I’ve read a lot lately about the movie “Interstellar”. I haven’t seen it, and I probably won’t see it anytime soon. But it sounds pretty interesting given that it uses some very heavy ideas from modern physics and cosmology to cobble a science-fiction / outer-space / dark-future story together. I’ve read that the producers enlisted a world-class physicist, Kip Thorne, to help them “keep it real”. But in the end, Hollywood is Hollywood and entertainment comes before accuracy. From what I’ve read, the whole thing turns into a hot scientific mess, with the hero-astronaut falling down into a black hole past the event-horizon “point of no return”, and yet somehow getting out intact.

This is where the filmmakers obviously told Kip to stay away. (Although, Dr. Thorne is known for some pretty wacky ideas, including the very unlikely idea of using a portable wormhole as an escape hatch from the gravity time dilation effect, thus allowing a person subject to relativistic time slow-down to live in both his or her past, and in his or her present!) Under the laws of physics as we know them, you can’t venture past an event horizon and get out. There are various theories as to how the information about you or anything else that would fall through an event horizon can get out (although you wouldn’t know how to reconstruct and interpret it), and how eventually over many billions of years, perhaps everything in a black hole gets out via some sort of quantum evaporation process. But you can’t send a probe down get any sort of an immediate and usable signal back from it, not even a “gravity wave” signal (which currently cannot be detected anyway for being so faint).

And then there’s the spaghetti-ification factor, the fact that as you approach the core of the black hole, tidal gravitational forces would stretch you into a thin string of matter. Oh, and as if that’s not enough, now there’s the firewall paradox, the possibility that  »  continue reading …