Why we are fanatic space lover

Look at the stars, look how they shine for you

It's inappropriate to quote lyrics here, to describe the feeling about this book, especially to Kip Thorne. I should know Professor Thorne's name 14 years ago, in Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Fortunately in this year, a biographical film, named The Theory of Everything, illustrates Hawking's life and the famous "bet" between Thorne, Preskill and Hawking himself. Small world.

Let's concentrate on interstellar travel.

First we try to understand the framework here: how do we know whether it is true or a speculation. Kip Thorne makes rules here:

1. Nothing in the film will violate firmly established laws of physics, or our firmly established knowledge of the universe.
2. Speculations (often wild) about ill-understood physical laws and the universe will spring from real science, from ideas that at least some “respectable” scientists regard as possible.

"The science of Interstellar lies in all four domains: Newtonian, relativistic, quantum, and quantum gravity." As quoted in this book, we understand the first three domains more or less. However, for the forth one, the quantum gravity, with its own field, we know very little indeed so far. It may exist or become significant centuries in the future, with those anomalies, like the coin Cooper tosses that suddenly plunges to the floor. Here is the "respectable" speculation.

Then how to travel in the space?

"Interstellar is an adventure in which humans encounter black holes, wormholes, singularities, gravitational anomalies, and higher dimensions. All these phenomena are “made from” warped space and time, or are tied intimately to that warping. This is why I like to call them the 'warped side of the universe.'” The warped space gives intuition to Jonathan Nolan and his brother, and "Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein’s relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It’s somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself."

Here we go. The word "warped" repeats so many times in this book. Before Cooper is trapped in the blackhole, almost everything we could deduce on space travel is based on the warped space and time.

For the blackhole, Kip Thorne considers interstellar is the first Hollywood movie to depict a black hole correctly, in the manner that humans would actually see and experience it. We need data of blackhole, since "If we know the mass of a black hole and how fast it spins, then from Einstein’s relativistic laws we can deduce all the hole’s other properties: its size, the strength of its gravitational pull, how much its event horizon is stretched outward near the equator by centrifugal forces, the details of the gravitational lensing of objects behind it."

That's why Cooper and TARS ships towards Gargantua, the gentle blackhole in the new galaxy. But how could they survive? Let's discover the new findings in science.

"In 1985, we physicists thought the cores of all black holes were inhabited by chaotic, destructive BKL singularities, and everything that entered a black hole would be destroyed by the singularity’s stretch and squeeze. That was our highly educated guess. We were wrong.

In the intervening quarter century, two additional singularities were discovered, mathematically, inside black holes: gentle singularities, to the extent that any singularity can be gentle. Gentle enough that Cooper, falling into one, might possibly survive. I’m dubious of survival, but we can’t be sure. So I now think it respectable, in science fiction, to posit survival. Also in the intervening quarter century, we have learned that our universe is probably a brane in a higher-dimensional bulk. So it’s respectable, I think, to posit living beings that inhabit the bulk—a very advanced civilization of bulk beings—who might save Cooper from the singularity at the last moment. That’s what Christopher Nolan chose."

We get the meaning of "gentle" here. More fascinating, the next is really exciting to me.

In Einstein’s more accurate, relativistic version of the gravitational laws, the strength of gravity, and the strength of all the warping of space and time produced by matter, are also proportional to this G. If there is no bulk—if the only thing that exists is our four-dimensional universe—then Einstein’s relativistic laws say that G is absolutely constant.

However it may NOT always be constant.

If the bulk does exist, then the relativistic laws allow this G to change. It might, the Professor speculates, be controlled by bulk fields. It probably is controlled by bulk fields, he thinks. All the characters in Interstellar are convinced that bulk beings exist, though they use that name only rarely. Usually, the characters call the bulk beings “They.”

"They" creates the space for us, and "They" creates the wormhole, the final tesseract.

"In our universe, space has three dimensions: up-down, east-west, and north-south. But to schedule lunch with a friend, we must tell her not only where, but also when. In this sense, time is a fourth dimension. In Interstellar, the characters often refer to five dimensions. Three are the space dimensions of our own universe or brane (east-west, north-south, up-down). The fourth is time, and the fifth is the bulk’s extra space dimension."

Here comes the two paragraphs I love in the last chapter.

"We live in a universe governed by physical laws. By laws that we humans are capable of discovering, deciphering, mastering, and using to control our own fate. Even without bulk beings to help us, we humans are capable of dealing with most any catastrophe the universe may throw at us, and even those catastrophes we throw at ourselves—from climate change to biological and nuclear catastrophes."

"But doing so, controlling our own fate, requires that a large fraction of us understand and appreciate science: How it operates. What it teaches us about the universe, the Earth, and life. What it can achieve. What its limitations are, due to inadequate knowledge or technology. How those limitations may be overcome. How we transition from speculation to educated guess to truth. How extremely rare are revolutions in which our perceived truth changes, yet how very important."

I love this book, not only for the explanation of interstellar, but for Kip Thorne's sparking idea. When I was a little child, I would love to look at the stars. We live on the earth, but it doesn't mean we have to die here. Last year, Gravity showed how we managed to survive in the universe. This year, Interstellar shows how we discover the unknown, and turn it to real.

Space is the final frontier. We are still pioneers.