Drinking Too Much Coffee And Learning About Black Holes

This morning, which is Christmas Eve, I woke up thinking of more Interstellar plot points that either just don’t add up, or are annoying. Over coffee my old man and I discussed these, then went down a really horrifying wikipedia rabbit hole, trying to learn about black holes. What we discovered will shock you

– So Cooper flies through the black hole and comes out the other side, and he’s back around Earth and it’s basically like 70 years later than when he left. Okay. BUT THEN, after his old lady daughter says “goodbye daddy I’m dying” and he goes back out into outer space, we are to believe that he just hopped in a spaceship and drove it off? A spaceship from 70 years in his future?? I get that humanity is not exactly operating at full capacity back on the dying earth but surely in 70 years NASA’s spacecraft technology would have progressed significantly. My grandpa flew planes in WWII but I highly doubt that in 2014 he could hop into a Lockheed SR-72 and go toodling around in it without any training

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– More on spacecraft issues: I don’t see any possible reason why a fucking SPACESHIP would have an “eject” button right down by the pilot seat just like a regular jet. “Now sir, if you get into trouble while flying this craft through OUTER SPACE, just hit the eject button! You’ll go flying out into outer space and then at the very least you can walk home”

– Lets talk about their whole Plan B thing. So I am not exactly remembering what the plan exactly was–did they have a way to incubate a bunch of fetuses without needing to use a human body? If so, that would mean that these three plucky astronauts were planning on creating a bunch of infants from scratch, raising them for at least thirteen years I guess, and then breeding them together. I know desperate times call for desperate measures but honestly that just doesn’t seem like the best plan. And wouldn’t you need more than just a couple grownups to pull it off? Even with test tube incubators (which, were we ever shown this amazing equipment that can gestate a full human baby to term?) to raise enough people to create a viable breeding pool you’d have to make kind of a lot of babies, and what if one or more of the astronauts dies en route, etc.? Along these lines, does this mean that now that she’s marooned alone on that one planet after burying her boyfriend, Anne Hathaway is like, well, on with Plan B, and just, what, creating babies? Will she have sex with the baby boys once they are old enough? This is going to create THE WEIRDEST CULTURE, I’m not sure this is worth the trouble. Okay and if they DON’T have incubators, but are planning on surrogacy, then it sure seems like they should’ve brought more than ONE WOMAN along on this mission! Wouldn’t they have like 20 women zipped up in those bags? And Hathaway wouldn’t be allowed to go tromping around on Sea World planets and such, if she was literally the only womb available to the human species for this whole Plan B thing. Also I love that. “Brand, we know you’re a badass astronaut, but here is your new life: incubating as many fetuses inside your body as possible until you die, and hopefully having procreative sex with some of those fetuses once they become viable adults. Thank you for your service”

– which leads me to the Bechdel test, which this movie DOESN’T PASS!!! The creators (and obviously the insane Christopher Nolan) can only imagine a social group with one woman and one black person in it at a time. Hathaway is the only woman at NASA, then she goes into space and is replaced by the new only woman at NASA, Murph. Even though there are two women in the movie (not counting Casey Affleck’s hilarious cipher of a wife), they never have a conversation with one another, except briefly when Murph is a baby which I don’t count, and then later, arguably, when Murph speaks directly to Brand on the video. HOWEVER, first of all, it’s not a conversation, it’s just a tape Murph made a million years earlier, and secondly, even so, ALL SHE DOES IS TALK ABOUT THE MEN IN THE MOVIE, specifically, their daddies. “Brand, did your daddy lie to you? Did my daddy lie to me? BOO HOO I WANT MY DADDY p.s. I am a brilliant astrophysicist”

– Okay real talk, that ending: So at first we are informed that the whole tesseract of Murph’s ship-of-Theseus bedroom that’s inside the black hole was created by “5 dimensional beings” who explicitly can’t communicate with humans. That’s why they needed to build this black hole thing for Cooper to use time to encode black hole data into an analog watch back in the future, which, whatever, lets just leave that one alone. I feel like the whole 5 dimensional beings thing is a totally fair sci-fi plotline that I am happy to accept as an explanation. BUT THEN, later, TARS says that it was built by humans, in the future! So now it makes no sense–humans in the future don’t know how to communicate with humans? It’s like they went out of their way to create a plot hole, probably because Nolan was like “I NEED MORE HUMANISM IN THIS MOVIE SO NO ONE WILL GUESS THAT I AM A ROBOT”

– speaking of black holes, remember the dude who spent 23 years on the ship while Brand was fucking up the mission to Sea World? He said “great, I’ll stay here and learn about this black hole” or something. What can you learn about a black hole from observing a black hole? By definition THERE IS NOTHING THERE TO OBSERVE; it can not be observed. So no shit after 23 years he was like “sorry, I didn’t learn anything”

Discussing this caused the aforementioned wikipedia rabbit hole and now I am terrified and will never sleep again.

“The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, information from that event cannot reach an outside observer, making it impossible to determine if such an event occurred”

“To a distant observer, clocks near a black hole appear to tick more slowly than those further away from the black hole.[47] Due to this effect, known as gravitational time dilation, an object falling into a black hole appears to slow down as it approaches the event horizon, taking an infinite time to reach it”

This is why advanced theoretical physics and astrophysics is totally mystical. These people are really nothing but newfangled theologians. Studying shit that is there but not there; unobservable yet exerting change on its surroundings. You observe it by not looking at it–it’s not an empirically observable phenomenon; it’s only a mathematically deducible phenomenon. It’s basically God. Then I love that people who come up with this shit are like “why would anyone get acupuncture, lol, THERE’S NO DATA ON IT.” News flash bro!

In grad school a friend of mine dated this horrible asshole who was an astrophysicist who studied, in his words, “The beginning of the universe.” He would always make fun of us for studying music, because “it’s just notes.”

“At the center of a black hole as described by general relativity lies a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite. For a non-rotating black hole, this region takes the shape of a single point and for a rotating black hole, it is smeared out to form a ring singularity lying in the plane of rotation. In both cases, the singular region has zero volume. It can also be shown that the singular region contains all the mass of the black hole solution. The singular region can thus be thought of as having infinite density.”

So it has infinite density but zero volume. It’s nothing. It’s pure nothing.

But definitely there’s no such thing as ghosts or whatever

This shit sounds like the Empyrean in fucking Dante. God is three circles that contain one another yet are all the same size, and you can’t look directly at it, but it’s surrounded by an invisible ring of spirit essences singing in a harmony that can’t be heard. DANTE DESCRIBED A BLACK HOLE

“Observers falling into a Schwarzschild black hole (i.e., non-rotating and not charged) cannot avoid being carried into the singularity, once they cross the event horizon. They can prolong the experience by accelerating away to slow their descent, but only up to a point; after attaining a certain ideal velocity, it is best to free fall the rest of the way. When they reach the singularity, they are crushed to infinite density and their mass is added to the total of the black hole. Before that happens, they will have been torn apart by the growing tidal forces in a process sometimes referred to as spaghettification or the “noodle effect”.”

To this I literally can only say “????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????????”

On wikipedia I also learned that dudes first realized gravity could affect light in THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, specifically we know this from a letter written by John Michell to Henry Cavendish in 1783 in which he says:

If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.

I love this. “Dear Henry, Yesterday we had a lovely mutton chop with new potatoes from the garden; I thought of you and your love of spring. Anyway, If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity. Last week I went to the booksellers and there found Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther,” which I have long meant to read. Well the hour grows late and my candle grows short. Please give my love to Anne and the children. I remain your, John Michell etc.”

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One Response to Drinking Too Much Coffee And Learning About Black Holes

  1. Alex says:

    This guy survived a spaceship exploding but I don’t think he had an eject button:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSS_Enterprise_crash

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