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WRINKLES IN SPACETIME: The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar

Kip Thorne looks into the black hole he helped create and thinks, “Why, of course. That's what it would do.” ¶ This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy. It appears to spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the universe along with it. (That's gravity for you; relativity is superweird.) In theory it was once a star, but instead of fading or exploding, it collapsed like a failed soufflé into a tiny point of inescapable singularity. A glowing ring orbiting the spheroidal maelstrom seems to curve over the top and below the bottom simultaneously.

All this is only natural, because weird things happen near black holes. For example, their gravity is so strong that they bend the fabric of the universe. Einstein explained this: The more massive something is, the more gravity it produces. Objects like stars and black holes do this so powerfully that they actually bend light and pull space and time with it. And it gets weirder: If you were closer to a black hole than I was, our perceptions of space and time would diverge. Relatively speaking, time would seem to be going faster for me.

What does Thorne see in there? He's an astrophysicist; his math guided the creation of this mesmerizing visual effect, the most accurate simulation ever of what a black hole would look like. It's the product of a year of work by 30 people and thousands of computers. And alongside a small galaxy of Hollywood stars—Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Casey Affleck, John Lithgow—the simulation plays a central role in Interstellar , the prestige space travel epic directed by Christopher Nolan opening November 7. Thorne sees truth. Nolan, the consummate image maker, sees beauty. Black holes, even fictional ones, can warp perception.

Thorne Isn't your average astrophysicist. Sure, he's a famous theorist, but even before his retirement from Caltech in 2009 he was deeply interested in explaining the heady ideas of relativity to the general public. Just before his retirement, Thorne and film producer Lynda Obst, whom he'd known since Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date three decades earlier, were playing around with an idea for a movie that would involve the mysterious properties of black holes and wormholes.

Before long, Steven Spielberg signed on to direct; screenwriter Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan wrote a script. Eventually Spielberg dropped out; Jonathan's brother Chris—known for directing mind-bendy movies like Memento and Inception (plus Batman ) dropped in. And while Chris Nolan was rewriting his brother's script, he wanted to get a handle on the science at the heart of his story. So he started meeting with Thorne.

Over the course of a couple months in early 2013, Thorne and Nolan delved into what the physicist calls “the warped side of the universe”—curved spacetime, holes in the fabric of reality, how gravity bends light. “The story is now essentially all Chris and Jonah's,” Thorne says. “But the spirit of it, the goal of having a movie in which science is embedded in the fabric from the beginning—and it's great science—that was preserved.”

Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne give WIRED an exclusive look at the creation of Interstellar ‘s black hole.

©2014 Paramount All Rights Reserved

The story the filmmakers came up with is set in a dystopian near future when crops have failed and humanity is on the verge of extinction. A former astronaut (McConaughey) gets recruited for one last flight, a desperate attempt to reach other star systems where humans can once again thrive.

And therein lies a problem. See, other stars are really far away. Reaching even the nearest ones would take decades at speeds we humans have no idea how to attain. Back in 1983, when Sagan needed a plausible solution to this problem for the story that would become the movie Contact , Thorne suggested the wormhole, a hypothetical tear in the universe connecting two distant points via dimensions beyond the four we experience as space and time. A wormhole was a natural choice for Interstellar too. As Thorne talked about the movie with Nolan, their discussions about the physical properties of wormholes led to an inevitable question for a filmmaker: How do you actually show one onscreen?

That's not the only headache inducing bit of physics that the film's special effects team had to grapple with. Nolan's story relied on time dilation: time passing at different rates for different characters. To make this scientifically plausible, Thorne told him, he'd need a massive black hole—in the movie it's called Gargantua—spinning at nearly the speed of light. As a filmmaker, Nolan had no idea how to make something like that look realistic. But he had an idea how to make it happen. “Chris called me and said he wanted to send a guy over to my house to talk to me about the visual effects,” Thorne says. “I said, ‘Sure, send him over.’” It wasn't long before Paul Franklin showed up on Thorne's doorstep.

Franklin knew that his computers would do anything he told them to. That was a problem and a temptation. “It's very easy to fall into the trap of breaking the rules of reality,” says Franklin, a senior supervisor of Academy Award-winning effects house Double Negative. “And those rules are actually quite strict.”

So he asked Thorne to generate equations that would guide their effects software the way physics governs the real world. They started with wormholes. If light around a wormhole wouldn't behave classically—that is, travel in a straight line—what would it do? How could that be described mathematically?

Thorne sent his answers to Franklin in the form of heavily researched memos. Pages long, deeply sourced, and covered in equations, they were more like scientific journal articles than anything else. Franklin's team wrote new rendering software based on these equations and spun up a wormhole. The result was extraordinary. It was like a crystal ball reflecting the universe, a spherical hole in spacetime. “Science fiction always wants to dress things up, like it's never happy with the ordinary universe,” he says. “What we were getting out of the software was compelling straight off.”

McConaughey explores another world in Interstellar (top). Thorne’s diagram of how a black hole distorts light.

Their success with the wormhole emboldened the effects team to try the same approach with the black hole. But black holes, as the name suggests, are murder on light. Filmmakers often use a technique called ray tracing to render light and reflections in images. “But ray-tracing software makes the generally reasonable assumption that light is traveling along straight paths,” says Eugénie von Tunzelmann, a CG supervisor at Double Negative. This was a whole other kind of physics. “We had to write a completely new renderer,” she says.

Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. “I thought we might cross the petabyte threshold on this one,” von Tunzelmann says.

“Chris really wanted us to sell the idea that the black hole is spherical,” Franklin says. “I said, ‘You know, it's going to look like a disk.’ The only thing you can see is the way it warps starlight.” Then Franklin started reading about accretion disks, agglomerations of matter that orbit some black holes. Franklin figured that he could use this ring of orbiting detritus to define the sphere.

Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”

That's what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he'd supplied.

Still, no one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually built one. Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole's shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it. “I never expected that,” Thorne says. “Eugénie just did the simulations and said, ‘Hey, this is what I got.’ It was just amazing.”

In the end, Nolan got elegant images that advance the story. Thorne got a movie that teaches a mass audience some real, accurate science. But he also got something he didn't expect: a scientific discovery. “This is our observational data,” he says of the movie's visualizations. “That's the way nature behaves. Period.” Thorne says he can get at least two published articles out of it.

When Thorne discusses the astrophysics that he likes best—colliding black holes, space dragged into motion by a whirling star, time warps—he uses a lot of analogies. He talks about two tornadoes running into each other or rays of light cast about like straw in the wind. But metaphors can be deceptive; they can make people think they understand something when they only understand what it is like . But Thorne's haloed, spinning black hole and galaxy-spanning wormhole are not just metaphors. Most Interstellar viewers will see these images—the wormhole, the black hole, the weird light—and think, “Whoa. That's beautiful.” Thorne looks at them and thinks, “Whoa. That's true .” And from a certain perspective, that's beautiful too.

New Research

Technology from ‘Interstellar’ Could Be Useful to Scientists, Too

The movie’s visual effects are now being used for scientific research

Erin Blakemore

Correspondent

Much has been made of the mind-bending visual effects in Interstellar . But the methods created by  the film’s Oscar-nominated visual effects team  may have more serious applications than wowing movie audiences—they could actually be useful to scientists, too. A  new paper  in  Classical and Quantum Gravity  tells how the Interstellar team turned science fiction towards the service of scientific fact and produced a whole new picture of what it might look like to orbit around a spinning black hole.

Director Christopher Nolan and executive producer (and theoretical physicist) Kip Thorne wanted to create a visual experience that was immersive and  credible . When they began to construct images of a black hole within an accretion disk, they realized that existing visual effects technology wouldn’t cut it—it created a flickering effect that would have looked bad in IMAX theaters. So the team turned to physics to create something different.

“To get rid of the flickering and produce realistically smooth pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a manner that has never been done before,” Oliver James, chief scientist at visual effects firm Double Negative, said in a release . “Instead of tracing the paths of individual light rays using Einstein’s equations — one per pixel—we traced the distorted paths and shapes of light beams.” That led to a new set of code they called DNGR—the Double Negative Gravitational Renderer.

But the team soon realized that the images produced using DNGR code could be used for much more than a fictitious interstellar trip . They began to use the code to conduct simulations of how a weird space surface called a “caustic” might affect images of star fields near black holes in a process known as “gravitational lensing.” Their simulations showed that as caustics are dragged around the sky by the spinning force of a black hole, they stretch around the hole again and again, affecting how stars look. This both creates and obliterates images of stars, creating up to 13 images of a star as the caustic flings images out of the black hole.

Think that sounds like a really cool visual? So do scientists. As astrophysicist Kip Thorne of Cal Tech, who co-authored the study, says, “This new approach to making images will be of great value to astrophysicists like me. We, too, need smooth images.”

Here’s more info on how the team created its visual effects:

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Erin Blakemore | | READ MORE

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist. Her work has appeared in publications like The Washington Post , TIME , mental_floss , Popular Science and JSTOR Daily . Learn more at erinblakemore.com .

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The Real Science Behind the Black Hole in “Interstellar”

The team responsible for the Oscar-nominated visual effects at the center of Christopher Nolan’s epic, Interstellar, have turned science fiction into science fact by providing new insights into the powerful effects of black holes. In a paper published today, 13 February, in IOP Publishing’s journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, the team describe the innovative computer code that was used to generate the movie’s iconic images of the wormhole, black hole and various celestial objects, and explain how the code has led them to new science discoveries.

Using their code, the Interstellar team, comprising London-based visual effects company Double Negative and Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, found that when a camera is close up to a rapidly spinning black hole, peculiar surfaces in space, known as caustics, create more than a dozen images of individual stars and of the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives. They found that the images are concentrated along one edge of the black hole’s shadow.

These multiple images are caused by the black hole dragging space into a whirling motion and stretching the caustics around itself many times. It is the first time that the effects of caustics have been computed for a camera near a black hole, and the resulting images give some idea of what a person would see if they were orbiting around a hole.

The discoveries were made possible by the team’s computer code, which, as the paper describes, mapped the paths of millions of lights beams and their evolving cross-sections as they passed through the black hole’s warped spacetime. The computer code was used to create images of the movie’s wormhole and the black hole, Gargantua, and its glowing accretion disk, with unparalleled smoothness and clarity.

It showed portions of the accretion disk swinging up over the top and down under Gargantua’s shadow, and also in front of the shadow’s equator, producing an image of a split shadow that has become iconic for the movie.

This weird distortion of the glowing disk was caused by gravitational lensing — a process by which light beams from different parts of the disk, or from distant stars, are bent and distorted by the black hole, before they arrive at the movie’s simulated camera.

This lensing happens because the black hole creates an extremely strong gravitational field, literally bending the fabric of spacetime around itself, like a bowling ball lying on a stretched out bed sheet.

Early in their work on the movie, with the black hole encircled within a rich field of distant stars and nebulae instead of an accretion disk, the team found that the standard approach of using just one light ray for one pixel in a computer code — in this instance, for an IMAX picture, a total of 23 million pixels — resulted in flickering as the stars and nebulae moved across the screen.

Co-author of the study and chief scientist at Double Negative, Oliver James, said: “To get rid of the flickering and produce realistically smooth pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a manner that has never been done before. Instead of tracing the paths of individual light rays using Einstein’s equations — one per pixel — we traced the distorted paths and shapes of light beams.”

Co-author of the study Kip Thorne said: “This new approach to making images will be of great value to astrophysicists like me. We, too, need smooth images.”

Oliver James continued: “Once our code, called DNGR for Double Negative Gravitational Renderer, was mature and creating the images you see in the movie Interstellar, we realized we had a tool that could easily be adapted for scientific research.”

In their paper, the team report how they used DNGR to carry out a number of research simulations exploring the influence of caustics — peculiar, creased surfaces in space — on the images of distant star fields as seen by a camera near a fast spinning black hole.

“A light beam emitted from any point on a caustic surface gets focused by the black hole into a bright cusp of light at a given point,” James continued. “All of the caustics, except one, wrap around the sky many times when the camera is close to the black hole. This sky-wrapping is caused by the black hole’s spin, dragging space into a whirling motion around itself like the air in a whirling tornado, and stretching the caustics around the black hole many times.”

As each caustic passes by a star, it either creates two new images of the star as seen by the camera, or annihilates two old images of the star. As the camera orbits around the black hole, film clips from the DNGR simulations showed that the caustics were constantly creating and annihilating a huge number of stellar images.

The team identified as many as 13 simultaneous images of the same star, and as many as 13 images of the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives.

These multiple images were only seen when the black hole was spinning rapidly and only near the side of the black hole where the hole’s whirling space was moving toward the camera, which they deduced was because the space whirl was ‘flinging’ the images outward from the hole’s shadow edge. On the shadow’s opposite side, where space is whirling away from the camera, the team deduced that there were also multiple images of each star, but that the whirl of space compressed them inward, so close to the black hole’s shadow that they could not be seen in the simulations.

Reference: “Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar,” O. James, E. von Tunzelmann, P. Franklin, and K. S. Thorne, 2015, Class. Quantum Grav. 32 065001 [ http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/32/6/065001 ].

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar , arXiv.org e-Print archive

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Building Gargantua

Oliver James of DNEG, which produced the striking black hole in the film Interstellar , describes the science behind visual effects and the challenges in this fast-growing industry.

Oliver James is chief scientist of the world’s biggest visual effects studio, DNEG, which produced the spectacular visual effects for Interstellar . DNEG’s work, carried out in collaboration with theoretical cosmologist Kip Thorne, led to some of the most physically-accurate images of a spinning black hole ever created, earning the firm an Academy Award and a BAFTA. For James, it all began with an undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s – a period that he describes as one of the most fascinating and intellectually stimulating of his life. “It confronted me with the gap between what you observe and reality. I feel it was the same kind of gap I faced while working for Interstellar . I had to study a lot to understand the physics of black holes and curved space time.”

A great part of visual effects is understanding how light interacts with surfaces and volumes and eventually enters a camera’s lens and as a student, Oliver was interested in atomic physics, quantum mechanics and modern optics. This, in addition to his two other passions – computing and photography – led him to his first job in a small photographic studio in London where he became familiar with the technical and operational aspects of the industry. Missing the intellectual challenge offered by physics, in 1995 he contacted and secured a role in the R&D team of the Computer Film Company – a niche studio specialising in digital film which was part of the emerging London visual effects industry.

Suddenly these rag-dolls came to life and you’d find yourself wincing in sympathy as they were battered about Oliver James

A defining moment came in 2001, when one of his ex-colleagues invited him to join Warner Bros’ ESC Entertainment at Alameda California to work on The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions . His main task was to work on rigid-body simulations – not a trivial task given the many fight scenes. “There’s a big fight scene, called the Burly Brawl, where hundreds of digital actors get thrown around like skittles,” he says. “We wanted to add realism by simulating the physics of these colliding bodies. The initial tests looked physical, but lifeless, so we enhanced the simulation by introducing torque at every joint, calculated from examples of real locomotion. Suddenly these rag-dolls came to life and you’d find yourself wincing in sympathy as they were battered about”. The sequences took dozens of artists and technicians months of work to create just a few seconds of the movie.

Following his work in ESC Entertainment, James moved back to London and, after a short period at the Moving Picture Company, he finally joined “Double Negative” in 2004 (renamed DNEG in 2018). He’d been attracted by Christopher Nolan’s film Batman Begins , for which the firm was creating visual effects, and it was the beginning of a long and creative journey that would culminate in the sci-fi epic Interstellar , which tells the story of an astronaut searching for habitable planets in outer space.

Physics brings the invisible to life “We had to create a new imagery for black holes; a big challenge even for someone with a physics background,” recalls James. Given that he hadn’t studied general relativity as an undergraduate and had only touched upon special relativity, he decided to call Kip Thorne of Caltech for help. “At one point I asked [Kip] a very concrete question: ‘Could you give me an equation that describes the trajectory of light from a distant star, around the black hole and finally into an observer’s eye?’ This must have struck the right note as the next day I received an email—it was more like a scientific paper that included the equations answering my questions.” In total, James and Thorne exchanged some 1000 emails, often including detailed mathematical formalism that DNEG could then use in its code. “I often phrased my questions in a rather clumsy way and Kip insisted: “What precisely do you mean”? says James. “This forced me to rethink what was lying at the heart of my questions.”

The result for the wormhole was like a crystal ball reflecting each point the universe Oliver James

DNEG was soon able to develop new rendering software to visualise black holes and wormholes. The director had wanted a wormhole with an adjustable shape and size and thus we designed one with three free parameters, namely the length and radius of the wormhole’s interior as well as a third variant describing the smoothness of the transition from its interior to its exteriors, explains James. “The result for the wormhole was like a crystal ball reflecting each point the universe; imagine a spherical hole in space–time.” Simulating a black hole represented a bigger challenge as, by definition, it is an object that doesn’t allow light to escape. With his colleagues, he developed a completely new renderer that simulates the path of light through gravitationally warped space–time – including gravitational lensing effects and other physical phenomena that take place around a black hole.

Quality standards On the internet, one can find many images of black holes “eating” other stars of stars colliding to form a black hole. But producing an image for a motion picture requires totally different quality standards. The high quality demanded of an IMAX image meant that the team had to eliminate any artefacts that could show up in the final picture, and consequently rendering times were up to 100 hours compared to the typical 5–6 hours needed for other films. Contrary to the primary goal of most astrophysical visualisations to achieve a fast throughput, their major goal was to create images that looked like they might really have been filmed. “This goal led us to employ a different set of visualisation techniques from those of the astrophysics community—techniques based on propagation of ray bundles (light beams) instead of discrete light rays, and on carefully designed spatial filtering to smooth the overlaps of neighbouring beams,” says James.

DNEG’s team generated a flat, multicoloured ring standing for the accretion disk and positioned it surrounding the spinning black hole. The result was a warped spac–time around the black hole including its accretion disk. Thorne later wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar : “You cannot imagine how ecstatic I was when Oliver sent me his initial film clips. For the first time ever –and before any other scientist– I saw in ultra-high definition what a fast-spinning black hole looks like. What it does, visually, to its environment.” The following year, James and his DNEG colleagues published two papers with Thorne on the science and visualisation of these objects ( Am. J. Phys 83 486 and Class. Quantum Grav. 32 065001 ).

Another challenge was to capture the fact that the film camera should be traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Relativistic aberration, Doppler shifts and gravitational redshifts had to be integrated in the rendering code, influencing how the disk layers would look close to the camera as well as the colour grading and brightness changes in the final image. Things get even more complicated closer to the black hole where space–time is more distorted; gravitational lensing gets more extreme and the computation takes more steps. Thorne developed procedures describing how to map a light ray and a ray bundle from the light source to the camera’s local sky, and produced low-quality images in Mathematica to verify his code before giving it to DNEG to create the fast and high-resolution render. This was used to simulate all the images to be lensed: fields of stars, dust clouds and nebulae and the accretion disk around the Gargantua, Interstellar ’s gigantic black hole. In total, the movie notched up almost 800 TB of data. To simulate the starry background, DNEG used the Tycho-2 catalogue star catalogue from the European Space Agency containing about 2.5 million stars, and more recently the team has adopted the Gaia catalogue containing 1.7 billion stars.

Creative industry With the increased use of visual effects, more and more scientists are working in the field including mathematicians and physicists. And visual effects are not vital only for sci-fi movies but are also integrated in drama or historical films. Furthermore, there are a growing number of companies creating tailored simulation packages for specific processes. DNEG alone has increased from 80 people in 2004 to more than 5000 people today. At the same time, this increase in numbers means that software needs to be scalable and adaptable to meet a wide range of skilled artists, James explains. “Developing specialised simulation software that gets used locally by a small group of skilled artists is one thing but making it usable by a wide range of artists across the globe calls for a much bigger effort – to make it robust and much more accessible”.

Asked if computational resources are a limiting factor for the future of visual effects, James thinks any increase in computational power will quickly be swallowed up by artists adding extra detail or creating more complex simulations. The game-changer, he says, will be real-time simulation and rendering. Today, video games are rendered in real-time by the computer’s video card, whereas visual effects in movies are almost entirely created as batch-processes and afterwards the results are cached or pre-rendered so they can be played back in real-time. “Moving to real-time rendering means that the workflow will not rely on overnight renders and would allow artists many more iterations during production. We have only scratched the surface and there are plenty of opportunities for scientists”. Even machine learning promises to play a role in the industry, and James is currently involved in R&D to use it to enable more natural body movements or facial expressions. Open data and open access is also an area which is growing, and in which DNEG is actively involved.

“Visual effects is a fascinating industry where technology and hard-science are used to solve creative problems,” says James. “Occasionally the roles get reversed and our creativity can have a real impact on science.”

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Interstellar shocks unveil the material around new stars

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Joel Green is at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA.

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The birth of stars can give rise to the most beautiful space images. And with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) produces infrared images of these events unlike any seen before. Far from being just pretty pictures, these images can reveal information about the material that is expelled from a protostar in more minute detail than images from other instruments can. Writing in Nature , Ray et al . 1 demonstrate how they trained the telescope on one such sight — a large and powerful interstellar jet known as Herbig-Haro 211, which is ejected at high speed from a spinning protostar in the Perseus cloud complex, a giant collection of molecular gas and dust just 321 parsecs from Earth 2 .

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Decoding the dark arts of Interstellar’s black hole

By Tushna Commissariat

In recent years, science and science fiction have come together in cinema to produce a host of rather spectacular visual treats, the best of the lot being Christopher Nolan’s epic Oscar-nominated film Interstellar . That actual science has played a major role in film is pretty well known, thanks to the involvement of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne , who was an executive producer for the project. But in a near-cinematic plot twist, it has emerged that Thorne’s work on trying to develop the most accurate and realistic view of a supermassive black hole “Gargantua” has provided unprecedented insights into the immense gravitational-lensing effects that would emerge if we were to view such a stellar behemoth.

To produce the awe-inspiring images of the wormhole and Gargantua that audiences across the globe marvelled at late last year, Thorne and a team from the acclaimed London-based visual effects company Double Negative developed a new computer code dubbed “Double Negative Gravitational Rendered” and have now published a paper detailing their work in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity , which is published by IOP Publishing, which also publishes physicsworld.com .

Instead of focusing how individual rays of light would be distorted by the black hole, the code aims to solve the equations for how bundles of light (light beams) would navigate the extreme warped space–time structure that would surround the spinning Kerr black hole that is Gargantua. This was done to get rid of some of the strange visual anomalies that the team saw early on in its work. The team saw distant flickering stars and nebulae that would rapidly move across the screen if the standard approach of using just one light ray per pixel in the code was applied, which in the case of an IMAX image would amount to a total of 23 million pixels.

“To get rid of the flickering and produce realistically smooth pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a manner that has never been done before,” says Oliver James, chief scientist at Double Negative, explaining that once the code “was mature and creating the images you see in the movie Interstellar , we realized we had a tool that could easily be adapted for scientific research”.

They also found that the dragged space–time and the lensing would mean that an observer or a camera would see the accretion disc that surrounds Gargantua wrapped over and under the black hole’s shadow and that distant stars would move in a complex swirling dance around the hole as the camera orbits it. Indeed, thanks to a curious optical effect know as a “caustic” or a “caustic curve”, the images of the stars or nebulae would get amplified and split into double or even multiple images or even cancel in a flash of light.

To learn a bit more about these curious caustics (hint: they are actually pretty common and you have seen one in action if you have seen a rainbow), find out about how Gargantua was made to bend the rules of physics for a good cause and look into the perfect Einstein rings that emerge in the team’s simulations, delve into the paper’s depths. In the meanwhile, do be sure to read my review of Interstellar (warning: it contains spoilers!) as well as Thorne’s book The Science of Interstellar , and watch the video abstract from the paper below.

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The Physics Behind “Interstellar’s” Visual Effects Was So Good, it Led to a Scientific Discovery

While he was working on the film Interstellar , executive producer Kip Thorne was tasked with creating the black hole that would be central to the plot. As a theoretical physicist, he also wanted to create something that was truly realistic and as close to the real thing as movie-goers would ever see.

On the other hand, Christopher Nolan – the film’s director – wanted to create something that would be a visually-mesmerizing experience. As you can see from the image above, they certainly succeeded as far as the aesthetics were concerned. But even more impressive was how the creation of this fictitious black hole led to an actual scientific discovery.

In short, in order to accurately create a visual for the story’s black hole, Kip Thorne produced an entirely new set of equations which guided the special effects team’s rendering software. The end result was a visual representation that accurately depicts what a wormhole/black hole would look like in space.

This was no easy task, since black holes (as the name suggests) suck in all light around them, warp space and time, and are invisible to all but X-ray telescopes (due to the bursts of energy they periodically emit). But after a year of work by 30 people and thousands of computers, Thorne and the movie’s special effects team managed to create something entirely realistic.

Relying entirely on known scientific principles, the black hole appears to spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the universe along with it. Based on the idea that it was once a star that collapsed into a singularity, the hole forms a glowing ring that orbits around a spheroidal maelstrom of light, which seems to curve over the top and under the bottom simultaneously.

To simulate the accretion disk, the special effects team generated a flat, multicolored ring and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Then something very weird and inspiring happened.

“We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” explained Paul Franklin, a senior supervisor of Academy Award-winning effects house Double Negative. “So rather than looking like Saturn’s rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”

The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he’d supplied.

“This is our observational data,” he said of the movie’s visualizations. “That’s the way nature behaves. Period.” Thorne also stated that he thinks he can get at least two published articles out of it.

But more important than that is the fact that Thorne, a thoroughgoing scientist and lover of the mysteries of space and physics, has a chance to show a mass audience some real, accurate science.

The movie premiers in North America on November 7th.

Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne explain the science behind creating the movie’s black hole.

Further reading: Wired

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24 Replies to “The Physics Behind “Interstellar’s” Visual Effects Was So Good, it Led to a Scientific Discovery”

Nice article. Just to clarify: visualizations of accretion disks around black holes have been properly visualized since the early work of Cunningham & Bardeen, in 1972/1973 or Luminet 1979. See, for example,

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-ref_query?bibcode=1973ApJ …183..237C&refs=CITATIONS&db_key=AST

for a list of papers that mainly include visualization calculations.

There has also been a very nice set of visualizations of black holes by Ute Krauss ( http://www.spacetimetravel.org/galerie/galerie.html ) and recently by Thomas Mueller.

I think what is new here is the coordinate system in which the calculations were done, this is a really technical aspect, but please do not get the impression that “Interstellar” has the first ever correct visualizations of a flow around a black hole…

I don’t agree with the white fuzz… I believe we should be seeing a set of airy discs, concentric rings surrounding the singularity, each disc with its own chromatic aberration and so… circular rainbows. As a ship accelerates towards a singularity, the closest discs should phase blue, so depending on both the Fraunhofer angles and the relative velocities, this shifting would tell us both the off axis and the speed differential. So no, I don’t agree with the white fuzz.

“Lead?” Really? Oy!

The title also calls the movie “Intellstellar”. Looks like it was written in a hurry. *S*

LOL Science? To begin with wormholes at the center of a spinning black hole are a convenience theory for interstellar space travel. Just because the mathematics says its possible doesn’t make it so. To state something is mathematically sound is no different than stating a sentence is grammatically sound. Just because you can write a grammatically correct sentence that states leprechauns are real doesn’t make them real…

I’m kind of puzzled. Perhaps I misunderstand what you are saying?

There is a LOT of observational data which strongly supports the existence of black holes. Rejection of the idea of black holes would require invocation of either some other object which would likely have to be stranger than a black hole, or a pretty wholesale rejection of our knowledge of Physics.

There is a lot of cosmology which is on rather shaky grounds, the existence of black holes is on surprisingly firm ground.

I should point out that wormholes are, of course, not at all on firm grounds if that was the only point you were making.

So it’s kind of a “gray” area then…no, wait 😉

You’re wrong and what is absolutely hilarious and horribly sad at the same time is the fact that you are completely unable to recognize how wrong you are because you’ve been totally sold by the pseudo-physicists that are occupying the upper reaches of modern academia in particle physics, gravitational physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Black holes are now and always have been an intellectual fiction. To understand what the pseudo-scientists in academia are calling ‘black holes’ would require a wholesale rejection of much of our knowledge of modern physics; not all… but quite a bit.

First you have to learn what is true. But I can tell you one thing that is taught that is not true at all. Elementary charged particles don’t always repel each other if they have the same charge and they don’t always attract each other if they have the opposite charge. They only obey Coulomb’s Law when they are not overlapping in the same momentum space. Being in the same momentum space or overlapping in the same momentum space is just a fancy way of saying that they are at rest or very nearly at rest with respect to each other. So, if two deuterons (the nuclei of two deuterium atoms) have a common de Broglie wavelength (calculated from a center of momentum frame) that is equal to or greater than their inter-particle distance then they will behave opposite to the expectation of Coulomb’s Law. This was only discovered recently (about two decades ago) but you won’t find it in any modern physics textbook. Yet, it can be proven to be completely true using only one of Maxwell’s equations and literally mountains of well known and universally accepted experimental data concerning the attractive interaction of parallel current carrying wires. People have looked at the interactive behavior of marco-scale objects like charged pith balls or charged balloons and then they concluded (quite erroneously) that because macro-scale objects like pith balls obeyed Coulomb’s Law then they could reverse-extrapolate that interactive behavior right down to the level of quantum scale objects like protons and electrons. Yet, there is not a single experiment in all the history of science that elementary charged particles that are at rest with respect to each other will behave in accordance with Coulomb’s Law. Not one. Yet. in most first year texts of college physics they’ll put problems giving the coordinates of one proton with respect to that of another proton at a different set of coordinates and ask the students to calculate the magnitude and direction of the force between them. This one fundamental fact ought to bring down the entire house of modern physics but it doesn’t because it is universally ignored. That one fact will show that black holes as they are presently conceived to come into being are absolute and total fictions. Modern physics, especially the Standard Model of particle physics, is a house of cards. Since cosmology and astrophysics is advised by particle physics … well, you guessed it … they are all houses of cards. What is keeping them standing? Ignorance and apathy. They don’t know and they really don’t care … as long as they can keep the public believing that they are truly the experts then the money will continue to roll in. They want you to conflate (that means mix up) the real science that is being done by material scientists and experimentalists that end up bringing you cell phones and 3D TV and all kind of wonderful modern conveniences and gadgets with the pseudo-science that they teach. All they have to do is get you to think that they are the same. The first group is to be praised for all of the great inventions that they are coming up with. And you know what? They are being very well paid by commercial interests to continue to do that sort of thing and to keep the inventions coming. These people actually work for a living like most of you reading this do. But the pseudo-scientists in academia who like to brag that they are theoretical physicists or quantum theorists or astrophysicists (who’ve never been to nor seen the inside of a star) or cosmologists …. well … they want you to give them the same praise and the same rewards for having done nothing but speculate concerning things that they can do no experiments on but can only observe from afar. Remember that it was the technologist scientists who invent and build the telescopes that they use. If you lined them all up against the wall and shot every last one of them, the world would be a better place. First, it would put fear into the next generation so that they’d choose careers that are not just story telling and downright lying to the members of the paying public (that they think are all too stupid to refute what they are saying) but which actually correctly inform us about the universe we live in. We don’t mind paying people to tell us entertaining lies when we turn on the TV or go to a movie; in fact, we expect that. We should put the pseudo-scientists on notice right now that we want real science and not intellectual fictions and if they don’t start giving us real science then we’re going to put them all up against the wall and we won’t show them one bit of mercy.

You’re right, what we need is a Stalinist purge of all these so-called “cosmologists” who are only in it for the money

I… I don’t know where to begin

My goodness, I’ve searched high and low for a publication of any sort that might be related to you. Would you please steer me in the right direction? With your insights I’m sure you’ve been published, even if it is in the National Equirer.

It is not hard to find confirmation of his claim about Coulombs law:

http://www.singtech.com/pages/definitions.html#anchor587207

It seems, however, that it *is* in textbooks, it’s just that high school physics textbooks oversimply stuff a lot. E.g. my daughters textbook keeps going on about the “force of gravity”, and I have to explain that gravity isn’t actually a force – it’s what you feel when some other force, whether rocket engine or surface of the earth, accelerates you. The planet surface we live on is an accelerated frame of reference.

@CustomDesigned

That “confirmation” of his claim is actually his own website (I did some googling), so perhaps not the corroboration you were looking for 😉

Black holes are intellectual fictions. They certainly are not ‘scientific’ even if people (and the number of people doesn’t matter since real science is not consensus based …. it’s fact based!) believe that it is. We might as well say that there are magical gnomes living on the moon and that the closer we get to one the more invisible do they become. How nice to say that quarks can never be torn apart from their union into a particle such as a proton. It is always convenient to give reasons why something that you believe exists cannot be observed and then call the whole thing ‘science’. Science comes from the Latin ‘Scientia’ which means ‘to know’. There is a difference between pseudo-knowledge (that’s what the people who claimed that they could see the Emperor’s New Clothes had) and actual knowledge like when you can observe the actual moon through a telescope. It is amazing to me that people like Wheeler, Thorne and Misner can write a large book of speculations and it later becomes esteemed as actual science (actual knowledge) when it really is nothing but pseudo-knowledge. Totally appropriate that this stuff is for science fiction. By the way… lots of stuff taught in the highest reaches of modern academia today concerning astrophysics, particle physics and cosmology …. really is …. you guessed it … really is … yes… science fiction!

Wow… so even the astrophysics community has to deal with “truthers”? SMH…

Mr. Science Truther, please do tell us then what exactly are the super massive objects at the center of galaxies, along with why light mysteriously bends around objects that emit no light?

I can’t believe you’re suggesting executing scientists skyboltman99. Tone down your rhetoric or find another place to share your views.

Wow… black hole deniers? Really???

More common than you think! Though they usually tend to be of a religious bent. Andrew Schlafly of Conservapedia thinks they were invented to “sell magazines”.

It is always convenient to give reasons why something that you believe exists cannot be observed and then call the whole thing ‘science’.

And it’s even more convenient attacking vast areas of science as non-science without using a single scientific argument.

Of course, don’t be astonished if you get laughed out ot the room.

Always a pleasure to read posts by self-proclaimed scientific experts. These semi-pseudo-quasi-faux scientists/people attack everything and everyone associated with the perceived scientific “establishment”. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Heisenberg, Hawking, Feynman, Wheeler, Thorne, Witten, Bose, Penrose, Dirac, Et al, are all fair game. It must be very difficult to carry all that additional weight with a head size almost too big to fit through a door. Please continue to dazzle the community with these conspiracy like posts.

Westerners have this way of painting things black that don’t really understand. They say that the scientific method has no place for religions, yet they still seek a ‘knowledge’ that is absolute, they still, quite rigorously try to find a truth that is absolute, one that exists all by its own – God.

Western world is quite good at solving problems, but they never arrive at the answers. They find it not a fundamental error to use invalid concepts for validating others.

Take the definition of Zero for instance. In western Maths it is defined as ‘nothing’ (forgive my English), but they are quite contend of using a symbol to represent ‘nothingness’. How is it possible? How can you represent or present ‘nothingness’? One cannot even grasp it… This brings me to my question, regarding the ‘Black Holes’.

If light does not escape a Black Hole, then accurate or valid, or reasonable, it is to use the color Black to paint its epicenter (for the lack of a better word)?

Well, pure black is an absence of light (there is no emission of any photons) rather than a ‘color’ per se, so it’s an accurate description of a singularity.

I really don’t see any problem here. Why exactly should the symbol be imbued with the qualities of the thing it is representing? You might as well complain about the existence of the word “nothing”, that’s essentially the same argument. Words and symbols are conceptual pointers, not the things themselves they are pointing at. And wrapping your head around the absence of a numerical value, or just the idea of absence in general isn’t quite as hard as you make it.

As for black holes, I suppose it would be more correct to label them as dark holes, or something else, but keep in mind the word “black” has more than one meaning here. Sure, it can mean the presence of a color, black marker, black paint, black ink, but it is also used to describe the absence of light. A black night, or a black sky, or a black room, doesn’t indicate that these things are covered in or filled with black paint or substance. It means there is an absence of light here. For these things, light is absent. Seems like that works just fine as a descriptor for black holes.

And if you’re talking about painting or drawing a black hole…well, you’re no longer dealing with a real black hole, are you? You’re dealing with a physical medium and pigments in order to create an artistic visual work meant to cognitively suggest something else. Attempting to say that painting a black hole with black pigment is wrong makes as much sense as criticizing someone painting stars for not adding fusion to the canvas so it emits heat and light.

As for your note on religions…I’m not sure I’m following. By definition (and as far as we can tell), any kind of religious happenstance, if it exists, defies science. If God or religious beings or power is the only kind that can circumvent physics and natural laws, then they are supernatural, and above our ability to explain them in ways that can be modeled, replicated, or understood. Trying to use science to support religion, or religion to support science, tends not to work too well. Most religious things don’t tend to stick around long enough to be confirmed as existing, measured, and so forth. They are in books, or ephemeral events. Can’t really apply science to that. What we do have are physical things, energetic things, stars, cosmic objects, things that can be detected, observed, and measured in different ways. And from what we can observe, we can work toward a truth. Will we always have a truth? Will we ever arrive at a truth? We may not. And yeah, there’s some confusion and some hubris here that can cause some to jump the gun and declare we’ve already reached the truth. But just because science can’t get us all the way there yet, just because science may not have the maturity in these areas to have the accuracy to grasp truth, doesn’t mean that it’s foolish or worthless to pursue it. I guess I’m wondering what your alternative would be.

One thing I have never understood in the depiction of black holes: they are always shown like an eclipse. If the accretion ring glows brightly and is really a sphere rather than a ring, why wouldn’t we see a bright sphere pretty much like a star, rather than a ring surrounding a black disk? Wouldn’t the entire event horizon surrounding the black hole as a sphere glow brightly, and so we wouldn’t see black at all?

Comments are closed.

• DOI: 10.1145/2775280.2792510
• Corpus ID: 10080932

Building interstellar's black hole: the gravitational renderer

• Oliver James , Sylvan Dieckmann , +2 authors K. Thorne
• Published in SIGGRAPH Talks 31 July 2015
• Computer Science, Physics
• ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Talks

2 References

Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie interstellar, visualizing interstellar's wormhole, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes

Dneg publishes scientific papers on spinning black holes.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar

The  Double Negative Gravitational Renderer  (DNGR) is the computer code used to create the iconic images of black holes and wormholes for the movie Interstellar .

It is the result of a year-long collaboration between Professor Kip Thorne and Double Negative Chief Scientist Oliver James, leading a small team of developers.

DNGR uses general-relativity equations to trace beams of light as they are bent and warped by the immense gravity of a black hole. Beams can get temporarily trapped, circling the hole many times before reaching the camera. These beams’ cross sections get stretched and squashed during this process, amplifying the light in small regions, resulting in glittering patterns in the starlight; and thin accretion discs get warped into rainbows of fire that stretch over and under the black hole.

The unprecedented detail DNGR reveals has led to its use as a tool for astrophysics research, giving us new insights into gravitational lensing.

Below you will find images and movies discussed in our paper  ‘Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar’  which is available for free download here:

Published by IoP in  Classical and Quantum Gravity  James O, von Tunzelmann E, Franklin P and Thorne K S 2015  Class. Quantum Grav.   32  065001

(Also of interest may be our technical paper  ‘Interstellar’s Wormhole’ )

All these movies entail a black hole with spin 0.999 of maximum and a camera at radii 6.03 GM/c2 or 2.6 GM/c2, where M is the black hole’s mass, and G and c are Newton’s gravitational constant and the speed of light. The observer is moving in a circular geodesic orbit.

View of a starfield under the influence of gravitational lensing. The camera is at radius r=2.6 GM/c2

View of a starfield under the influence of gravitational lensing. The camera is at radius r=6.03 GM/c2

View of a starfield under the influence of gravitational lensing. The camera is at radius r=6.03 GM/c2. The primary   and secondary critical curves are overlaid in purple and the path of a star at polar angle 0.608 pi is overlaid in red.

For a camera at radius rc = 6.03 GM/c2: Animation showing the mapping between points on the primary critical curve in the camera’s   sky and the primary   caustic curve on the celestial sphere.

For a camera at radius rc = 6.03 GM/c2: Animation showing the mapping between points on the secondary critical curve in the camera’s sky and the secondary caustic curve on the celestial sphere.

For a camera at radius rc = 2.6 GM/c2: Animation showing the mapping between points on the primary critical curve in the camera’s sky and the primary caustic curve on the celestial sphere.

For a camera at radius rc = 2.6 GM/c2: Animation showing the mapping between points on the secondary critical curve in the camera’s sky and the secondary caustic curve on the celestial sphere.

For a camera at radius rc = 2.6 GM/c2: Animation showing the mapping between points on the tertiary critical curve in the camera’s sky and the tertiary caustic curve on the celestial sphere.

DNGR development team: Oliver James, Sylvan Dieckmann, Simon Pabst, Damien Maupu, Paul-George Roberts, Shane Christopher VFX Supervisor: Paul Franklin CG Supervisor: Eugénie von Tunzelmann

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Interstellar's fake black holes are helping actual scientific research

Computer simulations used for the movie are accurate enough to be used by astrophysicists.

By James Vincent , a senior reporter who has covered AI, robotics, and more for eight years at The Verge.

Via New Scientist | Source IOP Publishing and Classical and Quantum Gravity

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Whether Interstellar was a good movie or not is still up for debate , but what seems certain now is that it led to some good science. Last year, Wired magazine explained how the visual effects team behind the space blockbuster worked with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to create a new computer simulation to model how light would be dragged into the black hole Gargantua. Now, the calculations underpinning this code have been published in a scientific journal , with astrophysicists saying the software could help them model other celestial objects in the future.

existing software just couldn't handle the size of the IMAX screen

When the Interstellar team began working on simulations for the film, they realized that current technology wasn't up to scratch. Their visualizations of stars flickered when scaled up to the 23 million-pixel resolution of an IMAX screen. Instead, they had to create an entirely new simulation model, which they named DNGR — or, the Double Negative Gravitational Renderer.

"To get rid of the flickering and produce realistically smooth pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a manner that has never been done before," said Oliver James, chief scientist at special effects team Double Negative, in a press release . Instead of tracing the paths of individual rays of light, say James, he and his team looked at bundles of light, creating a smoother moving image then ever before seen. This proved especially fruitful for visualizing gravitational lensing — an effect where light is bent around massive objects as it travels through space. It's these visualizations that could help astrophysicists model more cosmic oddities in the future.

Interestingly, the paper published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity also shows that the image of Gargantua that made it into the film wasn't the most scientifically accurate one. In the movie, Gargantua's accretion disc — the glowing ring of matter being pulled around, above, and below the black hole — was created at a relatively early stage, and has a fairly symmetrical design with a red tinge to the light.

The most realistic version of Gargantua. ( IOP Science )

However, by adding extra detail to their code, the scientists were able to create a more accurate image of Gargantua. The final version takes into account the vast rotational forces that would be created as the black hole spins. Not only do these forces throw matter to one side of the black hole, they also can change the color of the light for the observer. That's the Doppler effect — when a wave changes relative to an observer, because the source is moving. It's most obvious in day-to-day life when a vehicle with a siren drives by, and the sound gets higher as the siren gets closer, then lower as it moves away — but it also affects light.

"We base it in science, but we always give control so that artists can change it," James told the New Scientist. "The first images we gave [director Christopher Nolan] didn't have the Doppler shift, and I think he fell in love with them." Hopefully, scientists won't just fall in love with the simulations produced in the future by scientists using the Interstellar code — they'll also make them as accurate as possible as well.

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The Truth Behind Interstellar ‘s “Scientifically Accurate” Black Hole

You’ve probably heard that the black hole in Interstellar was a simulation of unprecedented scientific accuracy. You may also have heard that its creation led to an “amazing scientific discovery” having to do with the shape of its accretion disk, which loops over and under its dark, central shadow. Neither of these claims is true.

Above: What Gargantua’s accretion disk “would truly look like to an observer near the black hole.” | All images via James et al., licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

We spoke with Caltech physicist Kip Thorne, who served as both science advisor and executive producer on the film, to learn the real story behind Interstellar’s black hole, Gargantua. We also spoke with astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet, whose groundbreaking work on black holes in the 1970s was essential to the depiction of Gargantua in the film.

The Scientific Accuracy of Gargantua

A lot was made of the scientific accuracy of Interstellar in the lead-up to the film’s release. Director Christopher Nolan had worked closely with Thorne to see that as many plot points as possible were grounded in Real Science (or, more commonly, Speculative-Albeit-Imaginable Science).

Thorne even wrote a companion book to the film called The Science of Interstellar . The book elaborates on the scientific bases for the film’s various geological, astrophysical, and cosmological scenarios, and does an admirable job distinguishing scientific fact from conceivability and guesswork. Anyone who took issue with the film’s handling of science would do well to check it out; the film may play fast and loose with science here and there, but, as Thorne explains in his book, the decision to do so was almost always arrived at after much deliberation. Nolan, Thorne insists, did his homework.

Thorne did his fair share of intellectual legwork, as well. Through his collaboration with Nolan and Double Negative, the film’s visual effects studio, the renowned theoretical physicist used Albert Einstein’s equations on general relativity to help build what’s been hailed as the most accurate depiction of a black hole ever committed to film. And as if that weren’t sexy a story enough, several outlets reported that creating the film’s black hole had led to “an amazing scientific discovery” (a discovery about what, exactly, we’ll get to shortly).

But Gargantua, the massive black hole that appears in the film, was not actually as scientifically accurate as it could have been. And that “amazing” scientific discovery? Thorne tells io9 the discovery wasn’t as amazing as most outlets made it out to be. In fact, he says, many people actually missed what the discovery was, in the first place.

In a new paper, published Friday in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity , Thorne, along with co-authors Oliver James, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, and Paul Franklin (all three of Double Negative), describes the methods used to create the black hole featured in Interstellar, and why a more scientifically accurate simulation was excluded in favor of a flashier, “less-confusing” one.

A series of images from the paper shows, in order of increasing visual accuracy, what Gargantua would have looked like had science won out over story and spectacle.

The first image shows what Thorne and his co-authors describe as a “moderately realistic” accretion disk, the gyre of matter that orbits some black holes, and appears here to wrap over and under a spherical hole in spacetime.

The second and third images show what the accretion disk would look like, given the increasingly intense color-changing effects of Doppler and gravitational frequency shifts. (I’m simplifying, but these shifts characterize how light moving quickly toward and away from an observer affect the perceived color and intensity of that light.) The third and final image (which I’ve enlarged, below), write Thorne and his colleagues “is what the disk would truly look like to an observer near the black hole.”

Notice how the right side of the accretion disk, from our vantage point, appears to change color and waste away? While it is arguably the most realistic-looking black hole of the lot, Nolan feared its appearance would be too confusing for mass audience. In fact, the black hole could have looked even stranger, still. The simulation above shows what the black hole looked like after reducing its spin from 0.999-times its maximal value (a plausible but improbably fast spin, but one necessary to produce the huge time dilations experienced by those characters in the film who visit Miller’s planet) to 0.6-times maximal value. Were the disk spinning at full-speed, the left side of the black-hole’s shadow would appear to collapse into a flat, vertically-oriented boundary, and multiple images of the accretion disk would appear to emanate from this edge.

“It would have looked a lot more puzzling” Thorne tells io9. “The black hole plays a big role in the movie,” he says, and it does so without a detailed explanation of what it is you’re seeing (the fact, for example, that the gas appears to wrap up and around the top and bottom of the black hole due to an effect known as gravitational lensing).

“It’s quite spectacular,” Thorne says, “but if you add the Doppler shift and the gravitational frequency shift, the right side of the disk becomes so dark you can hardly see it, and the left side becomes so bright that it dominates in a really puzzling way.” Bring the black hole’s rotation up to .999-times its maximal value, and any remaining symmetry basically vanishes. The result is a very accurate model of a very specific genus of spinning black hole, says Thorne, but at the potential expense of clear, compelling storytelling.

Gargantua plus lens flare minus frequency shifts. It’s also spinning slower than expected for a black hole with its time-dilating properties.

The cinematic version of Gargantua benefited from some additional movie magic.

For instance, the visualization team modeled the black hole using bundles of light rays instead of individual ones, which evidently smoothed the appearance of the accretion disk. Lens flare was also added, to simulate the scattering and diffraction of light expected to occur in the lens of an IMAX camera trained on an accretion disk like the one in the film. Thorne tells io9 that “Chris [Nolan] loves lens flare,” and that, as a physicist, he actually found it “rather annoying” (the artifactual glare actually hides some scientifically interesting images of the gravitational star field behind the black hole, says Thorne – more on that later); but he assures us that the decision was not made gratuitously.

“The addition of lens flare is absolutely true to the real world characteristics of IMAX lenses,” he says. The simulation above is a variation of the accretion disk seen in the final film, and eschews the effects of fast spin, Doppler shift, and gravitational shift in favor of lens flare.

An Amazing Scientific Discovery?

Thorne says he was disappointed to see the most accurate black-hole simulations excluded from the film, but that he understood Nolan’s decision. “I completely agree with Chris [Nolan],” he says. “I would not want” a lopsided, color-shifted black hole “used in a fast paced movie using science as a venue for an exciting story.” The goal, he says, was to make the film as scientifically accurate as possible while producing images that could be understood by a mass audience.

But disappointed though he may have been to see the most accurate black hole simulations go unused, Thorne says he was more upset by articles that misrepresented his scientific contributions to the film. The original headline of a feature at Wired (it has since been changed) captures the tone of a spate of articles, published around the time of the film’s release, that Thorne found particularly troubling:

“How Building A Black Hole For Interstellar Led To An Amazing Scientific Discovery”

Thorne took issue with this article, and ones like it, for two reasons. The first has to do with the use of the “D” word, and the use of modifiers like “amazing.”

“There were no profound discoveries made in the simulation of these black holes,” he tells io9. Thorne was brought on board to provide the visual effects team at Double Negative with instructions for how to map light from an accretion disk to the “local sky” of a virtual IMAX camera near a spinning black hole. Double Negative then turned Thorne’s prescription into “Double Negative Gravitational Renderer” (aka DNGR), a fast, high-resolution package of image-generating code that differs from the techniques commonly used by physicists (you’ll recall that Double Negative could incorporate things like lens flare into its renderings, which can actually be counterproductive for an astrophysicist). Thorne and the Double Negative team then used their unconventional technique to observe black holes in – pardon the phrase – a new light.

“What we stumbled upon” were not so much discoveries but “cute little mysteries,” Thorne tells io9. His two newly published papers, he says “are about trying to understand these mysteries, and the weirdness they give rise to in the simulated images.”

One of the cute little mysteries Thorne is referring to has to do with the way light from an accretion disk bounces around the lens of a virtual IMAX camera. Another has to do with the way stars behind a spinning black hole, lensed by the gravitational deformation of spacetime, appear from a vantage point close to said black hole. The lensing, it turns out, gives rise to a complex, fingerprint-like structure along the left side of the black hole’s shadow. You can see it in simulations that do not include an accretion disk . One of the central ironies of this observation, in particular, is that the star field lensed by Gargantua is effectively invisible in Interstellar, washed out by the far-brighter lens flare of the black hole’s accretion disk.

Sure, Thorne admits, he and Double Negative got two publications out of their observations, but these are technical papers, he says. They’re as much for visual effects artists as they are for scientists. “It’s nothing profound,” he reiterates, “it’s just fun.”

The second issue Thorne had with articles trumpeting scientific discovery is that they tended to confuse what new insights had been gained in the first place.

From the Wired piece and others, Thorne said, “it sounded like what we found dealt with the apparent shape of the accretion disk, when it actually has to do with gravitational lensing patterns of stars behind the black hole.”

“I was not happy with that,” says Thorne.

In truth, astrophysicists have been simulating accretion disks in this way for decades, going back all the way to the groundbreaking work of French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet , in the late 1970s. What Thorne told me over the phone echoes what appears in his recent publication:

There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting.

I ran all of this by Luminet himself, who confirmed Thorne’s account of things and shared in his disappointment:

“I agree with his assessment,” Luminet responded via e-mail, “and I deeply respect Kip Thorne’s honesty… he was rather embarrassed by the use of the phrase ‘This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy’ used in the Wired article… [in such a way] that people might assume it refers to the disk.” In fact, Luminet confirms, the unprecedented accuracy refers neither to the accretion disk, nor the black hole as it appears in the film.

I asked Luminet whether he agreed with Thorne that the simplified appearance of Gargantua was a necessary compromise, made for the sake of clarity.

“I don’t necessarily share this point of view,” Luminet replied.

No matter how you slice it, he says, your typical moviegoer knows practically nothing about the properties of black holes. Why, then, would an audience necessarily be more confused by a more complex, realistic image?

“I think that the censorship came from the Hollywood producers,” says Luminet, “who arbitrarily decide what is good or not for the public.”

Read the paper published by Thorne and his co-authors at Double Negative in the latest issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity , or arXiv.org . Double Negative has also created a website for all film clips discussed in the paper, which you can visit here .

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Interstellar technology throws light on spinning black holes

The team responsible for the Oscar-nominated visual effects at the centre of Christopher Nolan's epic Interstellar have turned science fiction into science fact by providing new insights into the powerful effects of black holes.

In a paper published today, 13 February, in IOP Publishing's journal Classical and Quantum Gravity , the team describe the innovative computer code that was used to generate the movie's iconic images of the wormhole, black hole and various celestial objects, and explain how the code has led them to new science discoveries.

Using their code, the Interstellar team, comprising London-based visual effects company Double Negative and Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, found that when a camera is close up to a rapidly spinning black hole, peculiar surfaces in space, known as caustics, create more than a dozen images of individual stars and of the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives. They found that the images are concentrated along one edge of the black hole's shadow.

These multiple images are caused by the black hole dragging space into a whirling motion and stretching the caustics around itself many times. It is the first time that the effects of caustics have been computed for a camera near a black hole, and the resulting images give some idea of what a person would see if they were orbiting around a hole.

The discoveries were made possible by the team's computer code, which, as the paper describes, mapped the paths of millions of lights beams and their evolving cross-sections as they passed through the black hole's warped spacetime. The computer code was used to create images of the movie's wormhole and the black hole, Gargantua, and its glowing accretion disk, with unparalleled smoothness and clarity.

It showed portions of the accretion disk swinging up over the top and down under Gargantua's shadow, and also in front of the shadow's equator, producing an image of a split shadow that has become iconic for the movie.

This weird distortion of the glowing disk was caused by gravitational lensing--a process by which light beams from different parts of the disk, or from distant stars, are bent and distorted by the black hole, before they arrive at the movie's simulated camera.

This lensing happens because the black hole creates an extremely strong gravitational field, literally bending the fabric of spacetime around itself, like a bowling ball lying on a stretched out bed sheet.

Early in their work on the movie, with the black hole encircled within a rich field of distant stars and nebulae instead of an accretion disk, the team found that the standard approach of using just one light ray for one pixel in a computer code -- in this instance, for an IMAX picture, a total of 23 million pixels -- resulted in flickering as the stars and nebulae moved across the screen.

Co-author of the study and chief scientist at Double Negative, Oliver James, said: "To get rid of the flickering and produce realistically smooth pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a manner that has never been done before. Instead of tracing the paths of individual light rays using Einstein's equations--one per pixel--we traced the distorted paths and shapes of light beams."

Co-author of the study Kip Thorne said: "This new approach to making images will be of great value to astrophysicists like me. We, too, need smooth images."

Oliver James continued: "Once our code, called DNGR for Double Negative Gravitational Renderer, was mature and creating the images you see in the movie Interstellar, we realised we had a tool that could easily be adapted for scientific research."

In their paper, the team report how they used DNGR to carry out a number of research simulations exploring the influence of caustics--peculiar, creased surfaces in space--on the images of distant star fields as seen by a camera near a fast spinning black hole.

"A light beam emitted from any point on a caustic surface gets focussed by the black hole into a bright cusp of light at a given point," James continued. "All of the caustics, except one, wrap around the sky many times when the camera is close to the black hole. This sky-wrapping is caused by the black hole's spin, dragging space into a whirling motion around itself like the air in a whirling tornado, and stretching the caustics around the black hole many times."

As each caustic passes by a star, it either creates two new images of the star as seen by the camera, or annihilates two old images of the star. As the camera orbits around the black hole, film clips from the DNGR simulations showed that the caustics were constantly creating and annihilating a huge number of stellar images.

The team identified as many as 13 simultaneous images of the same star, and as many as 13 images of the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives.

These multiple images were only seen when the black hole was spinning rapidly and only near the side of the black hole where the hole's whirling space was moving toward the camera, which they deduced was because the space whirl was 'flinging' the images outward from the hole's shadow edge. On the shadow's opposite side, where space is whirling away from the camera, the team deduced that there were also multiple images of each star, but that the whirl of space compressed them inward, so close to the black hole's shadow that they could not be seen in the simulations.

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Materials provided by Institute of Physics . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Oliver James, Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Paul Franklin, Kip S Thorne. Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movieInterstellar . Classical and Quantum Gravity , 2015; 32 (6): 065001 DOI: 10.1088/0264-9381/32/6/065001

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The Science of 'Interstellar' Explained (Infographic)

Warning: SPOILER ALERT! This infographic contains details about the new space film "Interstellar."

The film " Interstellar " relies on real science for many of its stunning visuals. Physicist Kip Thorne, an expert on black holes and wormholes, provided the math that the special effects artists turned into movie magic. 

The spaceship Endurance's destination is Gargantua, a fictional supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. It lies 10 billion light-years from Earth and is orbited by several planets. Gargantua rotates at an astounding 99.8 percent of the speed of light .

"Interstellar" in Pictures: A Space Epic Gallery

Gargantua's accretion disc contains gas and dust with the temperature of the surface of the sun. The disc provides light and heat to Gargantua's planets.

The black hole's complex appearance in the film is due to the image of the accretion disc being warped by gravitational lensing into two images: one looping over the black hole and the other under it.

One feature of Einstein's equations is that time passes slower in higher gravity fields. So on a planet orbiting close to a black hole, a clock ticks much more slowly than on a spaceship orbiting farther away.

Warp Drives & Wormholes (Video)

Our three-dimensional universe can be thought of as a flat membrane (or "brane") floating in a four-dimensional void called the "Bulk." The presence of mass distorts the membrane as if it were a rubber sheet.

If enough mass is concentrated at a point, a singularity is formed. Objects approaching the singularity pass through an event horizon from which they can never return. If two singularities in far-apart locations could be merged, a wormhole tunnel through the Bulk could be formed. Such wormholes cannot form naturally, however.

Beings able to control gravity and travel through the Bulk could create wormholes and cross space much faster than light.

In two-dimensional diagrams, the wormhole mouth is shown as a circle. Seen in person, a wormhole would be a sphere. A gravitationally distorted view of space on the other side can be seen on the sphere's surface.

The film's wormhole is 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) in diameter and 10 billion light-years long.

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How the Movie ‘Interstellar’ Led to the Discovery of Scientific Phenomena

[image source: tedx/interstellar] the research and graphics team behind the movie ‘interstellar’ developed a graphics renderer so accurate, it led to the discovery of two scientific phenomena. generally, and frustratingly so, hollywood and science do not mix. it seems incredibly unlikely that a movie based on scientific facts would come to light. yet miraculously, the […].

Interesting Engineering

The research and graphics team behind the movie ‘Interstellar’ developed a graphics renderer so accurate, it led to the discovery of two scientific phenomena.

Generally, and frustratingly so, Hollywood and science do not mix. It seems incredibly unlikely that a movie based on scientific facts would come to light. Yet miraculously, the movie ‘Interstellar’ emerged as one of the biggest blockbusters of its year. Generally, sci-fi movies are more fi than sci, specifically pertaining to depictions of black holes. While previous movies have demonstrated impressive effects of a massive hole sucking in all matter, the scientific rules that they breach are rather alarming. As many academics in the scientific field know, a black hole is not a hole at, rather a massive sphere that has a gravitational field so strong, nearly nothing can escape it.

The definition of a black hole is “a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape” ( Source ). However, light  acts rather sporadically around the curves of space-time surrounding black holes. Contradictory to popular belief, however, black holes are some of the brightest regions in space. This is due to the immense amounts of matter and light that accumulate around the event horizon- or the point at which no light can escape. The matter heats up due to incredible amounts of friction, further accumulating and expelling incredible amounts of light. In hindsight, black holes are very, very dense stars. Creating an engine which incorporates these effects  while they themselves are not thouroughly understood requires extensive amounts of research.

Leading up to the break-through

The team comprised of doctors, physicists, software developers, and engineers alike, the team devised a conceptual design of a 3-dimentional hole and asked well-known physicist Kip Thorne analyze it. While the picture looks impressive, it Kip pointed out lacked a major component.

While the picture is impressive, it fundamentally lacks a critical component black holes exhibit, gravitational lensing. Massive bodies in space effectively warp space around them, altering the path light would otherwise travel as it nears the mass. Black holes are especially dense, containing so much mass that light can be placed into orbit around the void. Furthermore, what is behind the black hole, while it may not be directly visible, as the light is warped through space, some distant objects can become visible through gravitation lensing.

The effect is far from fictional, however. The effect has been well documented by the Hubble telescope through multiple images. Such an event can be seen below.

The orange galaxy in the middle of the photo is incredibly massive, warping the space around it, thereby bring into sight the blue galaxy behind it in the shape of a ring.

Not phased by the complexities of black holes, however, the research team continued collaborated daily with physicist Kip to develop rendering software that could emulate a black hole as close to reality as possible. Obviously, however, it is not particularly easy to visualize a black hole with the nearest one residing nearly  27,000 light-years away. As such, the team relied on dozens of scientific papers to reconstruct an engine backed by decades of real physical equations.

Further complicating the matter was the fact that the movie was destined for IMAX theaters, requiring the engine to emulate the black hole in unprecedented detail. Through months of dedicated research and development with collaborations between well-known physicists, however, the team was able to develop a game engine to render a black hole in never before seen detail. The development led an incredibly compelling image. The following video was created with the software.

However, while remaining scientifically accurate, the rendering failed to portray any depth to give the view a sense of relative relation to the black holes position, a critical component necessary for the plot of the story. With that, the team decided to add another component for visual effect. An accretion disk, which is essentially a belt of gas that orbits around a black hole gathering heat through friction as it moves, was added to the simulation. The ring gives off a compelling bright glow, adding another layer of complexity.

What’s the big deal?

As the researchers analyzed their monumental success, a few peculiar phenomenons were noted. The imaging software enabled the team to explore the environment leading up to the event horizon. The incredible resolution gave the team an incredibly detailed view of some particularly interesting effects tacking place towards the edge of the black hole. As the black hole spun up to nearly the speed of light (which was included as part of the rendering code), space bent into increasingly convoluted shapes, a discovery which no one has ever before seen.

With the discovery of the spiraling warped space-time along with the techniques involved in rendering it, the team was able to publish two scientific papers. Hollywood often butchers every scientific law, however, the one exception to that being Interstellar was able to not only portray a fantastic movie, but also give back to the scientific community through its incredible discovery, perhaps marginally saving Hollywood from its often ridiculed view on science. Sometimes reality can, in fact, be crazier than fiction.

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Further readings of the scientific discovery can be read through the published paper , as well as the full story can be viewed from the TedX video linked below.

SEE ALSO:  Astronaut Scott Kelly Aged Slower Than His Twin While in Space

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Kip Thorne, Christopher Nolan - The Science of Interstellar

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Justin Sands

One can view the recent science fiction films Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian as a three-part dialogue concerning the existential relationship between humanity, technology, and the science employed to create said technologies. Pitched into the deep of space, each film's protagonist must seek to find technological answers to save their own existence. Each film's exploration of these themes essentially questions the importance of technology as a product of scientific-calculative thinking and the validity of this thinking as the primary mode of understanding the world. In this article, I explore the existential dialogue crafted between these films through Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Through Benjamin, we will see how the medium of film is completely dependent upon technology to present its art and how this transforms the stories it tells, while also transforming the audience and the audience's reality. Consequently, understanding the popular reception of these films becomes just as important as the films themselves for our present study. Through Heidegger, we will see how technology provides a space where we can find a truth about ourselves and our reality. However, modern technology's increasing scientific complexity, created by scientists who in turn employ modern technology to further science, also conceals just as much as it reveals. These films provide us with an opportunity to explore a truth about our dependence upon technology even though, as technologically dependent works of art, they may also conceal how dependent upon science we have become when constructing our reality. Please Note: This is the next to last draft of my article, published by South African Journal of Philosophy. You can access the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02580136.2017.1423441. If the link no longer works, it is in South African Journal of Philosophy, Volume 37, 2018. Please cite the published article and please email me at [email protected] for any questions or comments. Thanks for reading!

This essay was inspired by the possibility that futures studies methods, theories and frameworks could shed some light on science fiction, in particular contemporary science fiction cinema – to act as a window into contemporary culture. Much is written about our future from the vantage point of futures studies, from literature on megatrends to scenarios of the near and long term future. And still more is written about science fiction genre, which arguably grapples most with complex issues and social and technological transformation. And yet still more is narrated and imagined by science fiction about our futures – from space operas, to robotic soap dramas, dystopian noir, cautionary allegory, and psychohistory. But what is written about science fiction from the vantage point of futures studies? Could futures studies be used to shed light on science fiction, to interpret science fiction and derive insights about ourselves? My interest is in a proposition. That contemporary filmic science fiction may tell us more about ourselves than the future per se. And by extension, the proposition that popular filmic science fiction is as much or even more about our collective unconscious, rather than the actual future. This is not a new idea. Many have commented on science fiction’s role in addressing contemporary issues (Nandy in Ramos, 2005, p.434). The novelty this essay attempts to engage in, is in using futures studies methods, theories and frameworks as the conceptual leverage to do this kind of interpretive work. In the case of this essay, futures studies approaches are applied toward understanding the film Interstellar (2014).

International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies

Gabriela Jasso González , Luis Daniel Martínez Alvarez , Alfonso Carlos Espinosa Jaimes

Christopher Nolan's filmography transcends a complex narrative process inherited from a huge cinematic tradition of editing and handling the camera as a narrator. From the first documentary shorts and feature films, where the camera is presented as an active, subjective, phenomenal, intentional and transcendental narrator, Nolan's work exhibits a series of dynamic and dialectical qualities of the narratological expressiveness of the camera as an active narrator. This article focuses on a series of philosophical, cinematic and theoretical reflections on the role of the camera from a phenomenological perspective in the fifth-dimension scene in the film Interstellar.

George A Dunn

As a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has substantially impacted contemporary cinema through avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contribution to wider pop culture with his Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience anticipates. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan collects sixteen essays, written by professional philosophers and film theorists, discussing themes such as self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what’s “real,” the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a “viewer” of Nolan’s films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true nature, or having to weigh the lives of those they love against the greater good, there are no simple solutions to the questions Nolan’s films provoke; exploring these questions yields its own reward.

Adam Pogioli

This paper explores the cosmology of contemporary science, theory and fiction, arguing that science fiction— especially as it turns to consider fundamental concepts in physics—is pressed by the demands of thematic unity towards the holistic frameworks developed in the physics of the scientific underground, which is itself an extension of concepts in the theory of dynamical systems and complexity. The film "Interstellar" is highlighted in particular for its exploration of gravity—a concept not well conceptualized in physics, despite its centrality to our cosmology. A better understanding of space and time is sketched through a more intuitive look at gravity. As anticipated by Goethe and the reciprocal systems theory developed by Dewey Larson, a relational and topological physics is argued to be the future of our cosmological understanding and an inevitable consequence of our converging threads of knowledge acquisition.

Renaldo Botha

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