Coherence (2013)

by Arjun.A.S(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/arjas640

89 min  |  Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Strange things begin to happen when a group of friends gather for a dinner party on an evening when a comet is passing overhead.

IMDb Rating: 7.2

Director: James Ward Byrkit
Writers: James Ward Byrkit (screenplay), James Ward Byrkit (story), Alex Manugian (story)

Release Date: 6 August 2014

Awards
5 wins & 5 nominations.

SCIENTIFIC PLOT

 

The film involves eight people at a dinner party. During their dinner, there is a comet that is passing over them. This causes their house and the occupants to intertwine with multiple such houses and occupants from other realities. There is a dark zone in between the realities. When people pass through the dark zone, they leave their reality and enter another reality at random.

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is a hypothetical set of various possible universes including the universe which we live in. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy and the physical laws and constants that describe them.

The miscellaneous distinct universes within the multiverse are called the “parallel universes”, “other universes” or “alternative universes

Byrkit told an interviewer, “For about a year, all I did was make charts and maps and drew diagrams of houses, arrows pointing where everyone was going, trying to keep track of different iterations. Months and months of tracking fractured realities, looking up what actual scientists believe about the nature of reality — Schrödinger’s cat and all that. It was research, but despite all the graphs and charts, I think our whole idea was that it has to be character-based. We want the logic of our internal rules to be sound, and we wanted it to be something people could watch 12 times and still discover a new layer

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. The thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement) in the course of developing the thought experiment.

GOOFS

(at around 1h 6 mins) When Hugh is calculating the different outcomes on his iPhone, you can see from the display that he has reception – which they claim none of them has.

Interstellar (2014)

by Arjun.A.S(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/arjas640

PG-13  |  169 min  |  Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi

In the future, Earth is slowly becoming uninhabitable. Ex-NASA pilot Cooper, along with a team of researchers, travel through a wormhole in space in an attempt to ensure humanity’s survival.

IMDb Rating : 8.3/10

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan.

Release Date: 7 November 2014

Awards
Won 1 Oscar.
Another 43 wins & 143 nominations.

SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY

Theoretical physicist  Kip Thorne was a scientific consultant for the film to ensure the depictions of wormholes and relativity were as accurate as possible. “For the depictions of the wormholes and the black hole,” he said, “we discussed how to go about it, and then I worked on the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein’s  general relativity equations.”

Early in the process, Thorne laid down two guidelines: “First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations… would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter.” Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of making the movie.At one point, Thorne spent two weeks trying to talk Nolan out of an idea about a character traveling faster than light before Nolan finally gave up. According to Thorne, the element which has the highest degree of artistic freedom is the clouds of ice on one of the planets they visit, which are structures that probably go beyond the material strength that ice would be able to support.

Astrobiologist David Grinspoon criticized the dire “blight” situation on Earth portrayed in early scenes, pointing out that even with a voracious blight it would have taken millions of years to draw down the atmosphere’s content of oxygen. He also notes that the ice clouds should have been pulled down by gravity.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has explored the science behind the ending of Interstellar. He concludes that it is theoretically possible to interact with the past, and that “we don’t really know what’s in a black hole, so take it and run with it.”

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku praised the film for its scientific accuracy and has said Interstellar “could set the gold standard for science fiction movies for years to come.” Likewise, Timothy Reyes, a former NASA software engineer, said, “Thorne’s and Nolan’s accounting of black holes and wormholes and the use of gravity is excellent.”

Physicist Lawrence Krauss said “how did they save the Earth? With a formula? And how was the Earth dying? With some ridiculous mold that was somehow eating up the oxygen in one generation that took two billion years to produce?””

Wormholes and black holes

In creating the wormhole and a supermassiverotating black hole (which possesses an ergosphere, as opposed to a non-rotating black hole), Thorne collaborated with visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and a team of 30 people at Double Negative. Thorne would provide pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the engineers, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totalling to 800 terabytes of data for the movie. The resulting visual effect provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, which led to the publication of three scientific papers.

Christopher Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole would not be visually comprehensible to an audience and would require the effects team to unrealistically alter its appearance. The visual representation of the black hole in the movie does not account for the Doppler effect, which when added by the visual effects team, resulted in an asymmetrically lit black and blue black hole. Nolan didn’t like the asymmetry caused by the Doppler effect and thought moviegoers wouldn’t understand why it was asymmetrical, so the finished black hole ignored the Doppler effect. Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable, provided that he maintained consistent camera perspectives. “What we found was as long as we didn’t change the point of view too much, the camera position, we could get something very understandable”.

The portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is considered scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy.The accretion disk of the black hole was described by Thorne as “anemic and at low temperature—about the temperature of the surface of the sun”, allowing it to emit appreciable light, but not enough gamma radiation and X-rays to threaten nearby astronauts and planets.

Correct depiction of the Penrose process was also praised.

GOOFS

When he meets the people of NASA, Cooper says the nearest star is 1,000 light years away. While the nearest star, in the Alpha Centauri system, is about 4.4 light years away, Cooper meant that it would take a ship 1,000 years to get there using the technology known at the time.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

by Arjun.A.S(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/arjas640

G  |  149 min  |  Adventure, Sci-Fi

Humanity finds a mysterious, obviously artificial object buried beneath the Lunar surface and, with the intelligent computer H.A.L. 9000, sets off on a quest.

IMDb Rating : 8.3/10

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers : Stanley Kubrick (screenplay),
                 Arthur C. Clarke (screenplay)

Release Date: 12 May 1968

Awards
Won 1 Oscar
Another 13 wins & 10 nominations.

Technologies in 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001 is, according to four NASA engineers who based their nuclear-propulsion spacecraft design in part on the film’s Discovery One, “perhaps the most thoroughly and accurately researched film in screen history with respect to aerospace engineering”. Several technical advisers were hired for 2001, some of whom were recommended by co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke, who himself had a background in aerospace. Advisors included Marshall Spaceflight Center engineer Frederick I. Ordway III, who worked on the film for two years,and I. J. Good, whom Kubrick consulted on supercomputers because of Good’s authorship of treatises such as “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” and “Logic of Man and Machine”. Dr. Marvin Minsky, of MIT, was the main artificial intelligence adviser for the film.

2001 accurately presents outer space as not allowing the propagation of sound, in sharp contrast to other films with space scenes in which explosions or sounds of passing spacecraft are heard. 2001’s portrayal of weightlessness in spaceships and outer space is also more realistic. Tracking shots inside the rotating wheel providing artificial gravity contrast with the weightlessness outside the wheel during the repair and Hal disconnection scenes. (Scenes of the astronauts in the Discovery pod bay, along with earlier scenes involving shuttle flight attendants, depict walking in zero-gravity with the help of velcro-equipped shoes labeled “Grip Shoes”). Other aspects that contribute to the film’s realism are the depiction of the time delay in conversations between the astronauts and Earth due to the extreme distance between the two (which the BBC announcer explains have been edited out of the broadcast), the attention to small details such as the sound of breathing inside the spacesuits, the conflicting spatial orientation of astronauts inside a zero-gravity spaceship, and the enormous size of Jupiter in relation to the spaceship.

The general approach to how space travel is engineered is highly accurate; in particular, the design of the ships was based on actual engineering considerations rather than attempts to look aesthetically “futuristic”.Many other science-fiction films give spacecraft an aerodynamic shape, which is superfluous in outer space (except for craft such as the Pan Am shuttle that are designed to function both in atmosphere and in space). Kubrick’s science advisor, Frederick Ordway, notes that in designing the spacecraft “We insisted on knowing the purpose and functioning of each assembly and component, down to the logical labeling of individual buttons and the presentation on screens of plausible operating, diagnostic and other data.”Onboard equipment and panels on various spacecraft have specific purposes such as alarm, communications, condition display, docking, diagnostic, and navigation, the designs of which relied heavily on NASA’s input. Aerospace specialists were also consulted on the design of the spacesuits and space helmets. The space dock at Moon base Clavius shows multiple underground layers which could sustain high levels of air pressure typical of Earth. The lunar craft design takes into account the lower gravity and lighting conditions on the Moon. The Jupiter-bound Discovery is meant to be powered by a nuclear reactor at its rear, separated from the crew area at the front by hundreds of feet of fuel storage compartments. Although difficult to be recognized as such, actual nuclear reactor control panel displays appear in the astronaut’s control area.

The suspended animation of three of the astronauts on board is accurately portrayed as worked out by consulting medical authorities. Such hibernation would likely be necessary to conserve resources on a flight of this kind, as Clarke’s novelization implies.

A great deal of effort was made to get the look of the lunar landscape right, based on detailed lunar photographs taken from observatory telescopes. The depiction of early hominids was based on the writings of anthropologists such as Louis Leakey.

GOOFS

When Bowman reenters the ship, he is exposed to vacuum for no more than 10 seconds before operating the repressurization valve. Scientific evidence shows that this would indeed be survivable without grievous harm, notwithstanding the sensational depictions in other movies.