dimensional membrane in a universe that has one more space dimension and one time dimension, so five dimensions in all. This movie, with its fifth dimension, corresponds to taking general relativity,

Einstein's laws of gravity, and expanding them into one higher dimension, something that physicists have been doing for the last 20 years or so, motivated by string theory. It's in that context of a five-dimensional universe that Professor Brand is trying to understand gravity in order to save the human race. And all these equations are from that branch of theoretical physics sitting on that blackboard.

And he gets close, but somebody else has to finish it for him. I first want to say your colleague, Lisa Randall, who you mention in the book, has been on this show talking about this. So this, in fact, let me say that Lisa was my inspiration for this. It was Lisa and Raman Sundaram who realized that you can solve a deep issue in physics called the hierarchy problem. Perhaps you can solve it by assuming that our universe has one higher, large extra dimension. We are pretty sure there are a number of extra dimensions that are curled up so small that you don't see their effects. And so she was responsible for that.

And when I started working on this film, and because of her, that was the inspiration for going the direction of having a science fiction movie set in a universal one extra dimension. I worked out the mathematics that I needed in order to have that extra dimension have enough volume that Cooper could go into it and you could have human adventures in the extra dimension. And I sent her a little technical paper about this. And she responded, I got good news, and I got bad news. The good news is that this is really respectable. People who work in this field have discovered this same model for the universe and explored it. The bad news is it's highly

unstable. This universe will self-destruct. And so that's where I took off from that. So the professor, if you look at the blackboards, the professor is struggling not only to understand gravitational anomalies, but to understand why our universe doesn't self-destruct. This Cooper, central character of Coop, is given the advice by another physicist, you really ought to check out what's going on inside that black hole. And when I heard that, and I thought, and then later, he actually enters the black hole. I thought, oh, no, this is impossible. Well, you said the same thing to Carl Sagan 25 years ago, he wanted to send Elie Eroway into a black hole. And here 25 years later, you're telling Chris Nolan, oh, now send him on in.

What changed? So what changed were two things. The first thing that changed was that we understand the interiors of black holes. Theoretically, we haven't done experiments. We understand them theoretically much better than we did. We now understand through work of a number of physicists that there are three singularities inside a black hole. Now, a singularity is a place where gravity is so strong, so intense that Einstein's laws break down, quantum gravity takes over,

and as you approach singularity, what we call tidal gravity stretches and squeezes you, we have presumed will kill you. Spaghettify, I think. Spaghettify is the technical phrase. And we understood very well when I was advising Carl in the 1980s that there was a singularity in there that was utterly lethal, that would spaghettify you, and you're dead, and the acts of which your body is made have been destroyed beyond recognition

and there's nothing left but the singularity. But since then we've learned that there are two other singularities inside there and they are much more benign but they are strong enough that there's a high probability but not a certainty that they might kill you. It's possible. They have

tidal gravity that will stretch and squeeze you and the stretching force becomes infinite. But it becomes infinite so fast that there's not time for that stretching to actually stretch you, spaghettify you. You might only be twice as long as you are. Now, if you're twice as long, you're dead. It's still going to hurt, yeah. It's still going to destroy your skull.

But if it's only 1%, well, maybe you might be able to survive. I wish we had another hour or two. I have so many other questions about this film and about this wonderful book that I think anybody who's interested in the science of Interstellar ought to take a look at. It just appears that between the book and the movie, you just had the time of your life. It was a blast. As I have said to Chris, it was a blast. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'm ready to move on. Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, and the man who helped put wonderful science in the film Interstellar. Kip's new and appropriately

named book is The Science of Interstellar, with a foreword by Christopher Nolan. It's a very enjoyable and illuminating read, but you could be happy getting it just for the hundreds of illustrations based on or lifted from the movie. The Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society is on the skyline, as he so often is. Welcome back, Bruce. Thank you, Matt. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, as we were just talking about, and I'm glad you did, too. So what's up there in those post-Thanksgiving skies?

Well, we got Mars hanging out still low in the southwest in the early evening, and then Jupiter is coming up earlier and earlier in the night. So it's coming up at 10 or 11 o'clock at night now in the east, of course. And on the nights of December 10th and 11th, it'll be hanging out near a nearly full moon. And so we'll make for a lovely sight, super bright star like Jupiter and the moon. Go check those things out. We move on to this week in space history. 1973, Pioneer 10 flew by Jupiter. One year later during the same week, 1974, Pioneer 11 flew by Jupiter. And in 1995, continuing our Jupiter fun, the Galileo probe entered Jupiter's atmosphere.

Anybody wants to see some beautiful images of Jupiter? It's that film that I talked with Emily about, Wanderers. There are some really impossible views that humans are taking over Jupiter. I think they'd all be dead in seconds from the radiation. But they are really pretty pictures. Have you seen this film? No, I have not. Oh, man, you've got to look it up. I just blogged about it.

So check it out, Wanderers. Be there. I wish. Until the radiation environment. Well, anyway. Yeah. On to Random Space Fact! That was not Kip Thorne doing a guest random space fact for us.

That was actually Bruce. I know that through a lot of people. Ha! I know. I'm sure it was confusing. So speaking of Pioneer 10, launched on March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft ever to pass through the asteroid belt and the first to make direct observations and obtain close-up images of Jupiter. And now is off into interstellar space, I suppose.

Or is Voyager 1 still farther out there, right? Yeah, Voyager 1 has the lead and will have the lead, continue to have the lead against any of its competing spacecraft. But Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and New Horizons are all on escape trajectories from the solar system. Makes me proud, as does this week's trivia contest. We asked you, what is the approximate mass of the Rosetta Philae lander? And how'd we do, Matt? This was confusing to a lot of people. We had some problems, as some of you may have seen, with the website last week. And it meant that the question from the previous week was left up. But a lot of you figured it out, you know, went by what you heard on the radio and did get your answers in.

So we still had a good response. I want to mention this one first from Brian Wilson in Centennial, Colorado. from Brian Wilson in Centennial, Colorado. He did get it right, not our winner this week, but he said that when Philae landed, it was 28 light minutes away, or about three and a third astronomical units from Earth. Speaking of stuff that is way out there,

I just was, I was impressed by that. I didn't realize it was quite that far. Yeah, they rendezvoused with a comet way out there, and that's part of their, the Rosetta goalvoused with the comet way out there, and that's part of the Rosetta goal, is to follow it from way out there coming in as it approaches the sun and see how things develop. So here's our winner, which is interesting, considering our talk about Betty and Veronica last week. Would you believe?

It's Veronica Toth of Kanata, Ontario, who said, and I think that she's close enough here, right? Because a lot of people did come up with 100 kilograms for the Massifile. It may have been slightly less than that, but do you think that's close enough? Yes. Now, that was the ballpark that exists most places, including from ESA on a lot of their pages. So that's what we're going with. Congratulations, Veronica. It's one more thing you can lord over Betty, I'm sure. And you'll be able to do that when you show her. I don't think it's actually that Veronica.

It's not? Maybe it is. I don't know. Go ahead. Well, she can still have the Year in Space wall calendar and the Year in Space desk calendar, which is your source for this week in space history. It is indeed. I've got one open right next to me.

They really are great publications, and not just because Bruce and I both contributed to the desk calendar, but that doesn't hurt. It's true. Both. And the wall calendar, also fabulous. So those of you who didn't win it, you can buy those at yearinspace.com. Here is one more that I want to read to you. You may have remembered your random space fact last time, comparing if Philae was the mass of an ant, then the comet would be about the mass of a 747. Yes. We had a lot of people who gave us the answer in kilograms, but also in the number of ants, which apparently is something over 32 million.

So there were so many of those, but only this response of its kind from Rennie Christopher, who says, according to the NASA website, 100 kilograms, I would not like to meet a 100-kilogram ant, especially not while I'm flying on a 747. Wasn't that a movie? Yeah, yeah. Ants on a Plane.

Ants on a Plane. It was the sequel. Ruin the picnic. Speaking of Pioneer 10 leaving the solar system, what bright star in our sky, or a relatively bright star in our sky, is Pioneer 10 approximately headed towards and will reach the vicinity of in about 2 million years. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. And you'll need to get it to us by Tuesday, December 9th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there.

Look up in the night sky and think about if you were to design a computer icon, what would it look like? Thank you and good night. a computer icon, what would it look like? Thank you, and good night. There is a t-shirt waiting for someone who designs a computer icon of Bruce and me. There you have it. There you go. He's Bruce Betts, the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Want your own year in space desk and

wall calendars? Those are once again the prizes in the space trivia contest we just began. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the interstellar-minded members of the Society. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова