In September 2013, Ritchie Kremer, the property master for
When Christopher Nolan filmed the scene where Romilly discusses his observations with Amelia Brand, Romilly wound up not actually showing her his data set. It was there on a table, but he didn’t pick it up. However, the data set is central to my science extrapolation of
Figure 18.1 is the data set’s first page. Each line of data on that page refers to a single resonant frequency at which Gargantua vibrates.
The first column is a three-number code for the shape of Gargantua’s vibrations and the picture is a still from a movie Romilly took, in my extrapolation of
In my extrapolation Romilly finds a few anomalies, severe disagreements between his observations and the theory. He prints the disagreements in red. On page one of the data set (Figure 18.1), there is just one anomaly, but the disagreement is severe: thirty-nine times larger than the uncertainty in his measurements!
These anomalies might be helpful in “solving gravity” (learning how to harness the anomalies), Romilly thinks, in my extrapolation. He wishes he could transmit what he has learned to Professor Brand back on Earth, but the outbound communication link has been severed, so he’s frustrated.
Even more, he wishes he could see inside Gargantua, to extract the crucial quantum data embedded in its singularity (Chapter 26). But he can’t.
And he doesn’t know whether the anomalies he observed are encoding some of the quantum data or not. Perhaps, with the hole spinning so rapidly, some of the quantum data leaked out through the horizon and produced the anomalies. Maybe Professor Brand could figure that out, if only Romilly could transmit the data to him.
I say a lot more later (Chapters 24–26) about gravitational anomalies, and quantum data from inside Gargantua as the key to harnessing the anomalies. But that’s later. For now, let’s continue our exploration of Gargantua’s environs, turning next to Mann’s planet.
19
Mann’s Planet
After discovering that Miller’s planet is hopeless for human colonization, Cooper and his crew travel to Mann’s planet.
I have deduced a plausible orbit for Mann’s planet from two things in
First, Doyle says the trip to Mann’s planet will require months. From this I infer that, when the
To achieve both requirements, the orbit of Mann’s planet must be highly elongated. And to avoid the planet’s being engulfed by Gargantua’s accretion disk as it nears Gargantua, the orbit, so far as possible, must be far above or below Gargantua’s equatorial plane, where the disk resides.