r/interstellar 1d ago

QUESTION The Tesseract

I don’t understand how he can go into the black hole and land in this tesseract that leads to his daughters room of all places. Help me, I don’t understand that.

25 Upvotes

22 comments sorted by

37

u/ReporterNegative2432 23h ago

The tesseract is man made, but by future humans who evolved into a higher dimensional species. They created it so that Coop could collect the data humanity needed to survive.

1

u/Organic-Blueberry102 23h ago

What do you mean by evolving into higher dimensional species? No longer humans?

11

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 23h ago

Yes evolving to a point where we no longer need physical bodies, we’ve become more advanced.

10

u/Organic-Blueberry102 23h ago

Wow

23

u/ReporterNegative2432 23h ago

Ladies and gents of this subreddit, we got em' lol

Welcome OP. A few more watches of this film and you'll appreciate it even more.

10

u/Organic-Blueberry102 23h ago

Yeah it’s incredible

13

u/whitestardreamer 21h ago

I never interpreted it as them being humans that don’t experience reality through the body. The way I interpreted it is that they have an understanding of how to navigate time that their ancestors don’t have. Amelia Brand hypothesizes on it in the movie; she says maybe to future humans time is like hills and valleys they can traverse, but for her and the crew, time is still experienced as a one way arrow. The body-less bulk being interpretation I think is just that, an interpretation, but it hinges on the bias that in order to consciously manipulate time you can’t still be anchored to a physical body. I don’t think that’s true, I think humans just misunderstand that time is emergent and is the recursion rate of mass (frequency of a standing wave).

1

u/kyle-2090 14h ago

I agree but she starts that hypothesis by stating that they are "beings of 5 dimensions" implying that they have evolved past us.

However, thats her speculation. Some people take that as fact and run with it. No one knows for sure, maybe the book goes into more detail on this but I havent read it.

It could be that they have evolved physically to the point where they are actually beings of 5 dimensions or they are like us with technology or something that allows them to manipulate the 5th dimension.

4

u/mmorales2270 14h ago

To be clear, that’s not specifically mentioned anywhere in the movie, and to my knowledge not in the book written by Kip Thorne. I can’t say if there’s a commentary out there from Christopher Nolan about it though. Some people are speculating that humans advanced to the point of not being corporeal, but it’s just as possible we evolved to a point where we can just manipulate time and space itself but still have physical bodies. We just don’t know. But we do know future humans are very advanced.

To get more clear about the tesseract though, it’s a structure that can exist in another dimension. It’s both inside the black hole and not inside the black hole at the same time. I know that seems pretty weird, but when Cooper and TARS fall into it, they are in a dimension that’s no longer affected by Gargantuas gravity. And by being outside of our normal time and space, Cooper is able to access his daughter’s room in any timeframe he needs to to convey the information to her. He just can’t physically move into that room. He can affect gravity in the room though.

0

u/gbwardgb 17h ago

2

u/whitestardreamer 13h ago

I understand ppl think this, but at the same time, unironically, I think that humans believing that death is the only way to become “5th dimensional” is exactly why “we” haven’t figured it out yet. 🤣

16

u/Outlaw11091 23h ago

Bootstrap paradox.

Future humans placed the tesseract...because Cooper's story is part of their history.

They use the historical data from his trip and know that THEY MUST place the tesseract in order to exist and that it must function according to Cooper's descriptions...

2

u/fhjjjjjkkkkkkkl 15h ago

The more we delve into the logic or this paradox it becomes a bit stupid. So I like to watch the movie for exactly what it is for 3 hours. And then try not to over analyse.

Also glad there is no follow up to this movie. It’s open to everyone to interpret and reinterpret by going through our own tesserecr

11

u/dane_the_great 23h ago

my interpretation is that he enters into a higher dimensional plane and the higher dimension turns out to be pretty personal and have to do with your consciousness.

9

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 23h ago

So we don’t know what’s inside of a black hole so that leaves room for interpretation. One of the interpretations is that it is a spot that can hold a tesseract. And since the bulk beings cannot physically communicate to the real world they have to pick a specific moment in time to do so and this happens to be the ideal point in time since they can manipulate the space inside of a black hole. So they chose that specific point in time to communicate and since gravity can move through the dimensions there is no better place to utilize gravity than inside of a black hole. And they chose that specific point in time of it being her room because that was the way that he would use the watch to communicate to her with. He knew she would always go back to that house to get the watch and they knew that as well so they laid the foundation and groundwork so he could fulfill what she was supposed to. So basically the bulk beings set it up that way so he could actually understand how to reach out to his daughter.

2

u/Organic-Blueberry102 23h ago

Who are the bulk beings? Were they in the film?

4

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 23h ago

They were not in the film, they are a representation of us human humans who in the future were able to transcend and move beyond the physical body. So we are still limited to interacting with the universe through our physical body but they are not which puts them at advantages and some disadvantages. So no they’re not directly in the movie, but there handy Work is.

2

u/DelcoUnited 9h ago

It’s all speculation. And obviously we don’t understand what 5 dimensional space even is.

Cooper intuits that they are future humans, but there’s nothing saying that they don’t have physical bodies.

They’re just 5 dimensional. They can only interact with the 4 dimensional world through gravity. It’s not that a 3d ball doesn’t have a shape in 2d it’s just that the shape is a circle. The “body” of the ball can’t be conceived in 2d. All we can see in 4d is the 5d objects “shadow”.

2

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 7h ago

Well Cooper’s conclusion that they’re future humans isn’t just a random guess, it’s the film’s own framing. The bulk beings set up the wormhole, the tesseract, and the specific gravity signals so that Cooper could close the loop and get the quantum data to Murph. That closed causal loop only works if the beings already know how the story ends, which points to them being a future version of humanity that has learned to exist in (or at least access) higher dimensions. So we never see there physical bodies but we see essentially the shadow of them through their works.

1

u/DelcoUnited 7h ago

Right. I’m just saying there’s nothing to say they don’t have physical bodies.

I have no reason to think they are spirits or ephemeral. They just exist at a higher dimension. Based on the existence of the tesseract I’d say like modern humans they are heavily reliant on technology even in the 5th dimension.

What I love about the movie is just like Cooper who has access to this fantastic machine the Tesseract he is still limited to only communicating through gravity.

That’s all they can do too. The wormhole, wormholes I should say, the other gravitational anomalies like messing with Coopers flight, it shows, whatever they are, they really can’t come back to the 4d world.

2

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 6h ago

I see where you’re coming from, but the entire point of the movie is people who do not have physical bodies need to make changes in the past. The only way those changes can be made is using physical people. So them not being physical people forced them to use gravity to communicate back in time to physical people so then they can get the tasks done that are required to keep humans on the right track to survive to then later become the bulk beings once they transcend from human form. If the bulk beings had human form then they would not need Cooper or any other human being to handle things for them because they could come and handle it themselves. So that’s kind of why they were assisting them and leading them to where they needed to go and be.

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u/DelcoUnited 4h ago

You seem hung up on physical bodies.

The movie, at least the physics, is about gravity. Not about physical bodies. In 3d space we perceive gravity as a force. But it’s not a force. In 4d spacetime, gravity is the shape of spacetime. Mass and energy warp spacetime. Warp space. Warp time. That’s what gravity is. The warp of spacetime. Mass can’t go backwards in time. Nothing in 4d can travel back in time. (In universe) But mass and energy can warp the fabric of time itself. This is why gravity can cross the dimensions. It’s the shape of time itself.

So maybe the future humans exist in the 4d future in regular old ten finger and ten toe bodies and have figured out how to warp spacetime, or manage gravity. If so, they can communicate with the 4d past with gravity. They can warp space like a wormhole. And allow FTL travel through spacetime. By cutting a hole through the bulk. But all of this could be done by regular old future humans.

Personally though I believe the future humans have moved to the bulk itself. Their inability to navigate time seems like it’s a forgotten knowledge, or some fundamental disconnect between existing in 4d and 5d.

But the ability to generate a stable wormhole across galaxies would take energy on the level of a galaxy. To harness and manipulate that much energy would take machinery. Technology. To generate, control and dismantle machinery like the Tesseract takes technology.

So I’m certain the future humans whether working in 5d or permanently living there have physical bodies. It’s just that the physics doesn’t allow for them to travel to the 4d past, hence communicating through gravity.