Warning: this piece may contain spoilers 

Space exploration has been a common theme throughout the history of mankind.  From the beginning of time people have always looked up to the sky, curious about what lies beyond it. The dreams of reaching outer space and exploring areas that could further human research and development has been deeply engraved into modern history and soon became a reality when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first to arrive in 1961 on Sputnik, and it is safe to say that space exploration has improved tremendously since then. 

Hollywood has since then taken the ideas of what lies beyond our skies and has expanded everyone’s viewpoints on it. Several films have been produced that depict representations of space exploration. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these films are accurate, but they have inspired many to research the unknown. Many popular space exploration films include Hidden Figures, Apollo 13, The Martian, Aliens, and Gravity. In 2014, the well-known and successful director, Christopher Nolan, produced his own interpretation of space, Interstellar. 

In a world riddled by devastating droughts, famines, and disasters, Interstellar begins by introducing the lead engineer and pilot, Cooper. The film is set to take place in the year 2067 in rural northeastern Colorado. Once a profound engineer and powerful pilot, Cooper is now forced to work on his farm, desperate to provide enough food for his family and neighbors. Eventually he regains contact with a previously NASA coordinated group, turned independent. This leads him to pilot the Endurance, a spacecraft whose mission is to travel through a wormhole in order to find a potentially habitable planet for mankind to exist on before inevitable extinction. They also hope to rescue a team of previous astronauts who each sought to observe a specific planet, known as the Lazarus mission. 

Utilizing the wormhole as a mode of transportation into another galaxy brought forth many questions amongst scientists. Jack Priske, Aerospace Engineering student at Wartburg College, states that “The subject of wormholes and utilizing them as a mode of travel is very complex and somewhat hypothetical. Wormholes bend the fabric of space time into a higher dimension that could allow for quicker human travel between two distant points in our galaxy or even the universe. Science proves that wormholes exist but to this day we haven’t seen proof of any. We can’t even prove the wormholes are transversable, meaning that you could come back through the wormhole if you entered it. A more feasible method for interstellar travel could be through hypersleep pods or somehow developing a propulsive spacecraft that could travel close to the speed of light.”

During The Endurance’s mission, they are seen planning a route around Gargantua- a large black hole. Coop is worried that traveling near Gargantua would cause them to lose a lot of time. 

Priske was asked about his interpretation of space-time relativity, this is what he said- 

“Time relativity comes from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity in which space-time is like a sheet of fabric in space that is warped around bigger objects that are on it. I like to think about it as a funnel. When you push down on a sheet of fabric it creates a depression or a funnel that causes things to fall into it. For example, Earth is a massive planetary body that creates the funnel in the space-time fabric and causes things to fall into it (also known as gravity). The reason that the astronauts in Interstellar experience “different time” is due to the planet being very close to Gargantua. Gargantua is a black hole that has a huge gravitational pull because it greatly affects the space-time fabric, in other words creating a huge funnel for things to fall into it.”

Interstellar also brings up the concept of black holes and time being seen as a physical dimension within them. 

Priske believes that “Similar to wormholes, black holes are also very complex. Nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the black hole once it passes its event horizon, making our knowledge of black holes very limited. It’s hard to truly understand what would actually happen if you were to fall into a black hole like Coop did in Interstellar (science would prove that gravity would stretch you out until death). Coop fell into the black hole hoping he could obtain the necessary quantum data needed to solve professor Brand’s equation of gravity. This gets pretty confusing but the ‘beings’ created a 5th dimension that represented time as a physical dimension so that Coop could interact with Murphy’s watch and relate to her the quantum data from the black hole.”

When asked about his interpretation of a white hole potentially being the exit route for a black hole, as seen near the end of Coop’s journey, Priske stated that “The end of Interstellar is confusing and after watching it numerous times and even having a better understanding of space, it still confuses me. The end of the movie shows Coop traveling back through the wormhole and shot out into Saturn’s orbit where the station picked him up. One of my theories that suggests he made it back alive is the idea that Gargantua (the black hole) is connected to the wormhole and the other end is the white hole that spits Coop back out. A white hole is opposite of a black hole in which it pushes matter out of itself instead of pulling matter into itself. Science can theorize that when a black hole and a white hole collides, a wormhole can form.”

Overall this Aerospace Engineering student believes that Interstellar is a great movie, worthy of a 10/10 rating!