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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

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How FX Wizards Brought Interstellar’s Strange Bots to Life

INTERSTELLAR
While Christopher Nolan was making Interstellar, he decided to show a model of the movie’s bots to his kids. They were extremely disappointed. “That’s not a robot,” they told him. “That’s a box.” Well, it’s true: Nolan’s intelligent machines, which he dreamed up with production designer Nathan Crowley, look for all the universe like slabs […]
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One Man’s Quest to Build a Mind-Warping 4-D Videogame

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There's a row of books on a shelf in Marc ten Bosch's living room that contains a crash course in higher dimensions. Titles like Flatland. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. A young-adult novel called The Boy Who Reversed Himself. They're all devoted to helping our brains break out of the three dimensions in which we exist, to aid our understanding of a universe that extends beyond our perception.
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The Tricky Ethics of Intergalactic Colonization

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Leif Podhajsky Zheng He! Zheng He! Is there a better icon for interstellar voyaging? Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng set out from China on massive naval expeditions that reached as far as Mecca and Mombasa, journeys with more than 300 vessels and 28,000 crew, excursions far bigger and longer than those of Columbus more than […]
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The Ugly Battle Over Who Really Discovered the First Earth-Like Planet

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No one knows what the planet Gliese 667Cc looks like. We know that it is about 22 light-years from Earth, a journey of lifetimes upon lifetimes. But no one can say whether it is a world like ours, with oceans and life, cities and single-malt Scotch. Only a hint of a to-and-fro oscillation in the star it orbits, detectable by Earth's most sensitive telescopes and spectrographs, lets astronomers say the planet exists at all. The planet is bigger than our world, perhaps made of rocks instead of gas, and within its star's “habitable zone”—at a Goldilocks distance that ensures enough starlight to make liquid water possible but not so much as to nuke the planet clean.
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How a Superchilled Telescope Will Look Back at the Dawn of the Universe

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To see back in time, you need a massive telescope—one big enough to capture light from when the first galaxies were formed, 13.5 billion years ago. Astronomers are clamoring to see this light, so NASA is obliging them by building the James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb will operate 1 million miles from Earth in […]
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We All Might Be Living in an Infinite Hologram

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Quarks and leptons, the building blocks of matter, are staggeringly small—less than an attometer (a billionth of a billionth of a meter) in diameter. But zoom in closer—a billion times more—past zeptometers and yoctometers, to where the units run out of names. Then keep going, a hundred million times smaller still, and you finally hit bottom: This is the Planck length, the smallest possible unit in the universe. Beyond this point, physicists say, the very notion of distance becomes meaningless.
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A Guide to Flatland: What It’s Like to Live in Two Dimensions

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Mathematician Ian Stewart wants us to see what he sees. Which is kind of a problem, because he’s accustomed to envisioning some pretty impossible shapes: snowflakes in fractional dimensions, hypercubes in 4-D, 11-dimensional superstrings. So when the University of Warwick professor and author writes about these freaky geometries, he relies on an analogy—a way for us blockheads to understand realities above, below, and in between our three dimensions. His guide is a little mathematical fantasy he read over half a century ago: the cult classic Flatland. 
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The Impact of Borges, Brazil, and M. C. Escher on Interstellar

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Christopher Nolan owes a lot to 1977: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Spy Who Loved Me—three movies he often cites as major influences. But more important, 1977 was the year his dad took him to the theater to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. The precocious kid instantly fell in love, and a career was born. “Movies become indistinguishable from our own memories,” Nolan says. “You file them away and they become very personal.” Those memories burrow through time and erupt in his films, so we journeyed back to see which works and artists have incepted him.
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Interstellar Was So Big It Almost Broke IMAX

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When it comes to Interstellar, the spaceship Endurance isn't the only thing going where no one has gone before—so is the movie itself. At 2 hours, 47 minutes, and 7 seconds, Interstellar is the longest Imax presentation ever. To screen it, all that film is wound up and placed on a 72-inch-diameter platter; fully loaded it weighs 600 pounds and takes a forklift to move. D
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An Oral History of the Epic Space Film The Right Stuff

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Before writer-director Philip Kaufman brought Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff to the big screen in 1983, onscreen astronauts were little more than alien quarry or asteroid bait. In Kaufman's hands, however, spaceflight became a far more human pursuit—a story not of external threats but inner resolve. With its three-hour-plus run time and unconventional structure, the film—which tells the story of test pilots like Chuck Yeager and Gordon Cooper as they break the sound barrier and launch toward the exosphere—was almost as daring as its subject. (Kaufman calls it “the longest movie ever made without a plot.”) But it introduced an entire cinematic genre, what Quentin Tarantino has called the “hip epic,” inspiring everyone from Michael Bay to James Cameron, who hired its cinematographer for Titanic. Its dialog has become a go-to signifier of human accomplishment; director Rian Johnson celebrated landing his Star Wars gig by tweeting a clip from the movie. “Phil really pulled it off,” George Lucas says. None other than Christopher Nolan has called it “an almost perfect movie.
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An Astronaut Reveals
What Life in Space 
Is Really Like

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Dan Winters There’s no way to anticipate the emotional impact of leaving your home planet. You look down at Earth and realize: You’re not on it. It’s breathtaking. It’s surreal. It’s a “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto” kind of feeling. But I’ve spent a total of 55 days in space, over the course of […]
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Revealed: The Lost Chapter of Interstellar

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Before Cooper left his daughter to find humanity a new home in space, there were the Lazarus missions. Led by Dr. Mann, this was NASA’s first attempt to locate a hospitable exoplanet. So what happened to Mann on the other side of the wormhole? We teamed Christopher Nolan with award-winning comic-book artist Sean Gordon Murphy to tell Mann’s story.
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Interstellar Director Christopher Nolan Invites You to Explore the Universe in Multiple Dimensions

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Spacetime. One of the most stimulating and challenging compound nouns. Thoughts of Einstein, of relativity, of complex physical laws that hover tantalizingly beyond our ability to grasp (I'm not writing this for Kip Thorne and his colleagues). The word pulls time down from its perch of abstraction and drags it into the mud with the other three dimensions, the ones we can get our hands into and our heads around. By doing this, however, it also suggests the limits of our world. Higher dimensions may exist, but we have no words to describe them. Mathematics can give us a glimpse, but only those of us with highly developed algebraic skills (not me, for the record). Which brings us to the most frustrating part: We can only really see the dimensions below the one we exist in--a problem never more clearly or cleverly explored than in Reverend Edwin A. Abbott's novella, Flatland, where a three-dimensional creature struggles to explain his existence to a two-dimensional creature who can himself see only one of the dimensions he lives in.
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Interstellar Almost Had 6 Wormholes and 5 Black Holes

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By the time Christopher Nolan signed up to direct Interstellar and started rewriting its script, astrophysicist Kip Thorne had been working with Nolan's brother, Jonathan (who goes by Jonah), on getting his ideas onto film for years. When Chris and Thorne met, they quickly found common ground: Thorne wanted science in the story, and Nolan wanted the story to emerge from science. So in Interstellar, time dilation—the passing of time at different rates for different observers—became an emotional obstacle between a father and his daughter. Quantum gravity, the reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics, became the plot's central mystery. The visual effects team even collaborated with Thorne to make sure their depictions of a black hole were accurate as well as elegant.
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9 Easter Eggs From 
the Bookshelf in Interstellar

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"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space,” says Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway) in Interstellar. But in Christopher Nolan's sci-fi epic, books can be transcendent too. Early in the film, Murph (Mackenzie Foy) attempts to decode meaning from the seemingly random volumes that fall from her bookshelves. She is certain that what she calls a ghost is using the books to try to communicate. Nolan, for his part, is absolutely using the books to communicate (Hello, Flatland!): The volumes he chose for her shelves relate to the characters in the film—and to his conceptual world. We asked the director about some of the featured tomes.
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