The Science of Interstellar

More reliable than Wikipedia for gravitational slingshots, but less comprehensive, is http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/grav/primer.php. A gravitational-slingshot video game has been developed in connection with Interstellar; see Game.InterstellarMovie.com.

For a somewhat technical discussion of the intermediate-mass black holes that I invoke for gravitational slingshots, see Chapter 4 of Black Hole Astrophysics: The Engine Paradigm (Meier 2012).

You can generate and explore complicated orbits around fast-spinning black holes, such as that in Figure 7.6, using a tool written by David Saroff and available at http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/3DKerrBlackHoleOrbits.

Chapter 8. Imaging Gargantua

Simulations of the gravitational lensing of star fields by black holes, similar to those that underlie Interstellar, have been carried out previously by a number of physicists and can be found on the web. Especially impressive are those by Alain Riazuelo; see www2.iap.fr/users/riazuelo/interstellar. See also the section on Chapter 28, below.

Paul Franklin’s team and I plan to write several somewhat technical articles about the simulations that they carried out using the equations I gave them: the simulations underlying Interstellar’s images of Gargantua and its disk and the wormhole, and additional simulations that have revealed surprising things. You can access these articles on the web at http://arxiv.org/find/gr-qc.

Chapter 9. Disks and Jets

For in-depth discussions of quasars, accretion disks, and jets, see Gravity’s Fatal Attraction (Begelman and Rees 2009), Chapter 9 of Black Holes & Time Warps (Thorne 1994), and at a more technical and more detailed level, Black Hole Astrophysics (Meier 2012). For the tidal disruption of stars by black holes and the resulting accretion disks, see the website of James Guillochon (who, with colleagues, was responsible for the simulations that underlie Figures 9.5 and 9.6): http://astrocrash.net/projects/tidal-disruption-of-stars/. For astrophysically realistic film clips of accretion disks and their jets, I recommend some by Ralf Kaehler (Stanford University) at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~kaehler/homepage/visualizations/black-holes.html, based on simulations by Jonathan C. McKinney, Alexander Tchekhovskoy, and Roger D. Blandford (McKinney, Tchekhovskoy, and Blandford 2012). For some images of accretion disks with Doppler shifts included as well as gravitational lensing, see the website of the astrophysicist Avery Broderick, http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/~abroderi/Press/. The simulations that underlie Gargantua’s accretion disk in Interstellar (for example, Figure 9.9) will be described in one or more articles to appear at http://arxiv.org/find/gr-qc.

Chapter 10. Accident Is the First Building Block of Evolution

I don’t know any nontechnical discussions of the simulations that show the star density near a massive black hole growing, rather than decreasing. For a technical discussion and analysis, see Chapter 7 of Dynamics and Evolution of Galactic Nuclei (Merritt 2013), particularly Figure 7.4.

Chapter 11. Blight

If you watch the daily science news, or just observe the world around you, you’ll see examples of the kinds of scenarios that my biologist colleagues describe in this chapter—mild examples, thus far, fortunately; not catastrophic examples. A recent one is the amazing jump of a lethal virus from plants to honeybees, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2014/01/31/suspicious-virus-makes-rare-cross-kingdom-leap-from-plants-to-honeybees; this was a far bigger jump than that from okra to corn in Interstellar, but a far less lethal pathogen. Another example is the rapid demise of tree species once dominant on the American scene: not only the American chestnut tree mentioned by Meyerowitz in Chapter 11, but the American elm tree, http://landscaping.about.com/cs/treesshrubs/a/american_elms.htm, and the giant pine trees around my cabin on Palomar Mountain, near the 200-inch telescope.

Chapter 12. Gasping for Oxygen