Physicists Say: "Interstellar" Should Be Shown In Classrooms

by Monica Joshi

Watching "Interstellar" was like watching a science fiction movie: deeply based in the recent advances of science, but still fiction because of the scope of the story. The film, directed by Christopher Nolan, explores our universe in more epic proportions than has ever been done before. Therefore, according to some physicists, "Interstellar" ought to be shown in science classrooms for its graphics.

The proposition isn't just a random insight from movie addicts, but rather a carefully thought-out conclusion from a recent paper that explores the hard physics used to make the movie as accurate as possible. As Christopher Nolan worked with Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, it was their ambition to make the visuals of the galactic objects as scientifically accurate as possible.

Dr. David Jackson, who printed one of the papers earlier this month in the American Journal of Physics, said that:

"The physics has been very carefully reviewed by experts and found to be accurate. The publication will encourage physics teachers to show the film in their classes to get across ideas about general relativity."

However, general relativity is not the only hard concept that the movie explores. It also looks at time dilation, wormholes and black holes.

In the paper, the authors write that:

"...although wormholes were central to the theme of Contact and to many movies and TV shows since then, including Star Trek and Stargate, none of these have depicted correctly a wormhole as it would be seen by a nearby human. Interstellar is the first to do so."

"Interstellar" is also the first movie to try to depict what it would be like to be in close proximity to a black hole, which was an awe-inspiring feature in the film.

The film team went as far as to create new software to model how a black hole would look –gravitational lensing, accretion disks and all. And it needed to be impressive enough to plaster over a cinema screen (with 23 million pixels per image). A second paper published in Classical and Quantum Gravity describes in detail the process used by the visual effects company, Double Negative.

They have already begun showing Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Cosmos in classes, and rightfully so. They shouldn't stop there. Watching science fiction like "Interstellar" can offer students and teachers a lot more than just science-based knowledge; it can also fill them with awe and wonder about the world, leaving them itching to learn more about it.