Discuss Interstellar
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Is the wormhole appearing a major plot hole in this film?
posted by Midi-chlorian_CountSTAFFMOD on February 14, 2017 at 6:32 AM
It's been a while since I watched this but as far as I recall the gist of it is that mankind is going to die off as all our crops are dying off. However a wormhole has appeared in our system opening up the opportunity of travelling to inhabitable planets. I believe that the film explains that the wormhole was placed there by beings who evolved from humans, who have travelled back in time.
My question always was - how did these future beings exist in the first place in order to give their assistance?
Reply by Markoff
on February 20, 2017 at 7:24 AM
I guess there are unlimited parallel timelines, though not sure if it's scientific explanation, but common in scifi genre.
Reply by The_Foxcatcher
on February 20, 2017 at 7:49 AM
The movie is based on the premise of a big 'Casualty loop':
Future beings creates a wormhole ---> Earth humans travel through the wormhole ----> Earth humans populate Edmund's planet -----> Earth humans evolve into Future beings -----> Future beings creates a wormhole
So there's no starting point of the loop.
Its a paradoxical outcome and there's no answer for 'how did these future beings exist in first place' as there never 'is' a first place in the loop.
Reply by Midi-chlorian_Count
on February 20, 2017 at 1:09 PM
@Markoff
Yeah, I think you're talking multiverse here - so possibly some version of humanity which branched off from ours at a point in time prior to any "butterfly effect" event happening which ultimately resulted in the crop failures?
I think in quantum mechanics that is actually a valid theory. The only problem with it, in terms of this film's narrative, is that these future beings would be coming from one of an infinite possible futures - what would be their purpose in helping one particular strand which had failed?
Reply by Midi-chlorian_Count
on February 20, 2017 at 1:14 PM
@The_Foxcatcher
Interesting idea - I wonder if this is actually a scientific possibly?
I know causality loops are fairly common in time travel films, but they usually have an unchangeable event in the past - I'm not sure given the "arrow of time" / increased entropy concept whether the causal loop could be based around a future event?
Reply by iconmefisto
on February 20, 2017 at 1:24 PM
But there really is a starting point to the loop: Earth humans waiting to be saved by wormhole. The future then answers the prayer and the rest is causal loop history.
It's paradoxical, nonsensical, a plot hole, whatever you want to call it. I think stories that feature time and space violations like "travelling" to a place called the past, or traversing vast distance by traversing a short distance, are always going to be ultimately nonsensical. You just have to accept it as fantastical plot device.
Reply by The_Foxcatcher
on February 21, 2017 at 2:18 AM
I would say its a 'lame cop-out'. It would have been sensible had the wormhole appeared naturally or created by some other race of intelligent life. But they just didn't do that and turned the movie into an unsettling paradox which ultimately doesn't give any redemption to the characters' actions as at the end, a casualty loop turns out to be the hero of the story and the characters are simply happens to be the part of the loop.
Reply by iconmefisto
on February 21, 2017 at 8:18 AM
I agree it's a cop-out. I'm not sure about how lame it is, though. Plausibility has to break somewhere in these kinds of stories.
The way I see it, the alien writing reveals that time is literally not real but just a human mental construct, and using their language (instead of our "linear" human language) allows humans to see the already existing and unchangeable future.
And isn't it the linguist who cracks the alien writing (with the help of the Pakistanis) the hero? Went in as a translator, came out clairvoyant!
Reply by princeG
on February 21, 2017 at 11:24 AM
Did you switch discussion to Arrival?
Reply by iconmefisto
on February 21, 2017 at 11:51 AM
Oh wow. I was totally talking about Arrival. Sorry for the confusion. Haha
Reply by tomk1
on March 1, 2017 at 7:59 PM
That makes zero sense. Where is the future beings creating a wormhole in the past, like time travel 'a wormhole' into history ? The movie would have been fine if there was some Aliens in the system that had the knowledge to create a wormhole. Then hi you can colonize planet delta. Then lets get to know each other. instead it turned into a dumb human fist up in space.
O after smart -astrophysics- actors thinking going into a gravity well was a good idea to reserve energy & their time.
Reply by warrior-poet
on July 18, 2017 at 6:37 PM
Here's a few terms you could look up to help you in your research and understanding of the concept: "predestination loop", "closed time-like curve", "causal loop", "bootstrap paradox". While I disagree with one aspect of the film's premise, namely that a 3D race could evolved into a 5D race (see the next paragraph for details), real world theoretical physics allows for a closed time-like curve, where it appears that effect precedes cause and in fact causes itself, or where information or an object appears to have no real origin.
Having said that, it’s implausible, actually impossible, for the mysterious "They" to be future humans who exist in 5 dimensions, even though the film hints that to be the case. 5D beings would have always existed since the beginning of time, and therefore could not be the evolved product of a lower dimensional race. Evolving from something requires you to have a past and to be subject to Time's Arrow, or entropy. A 5D being wouldn’t be subject to this and never could have been in their past since they quite literally don't have a past.
However, if what's presented in the film could be used to conclude that future humans who are still quite 3D in nature developed a technology that could manipulate 5D space, that's a different story.
Recent experiments in quantum physics, both theoretical and real (as far back as 2010), indicate that it might be possible for the past to be changed as long as no conflicting paradox is produced (i.e. if the "time travel" or transmission event isn't prevented by whatever is changed in the past). Research Seth Lloyd and some of his commentary, including an experiment that seems to validate the notion that some natural mechanism prevents Grandfather Paradoxes (which is different than a bootstrap paradox). Here's a couple of links:
As a side note, I dated a fifth-dimensional being in my youth. She always knew what was going to happen beforehand since she existed simultaneously at all points in time throughout all probable event strings. It was annoying. I couldn’t surprise her with flowers, she had no birthday, etc. since my linear timeline for her was one big simultaneous “now”. On the other hand, she was extremely flexible. Seriously, though, I conclude the above based on simple logic conjoined with what’s presented in the film that’s based on theoretical concepts that describe the possible nature of a fifth dimension. Anyone who is familiar with the science probably comes to this invariable conclusion. Events in the film itself indicate that 5D and 4D aren’t directly transposable.
So I'll take this opportunity to ruminate further on the concept (feel free to stop reading cuz this may be long-winded)...
The theoretical fifth dimension (and it is highly theoretical, but within the context of the film it's a reality with a model of three spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension plus at least one higher dimension, i.e. the fifth dimension) exists outside of time as we know it. It would be like adding a second dimension to time (e.g. instead of one coordinate in time, there’s two) so that it encompasses all possible timeline configurations. If we imagine a linear timeline as a 1D line and stretched it out to a 2D plane that would represent the fifth dimension as it’s presented in the film. A 3D being or object with access to that 5D plane could see anywhere in time, inspect any probability, and send information to any time using gravitons (like Cooper in the Tesseract).
But a being or object existing in five dimensions itself is not subject to fourth-dimensional history, change, causality, etc. like we are. That entity existed before the Big Bang and is effectively eternal (from the limited scope of our relative 4D perspective), meaning no individual 5D entity could have had its origin within the confines of 4D space-time. That being exists simultaneously at all points in our linear timeline as we know it. The entirety of our history and future is a single “now” for that 5D being. For it there is no past or future as we 3D beings measure it, no relative movement along Time’s Arrow. While for us a single point in time demarks a past and future on either side of it, for a 5D being our entire linear timeline is a single moment in time.
Let’s delve into some specifics…
According to geometric principles a point has no dimension. A line is one-dimensional, that one dimension being length. A plane is two-dimensional, comprised of length and width (e.g. a circle). A solid is three dimensions of length, width and height (e.g. a sphere). “Interstellar” invokes the concept of time as the fourth dimension (called “space-time”), at which point we can no longer use a static geometric image to represent it. Taking a 3D object and moving it produces a visual of the fourth dimension (e.g. throwing a baseball). If we look at the baseball as if it were a single point in space-time (effectively collapsing the three spatial dimensions), the baseball moving through the air describes a line (a 1D construct), representing the first dimension of time, or the fourth dimension of space-time (if inflating the three spatial dimensions back up).
The fifth dimension is in essence the fourth dimension in infinite repetition, expanded out side to side. We can visualize it as the thrown macroscopic baseball object (third-dimensional) moving through time (the fourth dimension) being repeated, or mirrored, in infinite parallel thrown paths. In the movie this was represented by the bookshelf being stretch out to infinite versions in the Tesseract. If we look at the fourth dimension of space-time as the first dimension of time, with the baseball as a point extended to describe a line, we now extend that line at right angles to itself to form a plane, which is essentially a second dimension of time. Visualizing it in this way can help us understand the fifth dimension, and in a way that corresponds with quantum physics.
If this thrown baseball describes a fourth-dimensional model, all other possible trajectories for the baseball represent the fifth dimension. This fifth dimension would then correspond to quantum physics' superposition, in which a quantum system can be in any possible state or in fact in all possible states simultaneously prior to some form of interference that causes it to decohere and collapse into a single state. So in essence, something in the fifth dimension has not yet decohered or collapsed into 4D space-time, or perhaps transcends the behavior of small subatomic particles (meaning decoherence will never happen to it) by existing in what we might call a macroscopic 5D form (whatever that means). Regardless, a 5D being exists in all possible states simultaneously, stretched out across all possibilities like a quantum wave function.
The theories “Interstellar” draws from posit that the Big Bang that created the 4D space-time we experience was the result of interactions in a fifth dimension (e.g. the collision of two higher-dimensional branes, a 5D black hole, etc.), with our 4D reality a type of hologram (created by interference patterns) projected from that 5D brane. Ultimately, whatever the specifics or variation of this theory is used, the bottom line is that 4D space-time is a byproduct of a fifth dimension that “predates” and is a parent structure of ours. Hopefully this is starting to paint the picture clearly. A being that literally exists in 5D existed “before” the Big Bang. They do not age or have a past or future within the framework of 4D space-time, nor could they ever have.
Think about what this means…
5D beings would not be able to interact “normally” with 4D space-time, which is touched upon in the film. However, based on theoretical 5D “brane-world” physics, which was the basis for what’s in “Interstellar”, gravity is such a weak force in 4D space-time because of its ability to traverse the fifth dimension (where it’s stronger). If true, gravity is in essence leaking between our fourth-dimensional space-time brane and the fifth dimension. This is why in the film the 5D beings can only communicate or manipulate 4D space-time using gravity, because it’s the only force that can traverse the veil between 4D and 5D space-time.
In fact, a paper published in the January 2015 issue of New Scientist suggests that quantum processes may be governed by gravity, and that there are questions that are yet to be explored. For example, “General Relativity says that mass distorts space and time in a way that causes things around it to feel the attractive force we know as gravity. So in superposition is an atom's mass creating two distinct distortions in space-time and thus exerting a gravitational pull on itself?” As another example, “Special Relativity says that an atom moving through space will have a unique experience of the flow of time. This phenomenon is known as time dilation. But if a moving atom is in superposition, the time dilation must occur along two different paths at once and will be different on each path. So when the superposition ends and the two become one again, have they aged differently?”
Fundamentally, this becomes a question of whether or not general relativity even allows superposition, or constrains it under certain conditions. The upcoming generation of experiments in "gravitationally induced decoherence" might very well give us some concrete answers, and perhaps even finally lead us to a true quantum theory of gravity. “Superposition, for example, works because of a phenomenon called quantum coherence. This is what allows quantum objects to split their existence, characteristics and properties between spatial locations, different kinds of movement or even between different particles entirely.” Large collections of atoms seem to be unable to exist in superposition. In fact, the more massive such conglomerates get, the shorter-lived the superposition is. This raises the suspicion that gravity might be the real reason why massive collections of atoms, including us and every macroscopic 3D object we see, are not quantum.
Guess I’m going off track here, so I’ll reign it in and finish things up.
All of this means that a being that truly exists in a 5D state could not have come from our 4D state. They pre-exist the Big Bang, which is what created our 3D spatial plus 1D temporal brane. Again, that doesn’t mean that future humans couldn’t invent technologies that would allow them to create gateway devices that provide a window into 5D space-time, to send information from a two-coordinate temporal point to another two-coordinate temporal point, or perhaps to even send gravitational energy in a way that might allow them to create a wormhole in the distant past and imbed a Tesseract in a black hole. But it would be impossible for “they”, i.e. future humans, to themselves exist in 5D reality if their origin was confined by the constraints of 4D space-time.
There is something else to consider. We know that the characters’ early assumptions about “they” were at least partially wrong. They thought that “they” sent the messages to the past, but it was in fact Cooper, as we learn at the end of the film. It might be possible that the beings who created the wormhole and the Tesseract are in fact alien 5D entities that have always existed. Being 5D, they know all of our potential probabilities as a unified “now”, which means they knew Cooper would fall into that particular wormhole if they created it, knew his love for his daughter would guide him into using what would otherwise to him be a very alien artifact, etc. We learn at the end that the messages were actually from Cooper. All the 5D beings did was create the wormhole and Tesseract. So perhaps we can live with the possibility that the characters wrongly assumed “they” are future humans.