The Science of Interstellar

I hope that at least once you find yourself, in the dead of night, half asleep, puzzling over something I have written, as I puzzled at night over questions that Christopher Nolan asked me when he was perfecting his screenplay. And I especially hope that, at least once in the dead of night, as you puzzle, you experience a Eureka moment, as I often did with Nolan’s questions.

I’m grateful to Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, Emma Thomas, Lynda Obst, and Steven Spielberg for welcoming me into Hollywood, and giving me this wonderful opportunity to fulfill my dream, to pass on to the next generation my message of the beauty, the fascination, and the power of science.

Kip Thorne

Pasadena, California

May 15, 2014

1 A Scientist in Hollywood: THE GENESIS OF INTERSTELLAR

Lynda Obst, My Hollywood Partner

The seed for Interstellar was a failed romance that warped into a creative friendship and partnership.

In September 1980, my friend Carl Sagan phoned me. He knew I was a single father, raising a teenaged daughter (or trying to do so; I wasn’t very good at it), and living a Southern California single’s life (I was only a bit better at that), while pursuing a theoretical physics career (at that I was a lot better).

Carl called to propose a blind date. A date with Lynda Obst to attend the world premier of Carl’s forthcoming television series, Cosmos.

Lynda, a brilliant and beautiful counterculture-and-science editor for the New York Times Magazine, was recently transplanted to Los Angeles. She had been dragged there kicking and screaming by her husband, which contributed to their separation. Making the best of a seemingly bad situation, Lynda was trying to break into the movie business by formulating the concepts for a movie called Flashdance.

The Cosmos premier was a black-tie event at the Griffith Observatory. Klutz that I was, I wore a baby-blue tuxedo. Everybody who was anybody in Los Angeles was there. I was completely out of my element, and had a glorious time.

For the next two years, Lynda and I dated on and off. But the chemistry just wasn’t right. Her intensity enthralled and exhausted me. I debated whether the exhaustion was worth the highs, but the choice wasn’t mine. Perhaps it was my velour shirts and double-knit pants; I don’t know. Lynda soon lost romantic interest in me, but something better was growing: a lasting and creative friendship and partnership between two very different people, from very different worlds.

Fast-forward to October 2005, another of our occasional one-on-one dinners, where conversation would range from recent cosmological discoveries, to left-wing politics, to great food, to the shifting sands of moviemaking. Lynda by now was among Hollywood’s most accomplished and versatile producers (Flashdance, The Fisher King, Contact, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days). I had married. My wife, Carolee Winstein, had become best friends with Lynda. And I’d not done badly in the world of physics.

Over dinner, Lynda described an idea she had conceived for a science-fiction movie and asked me to help her flesh it out. This would be her second venture into science fiction: a collaboration with me, modeled on her previous collaboration with Carl Sagan on the movie Contact.

I never imagined myself helping create a movie. I never coveted a presence in Hollywood, beyond a vicarious one, through Lynda’s adventures. But working with Lynda appealed to me, and her ideas involved wormholes, an astrophysics concept I had pioneered. So she easily lured me into brainstorming with her.

During the next four months, over a few dinners and e-mails and phone calls, we formulated a rough vision for the film. It included wormholes, black holes, and gravitational waves, a universe with five dimensions, and human encounters with higher-dimensional creatures.

But most important to me was our vision for a blockbuster movie grounded from the outset in real science. Science at and just beyond the frontiers of human knowledge. A film in which the director, screenwriters, and producers respect the science, take inspiration from it, and weave it into the movie’s fabric, thoroughly and compellingly. A film that gives the audience a taste of the wondrous things that the laws of physics can and might create in our universe, and the great things humans can achieve by mastering the physical laws. A film that inspires many in the audience to go learn about the science, and perhaps even pursue careers in science.