The Physics and Philosophy of Interstellar
There are not many films where the visual effects pipeline produces a peer-reviewed physics paper. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is one of them. The visualisation of the supermassive black hole Gargantua was rigorous enough that it ended up in Classical and Quantum Gravity, co-authored by the visual effects team and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne. That single fact captures what makes the film unusual. It is, on the surface, a story about love, time, and survival. Underneath, it is a serious attempt to take Einstein’s general relativity and put it on a 70mm IMAX screen with as little fudging as Hollywood would allow. ...