So, I just watched Interstellar for the first time yesterday and I can officially declare it as my favorite movie now. It was literally one of the only movies in my entire existence that made my brain hurt and ponder throughout. I am now so ever intrigued by the concepts of quantum mechanics, dimensions, black holes, relativity, etc. I’ve decided to lay out my thoughts on the theory of relativity for you to read and learn, or perhaps even add more. It’s a difficult idea to grasp, I still have trouble about the whole idea of time slowing down or speeding up. Here’s a general thread about the theory of relativity.

Classical relativity is the idea that objects move relative to each other, for example, two people standing still in a truck that is moving at 50 miles per hour are playing catch in the trunk. The two people in the car will perceive the ball moving at 10 miles per hour, but someone standing still and watching the two people throwing the ball outside of the car will perceive the ball moving at 60 miles per hour (50 mph + 10mph = 60mph).
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Special relativity is basically the idea that the speed of light is the same for everyone (299,792,458 meters a second). But, this also explains why time slows down for you when you move faster.
The equation for speed is speed = distance / time.

Let’s say you have a special clock with two mirrors that are reflecting a beam of light back and forth. Remember, the speed of light never changes. Let’s say the distance, “D”, is the distance the beam of light travels from one mirror to the other, and that for each time the beam of light completes “D”, it is one tick on the clock. Sally observes (this is obviously exaggerated) that it takes about one second for the tick for “D” to occur. Now let’s look at Sam who is in rocketship moving at the speed of light. Now, since Sam is moving super-duper fast, the light has a greater length to travel, which causes the amount of time for “D” to happen take longer. This means that the clock will have to wait longer to tick than Sally’s clock’s tick. That means everything in Sam’s rocketship must slow down, even his mind and perception must slow down. Time is now slower, but only from your reference (Sam’s in this case), because time is relative.
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General relativity is simply the idea that space and time coincide and that mass causes spacetime to curve. Pretend you are floating in space, moving in a straight line, when you begin to approach a planet, like Earth, the curvature in space forces you to stop moving in a straight line, but curve right into Earth, this explains the idea of gravity. This explains why if you were to stand on a planet with a massive amount of mass, time would massively slow down (for example, 1 hour on “x” planet will be equivalent to 7 years back on Earth) and gravity would be much stronger, it would even be more difficult to walk! It’s an insane theory, but math seems to prove right.

(If you are still confused, this article might help, https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-scie...elativity.html)  

Enlightening It makes me regret not paying attention in school.

Something that I wonder about is why does time seem to slow down the moment that something bad is about to happen?  

Teacher: *teaches theory of relativity*
Student: whats the point of this?
Teacher: it will help you in the future
Graalians:  

Unfortunately my calculus teacher advised us that we will probably never use these equations in real life. Looking back at his poor expectations of us he was probably not a good teacher :z  

It's how the Flash TV series works. If The flash runs at 700 mph, does that mean the Flash is fast or everyone else is slow or is there a special viewpoint which determines everyone to a specific reference point?

If I don't make sense, i probably am thinking nonsense at this point but that's wat physics is bout! Cuz in physics, ***'s abstract and u cant grasp concepts like u can grasp the 2+2 concept lol  

I watched interstellar awhile ago and got lost at the robot thing.
But yeah, its always been pretty cool to think "This goes faster than I can scream" or "That would beat my flashlight in a drag race"  

too bad it was ruined by the ******ed ending

power of "love" boys, thats physics  

haven't watched enough movies if this is your favorite  

For my motion picture course last semester, we were assigned the task of writing an essay on some aspect of a movie from a list our professor provided. Being a biology major, I don't have a lot of opportunities for artistic writing anymore, so I chose interstellar and focused on making my essay an "inter-dimensional analysis," whatever that means

But anyway, since I spent some time on it and I think it turned out alright, here it is:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

Posted by Crono

too bad it was ruined by the ******ed ending

power of "love" boys, thats physics

now that's dallas

Posted by Fulgore

haven't watched enough movies if this is your favorite

True, but this movie deserves some +rep for being one of the few big Hollywood science movies that incorporates a lot of real science into its logic... They hired an astrophysicist on as an exec producer and he was pretty integrated into the process, drawing up equations so that the artists could build some semblance of what a black hole/tesseract might look like.  

GR and the math behind it are very nifty. If you want to learn a bit more this book is good, not too dated and written for general readers.

Posted by Crono

power of "love" boys, thats physics

space loves you  

Posted by Imprint

space loves you

for a movie where space hates you, Event Horizon is an alright sci-fi horror from the 90's I think