HOW A FILM CONTRIBUTED TO SCIENCE

We have seen how science has been one of the major factors in affecting the making of films. From realistic science to our favorite science fiction; Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Astronomy, Mathematics and many other sciences have helped shape the film industry to what we know and love today. Sometimes science has been entirely used as a genre of itself - independent and self sufficient to carry the plot of a film - and sometimes mixed with other genres to introduce intense storytelling and powerful suspense. Directors like Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese are known for their great use of psychology to produce films that would keep you thinking long past the movie's run time. Many other films have used various sciences to create movies that are everlasting in mankind's history e.g. Jurassic Park, Planet of the Apes, Alien, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity, Inception just to name a few.

This is just one side of the story, seeing how science has contributed to the film industry. But have we ever explored how films might have contributed to science, either helping explain theories that might have seemed so hard to understand in the first place or introduce alternate depictions that were never existent in the first place. The former has been done a couple of times though in a very minimal sense e.g. The concept of time travel. The latter however is a very rare thing to see but the making of one film - Interstellar - which incorporated a film genius, a great theoretical physicist and a dedicated VFX team made this possible. Christopher Nolan, Kip Thorne and the VFX team under supervisor Paul Franklin created a depiction that would bring a new discovery in theoretical science - the visual of a black hole. Using the calculations provided to them by Thorne, the VFX team rendered the visual of a black hole that surprised Thorne himself in the way it stayed true to the calculations and the theories of gravity involved.

Pertaining this information, wired.com writes:

Kip Thorne looks into the black hole he helped create and thinks, “Why, of course. That's what it would do.” ¶ This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy. It appears to spin at nearly the speed of light, dragging bits of the universe along with it. (That's gravity for you; relativity is superweird.) In theory it was once a star, but instead of fading or exploding, it collapsed like a failed soufflé into a tiny point of inescapable singularity. A glowing ring orbiting the spheroidal maelstrom seems to curve over the top and below the bottom simultaneously.

To continue reading the full version of the article from wired.com visit this link: http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/ 

Courtesy of Warner Bros. UK

Courtesy of Discovery Channel

Jin Chang