Interstellar from a physics/sci-fi writer’s POV (spoilers)

I’ve spent the better part of the last two years researching many mind-bending aspects of physics for a story I’m writing about scientists uncovering the fundamental nature of the universe. As such I deem myself smart enough to elaborate on what’s going on in the film, despite not having any actual scientific creds. Obviously, spoilers.

So here’s what’s going on.

Anne Hathaway’s character Amelia Brand is the most important piece of the puzzle, because as we find out late in the film, she landed on a habitable planet. I assume she was able to incubate human life there using the embryos she brought along. At some point McConaughey’s Cooper finds her and presumably brings the remaining human population, who had been living on enormous space stations, to live with her. There, humanity flourishes and over time transcends the third dimension.

That could happens, if you believe the theorists, with the help of advanced artificial intelligence which, when combined with human cerebral function, will apparently allow humans to exist beyond their corporeal limits. Imagine your subconscious leaving your body and just sort of chilling out somewhere beyond the physical limits of space and time. The film Lucy offers a good example of this, when Scarlett Johansson sort of disappears at the end. She becomes one with the universe, and I believe the 5th dimensional humans in Interstellar are of a similar ilk.

So let’s assume that this happened, and the new 5th dimensional beings — are able to see and understand existence from outside the boundaries of time, not to mention manipulate it. Knowing that the fate of humanity rests on Brand finding the wormhole and redeveloping human civilization, these beings somehow figure out a plan that eventually sends Cooper on his mission, with help from his daughter and the ghost storyline with the book case.

Edit: here’s a helpful flowchart I found on Reddit after I wrote this that confirms this line of thinking.

That, or a similar version of that, is one way to understand the film’s overall sci-fi plot (character plot is totally different) based on existing theories that I’ve read about. Yes, assumptions are made to get here, but it more or less works.

Here’s where things get tricky. The entire scenario creates a time loop paradox. In order for Brand to complete her recivilization mission, the worm hole had to be opened, the final Lazarus crew had to go through it and experience everything that happened — none of which could have occurred without the intervention of the 5th dimensional humans.

If you’re confused, here’s another way to look at it: humanity only survives if they get help from the 5th dimensional beings, but the 5th dimensional beings never come to be unless their human predecessors survive (by traveling through the wormhole).

This is tricky for us to understand because we experience time as linear. But for anything that exists outside the boundaries of three dimensional reality, time is not linear — one way to think of it is that for them, everything that ever happen, occurred in the same instant, and they’re able to “see” every moment the linear universe laid out in front of them like a map.

So at the same moment humanity was fighting for its very survival, the 5th dimensional beings were coming into existence, essentially stopping time, and allowing them to (thanks to big sci-fi assumptions about communication) help their ancestors through their trials.

Time loop paradoxes are common in sci-fi, and can be fun to play with. But without some mental gymnastics they are really hard to follow. You sort have to just accept the paradox exists and ignore it because, in this case, something is happening outside our dimension of space and time, and there’s no way we could ever perceive it anyway. So why try?

Now, one could hypothesize that one of the original 12 Lazarus mission specialists who were marooned on various planets a decade before we picked up the story, found a way to survive and that his or her descendants became the 5th dimensional humans. This is less likely because there was no way to repopulate before Brand came along with her embryos. Also, you still have the time loop paradox to deal with since the initial Lazarus voyages sent astronauts through the worm hole.

Ok, so maybe wormholes occur naturally. Long story short, one opening near Saturn would completely mess up our solar system. Like, forget global warming because the earth just spun off into deep space type stuff.

The black hole, aka Gargantuan, deserves mention as well, namely because it became the vehicle not only for Cooper to save humanity, but also for him to get home.

Let’s start with the getting home part. Various theories have stated that a black hole’s singularity, the point where all that gravity condenses, could create a rip in space time that becomes a wormhole. The first hint we get that the Gargantuan’s singularity resulted in the Saturn worm hole is when Brand’s hand gets all weird during the trip out. She’s passing Cooper who is on his way back, though you don’t know that until the end. It’s the only indication the black hole and worm hole are connected, though you would have to be pretty clever to figure that out before seeing the entire film.

Second, the Gargantuan seems to exist for the sole purpose of letting Cooper play ghost with his daughter. Leading black hole formation theory states that they are formed when a star 100 million times larger than our own goes supernova, collapsing in on itself. This creates a gap, because as far as we know the 5th dimensional beings created the black hole to help Cooper. But in reality, they are a natural phenomenon.

Ok, so maybe the 5th dimensional beings can create custom black holes, but then why not just drop humanity a line and give them the quantum data they needed to manipulate gravity (using Dr. Brand/Michael Cain’s equation) to begin with? Seems a bit elaborate considering all they “needed” was a quantity of information that was communicable via morse code.

There’s a lot more small stuff, like love being a transcendent power outside of space and time that was necessary to make the whole thing work. I really like this idea as a storyline, but not as a sci-fi fan.

My story takes a different approach to playing with physics, instead focusing on what happens when humanity uncovers the fundamental nature of the universe. The *working* title is Interversal, which is so damn close to Interstellar I will definitely have to change it. But if you’re interested the first chapter is on WattPad.

PS — Matt Damon. Just…why?