Directed by Gail Willumsen
Produced Jill Shinefield and Gail Willumsen
Narrated by Matthew McConaughey
The Science of Interstellar
Worm holes, black holes and time travel—oh my!
Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi extravaganza is not the first Hollywood movie to deal with space travel, but it has a unique pedigree. Nolan decided to give his film a backbone of real science, and he grounded his storyline in the research of theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne. But what about movie-goers who don’t know a worm hole from a black hole?
That’s where Gemini’s one-hour companion documentary, The Science of Interstellar came in. We reached out to the experts and got a crash course in general relativity and quantum theory. Nobel Laureate Andrea Ghez at UCLA schooled us in the complexities of black holes. Planetary scientist Natalie Batalha, at NASA Ames taught us how to hunt for habitable planets beyond our solar system. Kip Thorne boggled our minds as he described gravitational waves that disturb in the curvature of spacetime. And we checked in with Elon Musk about his plans for colonizing Mars.
Produced for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, The Science of Interstellar was broadcast on the Discovery, Science and American Hero channels, and is packaged as an “extra” in the home entertainment edition of the feature film.
This artist's concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Kip Thorne posited the possibility of using cosmic wormholes to travel in time.
Nathalie Batalha has helped find nearly 5,000 new worlds beyond our solar system.