josephcq wrote:I just looked him up per your recommendation. I recognized 3 of his works right away! I didn't recall the name of the artist or that they were by the same person. Very cool. His work was obviously influential on Inception as well with all the talk of 'paradoxical architecture' and stuff.

edit: fascinating. The 'penrose stairs' we first described by Lionel Penrose, and MC Escher was the first to do a visual artistic interpretation of them.

And visually his famous Waterfall is comparable to Cooper. It's a paradox. There need not be resolution or answer it's just something to make you wonder and engage with you.

Sky007 wrote:

josephcq wrote:I just looked him up per your recommendation. I recognized 3 of his works right away! I didn't recall the name of the artist or that they were by the same person. Very cool. His work was obviously influential on Inception as well with all the talk of 'paradoxical architecture' and stuff.

edit: fascinating. The 'penrose stairs' we first described by Lionel Penrose, and MC Escher was the first to do a visual artistic interpretation of them.

And visually his famous Waterfall is comparable to Cooper. It's a paradox. There need not be resolution or answer it's just something to make you wonder and engage with you.

That i could accept. Instead it's being tied to theoretical science, where i'm not yet able to grasp the theory related to the movie either because i'm not smart enough or the explanations have been lacking as far as linking what we see in the movie to the theory.

Sky007 wrote:

josephcq wrote:I just looked him up per your recommendation. I recognized 3 of his works right away! I didn't recall the name of the artist or that they were by the same person. Very cool. His work was obviously influential on Inception as well with all the talk of 'paradoxical architecture' and stuff.

edit: fascinating. The 'penrose stairs' we first described by Lionel Penrose, and MC Escher was the first to do a visual artistic interpretation of them.

And visually his famous Waterfall is comparable to Cooper. It's a paradox. There need not be resolution or answer it's just something to make you wonder and engage with you.

Or they put water in it and it cycles.

Crazy Eight wrote:

Sky007 wrote:

josephcq wrote:I just looked him up per your recommendation. I recognized 3 of his works right away! I didn't recall the name of the artist or that they were by the same person. Very cool. His work was obviously influential on Inception as well with all the talk of 'paradoxical architecture' and stuff.

edit: fascinating. The 'penrose stairs' we first described by Lionel Penrose, and MC Escher was the first to do a visual artistic interpretation of them.

And visually his famous Waterfall is comparable to Cooper. It's a paradox. There need not be resolution or answer it's just something to make you wonder and engage with you.

Or they put water in it and it cycles.

If it were a real waterfall sure, but it's an illusion or brain scrambler. Same with Coop.

stevearico wrote:

Sky007 wrote:

josephcq wrote:I just looked him up per your recommendation. I recognized 3 of his works right away! I didn't recall the name of the artist or that they were by the same person. Very cool. His work was obviously influential on Inception as well with all the talk of 'paradoxical architecture' and stuff.

edit: fascinating. The 'penrose stairs' we first described by Lionel Penrose, and MC Escher was the first to do a visual artistic interpretation of them.

And visually his famous Waterfall is comparable to Cooper. It's a paradox. There need not be resolution or answer it's just something to make you wonder and engage with you.

That i could accept. Instead it's being tied to theoretical science, where i'm not yet able to grasp the theory related to the movie either because i'm not smart enough or the explanations have been lacking as far as linking what we see in the movie to the theory.

This is why I like my theory which eliminates the paradox.

That's fair enough Riskmaster. But to me your idea relies on more speculation than anything else i've read. I don't see why we would accept that the human race "dies" from blight but as a result is put into the 5th dimension. This also requires a second timeline or universe of which there is one where the human race dies and another where they are saved.

I guess it's just as speculative as most other theories.

I haven't read the whole thread but I'm just gonna say that for quite a while I've been meaning to write a bachelor thesis (or at least an article for Crazy Eight's blog) on the concept of "spatial narrative" in Nolan's films. For me the Escher influence that pervades all of his films suggests that he approaches narrative much like a graphic artist would approach an image/picture. It has architectural volume and geometry, it twists and bends, it has levels above and within levels and so on and so on. Just like Escher's works it's obviously meant to be confusing and even impossible.

One further key detail would be that Escher's work emphasises the importance of perspective in the understanding of all things. The illusion of the Penrose triangle and staircase only occurs (and -> makes sense) if looked at from a particular angle. Even when a particular angle is not needed, for example in



the emphasis is on perspective again, more precisely on the capacity of perspective to make the impossible seem possible (another recurring theme).

Then there's the obvious element of infinity and cyclicality, things ending where they begin and so on



also an element of Metamorphosis precisely through cyclicality.

This is again very typical of a Nolan-narrative which you well know very often begins at the end then gets to the end and so on and so on.

Most of all though there's the importance of self-reflexivity and how perspective factors into it:



This image alone serves as a summary not just for the Interstellar paradox but all of Nolan's work because all of it is after all an ode to our cyclical, two-sided relationship with medium of whatever kind, be it material things like film photography (Memento) or memories (Memento/Inception) or even more abstract things like symbols (Batman). S'all about the cycle of people embedding meaning onto things that eventually have an effect onto people, hence how we, through our own medium, "pull ourselves up" from our own past and into the future.

To make this even more credible, think about how narrative is a direct offspring of vision and thus a direct relative to our capacity to have a perspective. All narrative inevitably shares the same components that an image has: perspective, range/composition, proximity, field of view, detail, esthetic and so on. What we put into narrative is no more than what we see and imagine and so I think it's not too inaccurate to view narrative as a pictorial component or as an image altogether.


PS: This is all to say that none of the paradoxical-impossibility-conundrum is ever a problem here. The impossibility of time travel (within the realm of interpretation) is much like the impossibility of the Penrose triangle. Yes, physically it's not possible, therefore it's only possible through an illusion but that's the point. Illusions (lies/dreams) are often needed to obtain perspective and reach a catharsis (methamorphosis, evolution, transcendence). Similarly, I think, Escher's art confronts with the seductive "possibility of impossibility", it stimulates the desire to ponder how something can be impossible and yet look so very possible and normal when it makes sense to the eye (or mind).

stevearico wrote:That's fair enough Riskmaster. But to me your idea relies on more speculation than anything else i've read. I don't see why we would accept that the human race "dies" from blight but as a result is put into the 5th dimension. This also requires a second timeline or universe of which there is one where the human race dies and another where they are saved.

I guess it's just as speculative as most other theories.

One thing that keeps me holding on to this is that I think there is evidence in the movie that NASA would no longer exist because the people on earth were care takers, people were adapting and just trying to survive. It seems to me that NASA would have been totally dismantled if that worm hole did not show up 48 years ago and give them something to work for. Even then, it had to be in secret. I just keep thinking if no NASA, no engineers, etc were around, our society would depend on the environment even more and eventually succumb to the blight. I just don't see it ending well for the human race, the first time out.

prince0gotham wrote:I haven't read the whole thread but I'm just gonna say that for quite a while I've been meaning to write a bachelor thesis (or at least an article for Crazy Eight's blog) on the concept of "spatial narrative" in Nolan's films. For me the Escher influence that pervades all of his films suggests that he approaches narrative much like a graphic artist would approach an image/picture. It has architectural volume and geometry, it twists and bends, it has levels above and within levels and so on and so on. Just like Escher's works it's obviously meant to be confusing and even impossible.

One further key detail would be that Escher's work emphasises the importance of perspective in the understanding of all things. The illusion of the Penrose triangle and staircase only occurs (and -> makes sense) if looked at from a particular angle. Even when a particular angle is not needed, for example in



the emphasis is on perspective again, more precisely on the capacity of perspective to make the impossible seem possible (another recurring theme).

Then there's the obvious element of infinity and cyclicality, things ending where they begin and so on



also an element of Metamorphosis precisely through cyclicality.

This is again very typical of a Nolan-narrative which you well know very often begins at the end then gets to the end and so on and so on.

Most of all though there's the importance of self-reflexivity and how perspective factors into it:



This image alone serves as a summary not just for the Interstellar paradox but all of Nolan's work because all of it is after all an ode to our cyclical, two-sided relationship with medium of whatever kind, be it material things like film photography (Memento) or memories (Memento/Inception) or even more abstract things like symbols (Batman). S'all about the cycle of people embedding meaning onto things that eventually have an effect onto people, hence how we, through our own medium, "pull ourselves up" from our own past and into the future.

To make this even more credible, think about how narrative is a direct offspring of vision and thus a direct relative to our capacity to have a perspective. All narrative inevitably shares the same components that an image has: perspective, range/composition, proximity, field of view, detail, esthetic and so on. What we put into narrative is no more than what we see and imagine and so I think it's not too inaccurate to view narrative as a pictorial component or as an image altogether.


PS: This is all to say that none of the paradoxical-impossibility-conundrum is ever a problem here. The impossibility of time travel (within the realm of interpretation) is much like the impossibility of the Penrose triangle. Yes, physically it's not possible, therefore it's only possible through an illusion but that's the point. Illusions (lies/dreams) are often needed to obtain perspective and reach a catharsis (methamorphosis, evolution, transcendence). Similarly, I think, Escher's art confronts with the seductive "possibility of impossibility", it stimulates the desire to ponder how something can be impossible and yet look so very possible and normal when it makes sense to the eye (or mind).

Plz write this. Ive always said it's revolutionary what he does with plot and structure in terms of it's spatial connections. Basically what you're saying. I'd love to see it analyzed extensively.

stevearico wrote:@JesseM, Sorry for the late reply

...likewise!

stevearico wrote:“that you're OK with some types of scenarios where the nature of the loop is such that, if the past self hadn't gotten that influence from the future, they never would had the opportunity to travel back in time at all?” Some scenarios i’m ok with, just not ones where the object will be destroyed without intervention from it’s future self.

OK, but consider the two variants below:

1. Billiard ball is on an initial trajectory such that, if its trajectory is undisturbed, it will miss both wormhole mouths and go flying off into another region of space, which is empty. But instead, its future self comes out of one mouth and deflects it into the other mouth, at just the right angle so it becomes that same future self. So, here it would have never traveled through time at all if not for the influence of its future self, but if its future self hadn't hit it, it at least wouldn't have been destroyed.

2. Billiard ball is on an initial trajectory such that, if its trajectory is undisturbed, it will miss both wormhole mouths and go flying off into another region of space, which contains a bomb on this trajectory that would have destroyed it if it had hit it. But instead, its future self comes out of one mouth and deflects it into the other mouth, at just the right angle so it becomes that same future self. So, here it would have never traveled through time at all if not for the influence of its future self, but if its future self hadn't hit it, it would have been destroyed.

Are you saying you're OK with the first scenario, but not the second, even though they are completely identical aside from the presence of a bomb off in the distance, (it could be light-years away from the wormhole) and in neither one does the billiard ball get anywhere near the bomb (nor is there any 'original' timeline where it did)?

stevearico wrote:“But then its future self pops out of the wormhole and deflects it away from the bomb and into the wormhole, then when it goes through the wormhole it becomes that same future self, in a self-consistent loop which not only explains why it went back in time but also saves it from destruction.” Can you explain how this is theoretically possible?

I don't know what kind of explanation you're looking for...you haven't given any explanation for why you think it isn't theoretically possible in general relativity. If it helps, for a spacetime with matter in it to be "possible" in general relativity just means it respects certain equations defining a local relation between the matter and the spacetime curvature in the local neighborhood of every point in that spacetime. And if you're dealing with general relativity plus some other laws of physics like those governing billiard ball collisions (technically, the laws of electromagnetism), then the only additional requirement is that these laws are also respected in the local neighborhood of every point in the spacetime.

And for a conceptual picture of what it means to respect a given set of laws in the "local neighborhood of every point", imagine you divide the spacetime into a sort of grid of 4D spacetime cubes, where each spacetime cube contains the events in a very small cubic region of space over a very short duration of time (if you're familiar with the idea of labeling points in spacetime with space and time coordinates, then an example would be "all events whose space coordinates lie between x=1 and x=2, y=10 and y=11, z=0 and z=1, and whose time coordinate lies between t=15 and t=16"). Then the requirement that all the laws of physics are respected in a "local" sense would basically just mean the following:

A) If we looked at the events within any single spacetime cube--say, the one containing the event of the billiard ball collision, or another one that just contains a segment of a billiard ball's path without any collisions--then the familiar laws of physics would be respected within that spacetime cube.

B) The boundaries of adjacent spacetime cubes would also match up in the way we'd expect from the familiar laws of physics--for example, if a billiard ball exits a given spacetime cube at a given point on one of its faces, then the billiard ball should enter the adjacent spacetime cube at the corresponding point on the face where the two cubes join.

So, you could imagine each spacetime cube has its own tiny physicist acting as an overseer, each of whom makes sure the laws of physics are respected within their own cube, and who all check with their immediate neighbors to make sure the laws of physics are respected across their shared boundaries, but who know nothing else about the larger spacetime their cubes are embedded in. If every single one of these tiny physicists found everything checked out in their local domain, then this is all that's needed to ensure that the spacetime as a whole respects the laws of physics, and is "self-consistent" in the sense specified by the Novikov self-consistency principle. So in my two wormhole examples 1) and 2) above, the presence of a bomb in a distant region far away from the wormholes doesn't change what any of the overseers of cubes containing different segments of the billiard ball trajectory will observer, and of course the overseer of cubes containing the bomb at different times won't see anything unusual because the billiard ball never actually reaches it in either 1) or 2).

stevearico wrote:We don’t see such events in nature

We don't see any type of backwards time travel in nature, so until that changes, this discussion can only be about what the laws of physics allow in a theoretical sense.

stevearico wrote:and as i understood it, this scenario would contradict Novikovs theory.

You still haven't explained why you think it would contradict Novikov's theory. What is inconsistent about scenario 2 above? Do you think there is any local region where a physicist observing only that small region and its immediate neighboring regions would see anything unusual? The section "Assumptions of the Novikov self-consistency principle" in the wikipedia article confirms that the principle just amounts to the stipulation that all the normal laws of physics must hold locally throughout the spacetime, quoting one of the Kip Thorne's original scientific papers on "closed timelike curves" (CTCs) and the self-consistency principle:

"That the principle of self-consistency is not totally tautological becomes clear when one considers the following alternative: The laws of physics might permit CTC's; and when CTC's occur, they might trigger new kinds of local physics which we have not previously met. ... The principle of self-consistency is intended to rule out such behavior. It insists that local physics is governed by the same types of physical laws as we deal with in the absence of CTC's"

stevearico wrote:As in that theory, the possible trajectories which the billiard ball can take that will lead to a cyclical loop are ones which are NOT reliant….i just had an epiphany...

What do you mean by "NOT reliant"? Not reliant on what, exactly? Or was that meant to be an unfinished phrase that was interrupted by the epiphany?

stevearico wrote:So if you accept the original billiard ball theory then you must accept our altered theory of the ball being on a trajectory of destruction still being able to influence itself into a cyclical loop?

But i don’t really accept the billiard ball theory.

Well, do you accept that the Novikov self-consistency principle as understood by physicists like Kip Thorne does allow for any self-consistent billiard ball path through a wormhole? Just look at this paper to confirm this if you doubt it.

stevearico wrote: How do we see this theoretically? Is it to do with relativity?

Yes, it's basically just due to the definition of what it means for a given whole spacetime to be a valid "solution" to the equations of general relativity, which are themselves local equations--it's understood that for the spacetime as a whole to be a valid solution means nothing more than that these local equations are satisfied in the neighborhood of every point in spacetime.

stevearico wrote:Edit: i've been pondering my epiphanies for a week now. And i'm now back to square one, thinking that in-line with novikov's theory(?), these events where the billiard ball would be eradicated without influence from it's future self would stopped by some inherent law from travelling back in time. Pure conjecture of course but aren't all thought experiments?

See the quote from the paper above--the Novikov self-consistency principle requires that there be no special new laws that only kick in when time travel is involved. Whatever existing local laws are sufficient to deal with physics in regions of spacetime without time travel, the Novikov self-consistency principle posits we would observe matter/energy/spacetime curvature to respect these same local laws, and these laws alone, in regions where time travel did occur.