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 […]
Read more
Wired subscribe Time. Space. Dimension. Interstellar director Christopher Nolan invites you explore the world in five dimensions Time. Space. Dimension. Interstellar director Christopher Nolan invites you explore the world in five dimensions Shelf Portrait Nine easter eggs from the bookshelf in Interstellar Shelf Portrait Nine easter eggs from the bookshelf in Interstellar […]
Read more
Jelle Martens Eight years ago, Polish hacker Joanna Rutkowska was experimenting with rootkits—tough-to-detect spyware that infects the deepest level of a computer’s operating system—when she came up with a devious notion: What if, instead of putting spyware inside a victim’s computer, you put the victim’s computer inside the spyware? At the time, a technology known […]
Read more
To get ahead in life, spend some time on the International Space Station. Why? Well, according to the theory of relativity, astronauts on the ISS age more slowly due to the spacecraft’s high orbital speed.
Read more
Randall Munroe is the author of What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, published in September.
Read more
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.
Read more
Deathswitch subscribers are prompted periodically via email to make sure they’re still alive. When they fail to respond, Deathswitch starts firing off their predrafted notes to loved ones.
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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.
Read more
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 […]
Read more
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.
Read more
It would have taken just one of those 24 people to flake out for the whole project to fail. Thanks to all two-dozen participants around the globe, that didn’t happen.
Read more
Euler’s identity: Math geeks extol its beauty, even finding in it hints of a mysterious connectedness in the universe. It’s on tank tops and coffee mugs. Aliens, apparently, carve it into crop circles (in 8-bit binary code). It’s appeared on The Simpsons. Twice.
Read more
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.
Read more
- Jordan Crucchiola And Jason Kehe
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.
Read more
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
Read more
- Alex French and Howie Kahn
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.
Read more
- Marsha Ivins as told to Caitlin Roper
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 […]
Read more
- Christopher Nolan & Sean Gordon Murphy
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.
Read more
Dan Winters He didn’t have to sculpt a life-size spaceship with functional hydraulic gears. He didn’t have to transport that spaceship to Iceland in a 747 cargo hold. But one day, during the filming of Interstellar, production designer Nathan Crowley found himself standing in water as far as he could see—a glacial wash only 2 […]
Read more
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.
Read more
Late this summer, a single yellow Post-it note waiting on my desk rekindled our hopes. The message was simple but full of promise: “Chris Nolan called.”
Read more
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.
Read more
"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.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered