The Science of Interstellar

"To me, Kip Thorne does what I used to think all scientists do. When people ask, ‘What are the possibilities?’ scientists like Thorne can paint beautiful pictures of some amazing ideas, concepts nobody has thought of in the past. Here he was working with Christopher Nolan, who was making the movie Interstellar and thinking about things like ‘What does it actually look like to fall into a black hole?’ or ‘How do time machines work?’ Thorne gets to step beyond dry academic interpretations and present things in elegant and visual terms, which Christopher Nolan transformed so you can see them on a screen. Kip Thorne was able to take what is typically an equation on a blackboard and give a visceral description of what it looks like in such a way that a filmmaker could then turn it into a picture. To me, that’s almost magical. It’s transforming what might initially seem like a preposterous idea into something visual and approachable. It’s stunning. And the pictures Thorne includes are gorgeous. In this book, he takes a lot from the CGI of the movie. You just flip through, find a beautiful picture that you can read about and understand what it means. You find out it’s not just an artist’s interpretation but an artist’s representation of really hard science. All the pieces make sense when you go through these images that he’s assembled for the book. He’s among the most serious. There’s a great textbook which I was tempted to put on this list. It’s called Gravitation and it’s by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler —the Thorne being Kip Thorne. It’s the book that all gravitational physicists must own. It’s divided into two tracks. One track is very approachable for beginning students, and even general readers. It illustrates relativity and gravity with descriptions of things like ants crawling on apples. Track one is full of interesting, evocative stories that make difficult concepts intelligible. Then track two gets into the math. When you go through their examples in Gravitation , you can see the seeds of Interstellar and what Thorne’s done for the movie to explain things. He’s very good at finding these examples of how, yes, gravity is math, you have complicated equations to explain it—but it’s also all around us in ways we can see and feel. You can describe the universe using equations, but you can also just point at things we can observe in telescopes and tell us what’s going on."