2015/02/28 by Oliver James, Eugenie von Tunzelmann, Eugénie von Tunzelmann +2 · 2 voices · 71 citations
Health Professions · Physics and Astronomy · #Construct (python library) #Einstein #Embedding #Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies #Film in Education and Therapy #Frame (networking) #General relativity #Geodesic #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Theory of relativity #Wormhole #gr-qc #physics.pop-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1119/1.4916949
published in American Journal of Physics 83(6), 486-499 (American Institute of Physics) · 14 pages and 13 figures. In press at American Journal of Physics. Minor revisions; primarily insertion of a new, long reference 15 at the end of Section II.A
arxiv created 2015/04/22 · openalex publication_date 2015/05/20 · arxiv updated 2015/06/11 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Christopher Nolan's science fiction movie Interstellar offers a variety of opportunities for students in elementary courses on general relativity theory. This paper describes such opportunities, including: (i) At the motivational level, the manner in which elementary relativity concepts underlie the wormhole visualizations seen in the movie; (ii) At the briefest computational level, instructive calculations with simple but intriguing wormhole metrics, including, e.g., constructing embedding diagrams for the three-parameter wormhole that was used by our visual effects team and Christopher Nolan in scoping out possible wormhole geometries for the movie; (iii) Combining the proper reference frame of a camera with solutions of the geodesic equation, to construct a light-ray-tracing map backward in time from a camera's local sky to a wormhole's two celestial spheres; (iv) Implementing this map, for example, in Mathematica, Maple or Matlab, and using that implementation to construct images of what a camera sees when near or inside a wormhole; (v) With the student's implementation, exploring how the wormhole's three parameters influence what the camera sees—which is precisely how Christopher Nolan, using our implementation, chose the parameters for Interstellar's wormhole; (vi) Using the student's implementation, exploring the wormhole's Einstein ring and particularly the peculiar motions of star images near the ring, and exploring what it looks like to travel through a wormhole.