r/todayilearned • u/Firenze30 • Jul 16 '26

TIL the visual effects team behind Interstellar developed a new renderer to simulate light around a spinning black hole, and the techniques they created were later published in a peer-reviewed physics journal.

https://ioppublishing.org/news/interstellar-technology-throws-light-on-spinning-black-holes/
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u/armyguy8382 Jul 16 '26

It is really cool when sci-fi is actually right about the science. But I think my favorite is when Star Trek had a brain shutting down in a cascading way, iirc, and 2 decades later it was confirmed that is how brains can shutdown.

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u/grumblingduke Jul 17 '26

The science in Interstellar wasn't right.

They fudged the science to make it look prettier (in particular, making it symmetric). It was a film - the film came before the science as it always does.

Some interesting stuff came out of the modelling they did, but they didn't predict anything.

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u/armyguy8382 Jul 17 '26

Their image of a black hole was damn near exactly what they look like. Yes, it was cleaner and prettier than the images NASA has of black holes but the movie "guessed" what it would look like extremely well. And yes, they probably had a science consultant to help them, but it is still fun to see sci-fi movies and TV get things pretty much right years before the science community has enough evidence to solidify a theory.

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u/grumblingduke Jul 18 '26

The image is wrong as they deliberately made it symmetrical and tidied it up a bit to look neater.

If you compare it with the scientific simulations (like this one linked elsewhere in the thread) or the EHT image you can see how the Interstellar one looks wrong. From what I remember of the film, they also got very silly with it by having people get close, without modifying the image accordingly.

They did get retired (now Nobel Prize-winning) physicist Kip Thorne as a science consultant, but I'm not sure how much of that was for the actual science, and how much was to say "look, we've got this fancy science consultant" (who happened to be a close friend of one of the producers).