I'll take a shot I guess..
1. I believe it was the on-board computer as the ship was about to rip apart.
2. This is a tough one and takes a large amount abstract thinking. It's metaphysics at its finest, basically a chicken and the egg scenario. It's a self-perpetuating time loop, which is hard for us to comprehend as we experience/think of time as linear. That's not how it actually works, however. Time as we understand it, was created by humans and shaped by our limited ways of perceiving reality. Future, past and present are all human concepts, but the mechanics of the universe extend beyond these simple notions of human measurement. It's all happening and it has always been happening, but we are limited in our ability process that amount of information, resulting in the linearity of moment to moment perception. "They" (humanity in the future) have transcended this and can now perceive/traverse time as if it was our current reality. In order to reach that point, humanity's survival is necessary, hence the wormhole. If they ignored humanity, they'd essentially be committing suicide, which would impossible because that wormhole always had to exist as it did for "them" and now does for their ancestors. It is destiny but destiny based in science. Sorry I can't be clearer. I'm at work and coming with an apt metaphor is tough to do in a pinch.
3. Gargantua was connected to the network of wormholes created by ascended humans, and Coop was sent through a dimension that was somewhat perceivable by the Endurance when traversing the wormhole (Remember when Romley said they were cutting through a higher dimension?). Love is not the dimension, but it's quantifiable because it provides connection and understanding between people. Murph was able to perceive her fathers message because of the love and understanding they had between each other, enabling the discovery which saved humanity and allowed them to transcend the bonds of the reality we know today.
Now I know why certain critics think there are plot holes. I guess I can't blame them for not fully analyzing the possibility that the concepts of time/space work in a different way than they are accustomed to. I guess I'm expecting too much deep thinking from those who claim to have intellectual insights on film.
I appreciate your thoughts. I loved the movie BTW, but am just having difficulty wrapping my head around the concepts.
I guess the one thing I'm having the most trouble with is point #2 above; why would future mankind create a 5th dimension for Coop if they were already saved and living in a 5th dimension? For instance, it would be like us humans today going back in time and stopping the US and Russia from nuking each other, we're already here in 2014 so why do humans in 2014 need to go back to the 1960's and help humanity in any way (i.e, humans in 3050 going back and helping Earth humans in 2060 or whenever time period the first part of the film was set in)?
I'll take a shot I guess..
1. I believe it was the on-board computer as the ship was about to rip apart.
2. This is a tough one and takes a large amount abstract thinking. It's metaphysics at its finest, basically a chicken and the egg scenario. It's a self-perpetuating time loop, which is hard for us to comprehend as we experience/think of time as linear. That's not how it actually works, however. Time as we understand it, was created by humans and shaped by our limited ways of perceiving reality. Future, past and present are all human concepts, but the mechanics of the universe extend beyond these simple notions of human measurement. It's all happening and it has always been happening, but we are limited in our ability process that amount of information, resulting in the linearity of moment to moment perception. "They" (humanity in the future) have transcended this and can now perceive/traverse time as if it was our current reality. In order to reach that point, humanity's survival is necessary, hence the wormhole. If they ignored humanity, they'd essentially be committing suicide, which would impossible because that wormhole always had to exist as it did for "them" and now does for their ancestors. It is destiny but destiny based in science. Sorry I can't be clearer. I'm at work and coming with an apt metaphor is tough to do in a pinch.
3. Gargantua was connected to the network of wormholes created by ascended humans, and Coop was sent through a dimension that was somewhat perceivable by the Endurance when traversing the wormhole (Remember when Romley said they were cutting through a higher dimension?). Love is not the dimension, but it's quantifiable because it provides connection and understanding between people. Murph was able to perceive her fathers message because of the love and understanding they had between each other, enabling the discovery which saved humanity and allowed them to transcend the bonds of the reality we know today.
Now I know why certain critics think there are plot holes. I guess I can't blame them for not fully analyzing the possibility that the concepts of time/space work in a different way than they are accustomed to. I guess I'm expecting too much deep thinking from those who claim to have intellectual insights on film.
I appreciate your thoughts. I loved the movie BTW, but am just having difficulty wrapping my head around the concepts.
I guess the one thing I'm having the most trouble with is point #2 above; why would future mankind create a 5th dimension for Coop if they were already saved and living in a 5th dimension? For instance, it would be like us humans today going back in time and stopping the US and Russia from nuking each other, we're already here in 2014 so why do humans in 2014 need to go back to the 1960's and help humanity in any way (i.e, humans in 3050 going back and helping Earth humans in 2060 or whenever time period the first part of the film was set in)?
Because without them doing that they would have never been saved in the first place. It's a loop.
I'll take a shot I guess..
1. I believe it was the on-board computer as the ship was about to rip apart.
2. This is a tough one and takes a large amount abstract thinking. It's metaphysics at its finest, basically a chicken and the egg scenario. It's a self-perpetuating time loop, which is hard for us to comprehend as we experience/think of time as linear. That's not how it actually works, however. Time as we understand it, was created by humans and shaped by our limited ways of perceiving reality. Future, past and present are all human concepts, but the mechanics of the universe extend beyond these simple notions of human measurement. It's all happening and it has always been happening, but we are limited in our ability process that amount of information, resulting in the linearity of moment to moment perception. "They" (humanity in the future) have transcended this and can now perceive/traverse time as if it was our current reality. In order to reach that point, humanity's survival is necessary, hence the wormhole. If they ignored humanity, they'd essentially be committing suicide, which would impossible because that wormhole always had to exist as it did for "them" and now does for their ancestors. It is destiny but destiny based in science. Sorry I can't be clearer. I'm at work and coming with an apt metaphor is tough to do in a pinch.
3. Gargantua was connected to the network of wormholes created by ascended humans, and Coop was sent through a dimension that was somewhat perceivable by the Endurance when traversing the wormhole (Remember when Romley said they were cutting through a higher dimension?). Love is not the dimension, but it's quantifiable because it provides connection and understanding between people. Murph was able to perceive her fathers message because of the love and understanding they had between each other, enabling the discovery which saved humanity and allowed them to transcend the bonds of the reality we know today.
Now I know why certain critics think there are plot holes. I guess I can't blame them for not fully analyzing the possibility that the concepts of time/space work in a different way than they are accustomed to. I guess I'm expecting too much deep thinking from those who claim to have intellectual insights on film.
I appreciate your thoughts. I loved the movie BTW, but am just having difficulty wrapping my head around the concepts.
I guess the one thing I'm having the most trouble with is point #2 above; why would future mankind create a 5th dimension for Coop if they were already saved and living in a 5th dimension? For instance, it would be like us humans today going back in time and stopping the US and Russia from nuking each other, we're already here in 2014 so why do humans in 2014 need to go back to the 1960's and help humanity in any way (i.e, humans in 3050 going back and helping Earth humans in 2060 or whenever time period the first part of the film was set in)?
If you did or did not like the movie it is all good, I would never attack someone for well-reasoned dislike. Glad to hear you did though!
I'm about to leave my office and I want to continue discussing this topic, so I'll work on something that is hopefully a bit more clear than the esoteric wind-blowing I posted last time.
Perhaps I'm stuck in my 3-dimensional thinking and that's why I can't seem to grasp the logic. I did not study physics in high school/college so my education in time travel, relativity, quantum physics and the like are very, very limited. Just the very notion that time slows down the farther out in the universe you go is puzzling to me; for example, it's 11/06/2014 right now. If I was to get launched in space and travel through a wormhole to another galaxy and it would take me 2 years to get there, it would be 11/06/2016 for me when I get there. Then if I immediately went back home through the wormhole (taking another two years), it would be 11/06/2018 when I got back - basically 4 years to travel to another galaxy and back...but on Earth, perhaps 50 years or more would have passed - how? Why did it take me 4 years in Earth time to travel there and back and why isn't it still 11/06/2018 on Earth?
Perhaps I'm stuck in my 3-dimensional thinking and that's why I can't seem to grasp the logic. I did not study physics in high school/college so my education in time travel, relativity, quantum physics and the like are very, very limited. Just the very notion that time slows down the farther out in the universe you go is puzzling to me; for example, it's 11/06/2014 right now. If I was to get launched in space and travel through a wormhole to another galaxy and it would take me 2 years to get there, it would be 11/06/2016 for me when I get there. Then if I immediately went back home through the wormhole (taking another two years), it would be 11/06/2018 when I got back - basically 4 years to travel to another galaxy and back...but on Earth, perhaps 50 years or more would have passed - how? Why did it take me 4 years in Earth time to travel there and back and why isn't it still 11/06/2018 on Earth?
Time doesn't necessarily slow down the farther you go out into the universe. The time dilation you see in the film is the result of being near something with a lot of mass. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, objects with a lot of mass, and consequently strong gravity, bend and warp the 4-dimensional space-time (a single entity) which changes the relative experience of time by an observer. Time will always progress at the same speed for a local observer near an object with large gravity, but for someone observing from far away, you would see their clocks moving very, very slowly. The reason time was "moving slowly" for Cooper compared to Murph was because he was so close to the black hole. The black hole's gravity warps space-time so much that it appears that time moves very slowly for Coop from the viewpoint of Murph.
I would look up some videos on YouTube about general relativity, it may make it easier to understand
I appreciate your thoughts. I loved the movie BTW, but am just having difficulty wrapping my head around the concepts.
I guess the one thing I'm having the most trouble with is point #2 above; why would future mankind create a 5th dimension for Coop if they were already saved and living in a 5th dimension? For instance, it would be like us humans today going back in time and stopping the US and Russia from nuking each other, we're already here in 2014 so why do humans in 2014 need to go back to the 1960's and help humanity in any way (i.e, humans in 3050 going back and helping Earth humans in 2060 or whenever time period the first part of the film was set in)?
One thing I want to say before all is that Nolan stated in interviews that people will enjoy his movies more if they don't think too much about them, if they experience them (I don't remember where I read that but I could probably find the quote again). What I'm getting from this is that Nolan himself probably doesn't have all the answers to make everything make sense, he wants to convey an experience and a message without worrying too much about connecting the dots and making everything having an explanation. In Interstellar he wanted to convey the message that love is not meaningless evolutionary programming, love is something meaningful that transcends time and space and that may have a physical existence in a higher dimension we cannot perceive yet (I thought of it as a reply to what Case says in Jonathan Nolan's original script, that love is meaningless evolutionary programming; Christopher obviously disagrees with this statement). He also wanted to convey the message that we must keep looking at the stars and be explorers again, as the future of humanity will depend on it at some point. I guess those are probably the most important things to take from the movie. That being said, let's try to find a satisfying answer to your question
In an earlier post I mentioned one thing about black holes that may have relevance. The closer to the event horizon of a black hole the slower time passes, until it stops right on the event horizon, so it might be that as we go past the event horizon time starts flowing backwards. This would imply that from the point of view of the humans in the future who are on that side of the black hole, Cooper is in fact in their future, and Murph is even further in their future. In this sense they would have built the tesseract (the bookcase thing) for Cooper to use in the future. That's one possibility.
The black hole leads Cooper into the fifth dimension, the bulk, where apparently love is a physical reality. The beings of the bulk (the humans of the future) thus perceive the love that links Cooper and his daughter Murph. Once they saw Cooper arriving in their dimension, they may have wanted Cooper to see that link too because love is important to them, and so they built the tesseract to allow Cooper to communicate with his daughter. That would be another possibility.
Yet another possibility is that the whole future of the universe is already predetermined, that Murph received messages from a 'ghost' because Cooper was meant to go into the black hole in the future and send these messages through the tesseract, and that the tesseract was there because the humans in the future were meant to survive and build it.
I don't know whether any of these explanations is satisfactory enough for you. Maybe someone else can come up with better ones. If you don't like any, keep in mind that Nolan himself may not have a logical explanation at all.
Saw the film on 70mm IMAX yesterday and I was blown away. Enjoying all the commentary and insights on this particular thread. I plan to weigh in more on the ending after I see the film a couple more times. But one thing I'm wondering about right now is the loud humming sound we hear in Murph's bedroom. There may have been scenes in other parts of the home where we hear the humming sound too. At first, I thought "is this irritating humming sound an editing error?" Then, I said, this can't happen in a Nolan film. It was obviously intentional (and I got used to it), but what did it signify? My only guess would be that it represents a gravitational anomaly is taking place somewhere in the home (in Murph's bedroom/library?), which means that Cooper is in the 5th dimension future (in some quantum/gravity/loving form trying to communicate to Murph in the present). Can anyone help here?
Perhaps I'm stuck in my 3-dimensional thinking and that's why I can't seem to grasp the logic. I did not study physics in high school/college so my education in time travel, relativity, quantum physics and the like are very, very limited. Just the very notion that time slows down the farther out in the universe you go is puzzling to me; for example, it's 11/06/2014 right now. If I was to get launched in space and travel through a wormhole to another galaxy and it would take me 2 years to get there, it would be 11/06/2016 for me when I get there. Then if I immediately went back home through the wormhole (taking another two years), it would be 11/06/2018 when I got back - basically 4 years to travel to another galaxy and back...but on Earth, perhaps 50 years or more would have passed - how? Why did it take me 4 years in Earth time to travel there and back and why isn't it still 11/06/2018 on Earth?
First of all I disagree with your name wholeheartedly.....
Hahaha I love the debates about that movie also, so I'm just messing around!
In my mind, we can correlate the humming and the presence of the gravitational anomaly to Cooper's presence in and around his daughters bedroom, albeit in an undetectable 5th dimension. Thus, through the idea of gravity being the only force able to effect our 3d world through said dimension, we can glean that the odd fluctuations (anomalies) are a result of that physical space being connected to an alien region of space time inside the black hole.
Sorry if I'm being too abstract and unclear. This stuff is tough to express in a simplified manner.
Perhaps I'm stuck in my 3-dimensional thinking and that's why I can't seem to grasp the logic. I did not study physics in high school/college so my education in time travel, relativity, quantum physics and the like are very, very limited. Just the very notion that time slows down the farther out in the universe you go is puzzling to me; for example, it's 11/06/2014 right now. If I was to get launched in space and travel through a wormhole to another galaxy and it would take me 2 years to get there, it would be 11/06/2016 for me when I get there. Then if I immediately went back home through the wormhole (taking another two years), it would be 11/06/2018 when I got back - basically 4 years to travel to another galaxy and back...but on Earth, perhaps 50 years or more would have passed - how? Why did it take me 4 years in Earth time to travel there and back and why isn't it still 11/06/2018 on Earth?
Hey man it's hard to think outside the realm of what we know as possible, but isn't it cool that this movie is getting us to try? When is the last time you can say that happened?
I will say studying metaphysics and philosophy helped me understand the broad strokes presented by the scientific possibilities in fiction like this.
