I'm a huge Nolan fan so this is in no way criticism, but rather curiosity. I understand that the tesseract is a way to show time in 3D space so Cooper can see and navigate time spatially. So he can move in space and go from one moment in time to another, all in a few seconds, but apparently constrained to that room, and looking from behind the bookshelf. What I don't understand is:
1) Why can he only navigate time within the confines of that room and not anywhere else in the world?
2) Why can he only see the room from the outside, and not the inside?
3) If he can affect gravity to the point where he can push the books to fall, why not find an easier way to communicate with Murphy, like handwriting his message as something more detailed than just "stay"?
4) Why, if he can navigate through time in a spatial dimension, he tries to send the quantum data back to Murphy when she was a girl, as opposed to when she's an adult?
5) He starts coding the quantum data on the seconds needle in Morse code, however, he does this when Murphy is a child, and yet we see adult Murphy grabbing the watch and the needle is still moving. I don't get it.
6) Finally, wouldn't it take forever to translate such complicated data into Morse code?
sebaz wrote:I'm a huge Nolan fan so this is in no way criticism, but rather curiosity. I understand that the tesseract is a way to show time in 3D space so Cooper can see and navigate time spatially. So he can move in space and go from one moment in time to another, all in a few seconds, but apparently constrained to that room, and looking from behind the bookshelf. What I don't understand is:
1) Why can he only navigate time within the confines of that room and not anywhere else in the world?
2) Why can he only see the room from the outside, and not the inside?
3) If he can affect gravity to the point where he can push the books to fall, why not find an easier way to communicate with Murphy, like handwriting his message as something more detailed than just "stay"?
4) Why, if he can navigate through time in a spatial dimension, he tries to send the quantum data back to Murphy when she was a girl, as opposed to when she's an adult?
5) He starts coding the quantum data on the seconds needle in Morse code, however, he does this when Murphy is a child, and yet we see adult Murphy grabbing the watch and the needle is still moving. I don't get it.
6) Finally, wouldn't it take forever to translate such complicated data into Morse code?
Sebastian
1. "They" designed it that way. The Tesseract is docked to Murph's bedroom because that's the only place it needs to be to fulfill its purpose.
2. No one said he can't. He never bothered to try.
3. You try manual writing with a pencil when all you can do is crudely push/pull with gravity.
4. He went to a place in time where he knew for sure it would be there: mere minutes after past-Cooper drove away for good.
5. Kip Thorne: "By the time Cooper has received the quantum data from TARS, he has mastered this means of communication. In the movie we see him pushing with his finger on the world tube of a watch’s second hand. His pushes produce a backward-in-time gravitational force, which makes the second-hand twitch in a Morse-encoded pattern that carries the quantum data. The Tesseract stores the twitching pattern in the bulk so it repeats over and over again. When forty-year-old Murph returns to her bedroom three decades later, she finds the second hand still twitching, repeating over and over again the encoded quantum data that Cooper has struggled so hard to send her."
6. TARS: But such complicated data... to a child... COOPER: Not just any child.
stoifics42 wrote:
1. "They" designed it that way. The Tesseract is docked to Murph's bedroom because that's the only place it needs to be to fulfill its purpose.
I don't think that the Tesseract is docked to Murph's bedroom.
I think that it 'docks' to any place depending on the person. Cooper wanted to go home, to meet his daughter, so the Tesseract connected to Murph's room.
No, it isn't magic.
We're working on reading thoughts via brainwaves so it isn't farfetched to assume that 'they' have a mind reading technology.
stoifics42 wrote:
1. "They" designed it that way. The Tesseract is docked to Murph's bedroom because that's the only place it needs to be to fulfill its purpose.
I don't think that the Tesseract is docked to Murph's bedroom.
I think that it 'docks' to any place depending on the person. Cooper wanted to go home, to meet his daughter, so the Tesseract connected to Murph's room.
No, it isn't magic.
We're working on reading thoughts via brainwaves so it isn't farfetched to assume that 'they' have a mind reading technology.
Don't take it from me, take it from him (emphasis added):
... the tesseract ascends from the singularity into the bulk. Being an object with the same number of space dimensions as the bulk (four), it happily inhabits the bulk. And it transports three-dimensional Cooper, lodged in its three-dimensional face, through the bulk.
Now, recall that the distance from Gargantua to Earth is about 10 billion light-years as measured in our brane (our universe, with its three space dimensions). However, as measured in the bulk, that distance is only about 1 AU (the distance from the Sun to the Earth). So, traveling with whatever propulsion system the bulk beings provided, the tesseract, in my interpretation, can quickly carry Cooper across our universe, via the bulk, to Earth.
To match what is shown in the movie, I imagine this trip is very quick, just a few minutes, while Cooper is still dazed and falling. As he comes to rest, floating in the large chamber, the tesseract docks beside Murph’s bedroom.
The back face of the tesseract coincides with Murph’s bedroom. I’ll explain that more carefully. The back face is a three-dimensional cross section of the tesseract that resides in Murph’s bedroom in the same sense as the circular cross section of a sphere resides in a two-dimensional brane, and a spherical cross section of a hypersphere resides in a three-dimensional brane. So everything in Murph’s bedroom, including Murph herself, is also inside the tesseract’s back face.
Kip Thorne, The Science of INTERSTELLAR, Ch. 29
For it to "dock to any place depending on the person," that would imply there was more than one Tesseract, which we have no evidence for. The Tesseract we saw was a 5D hyperspatial construct designed around Cooper and Murph.
stoifics42 wrote:For it to "dock to any place depending on the person," that would imply there was more than one Tesseract, which we have no evidence for. The Tesseract we saw was a 5D hyperspatial construct designed around Cooper and Murph.
You are assuming that the tesseract was designed to dock to one specific place, but Kip Thorne doesn't actually say that in the quote you posted. It could be that it was designed merely to read the thoughts of the person inside it and go to wherever they wanted to go, and since Cooper was feeling great regret over having left Murph as a child, it read those thoughts and docked to her childhood bedroom. Also note that the tesseract temporarily took him to see Amelia Brand and "shake hands" after his main mission was done and it was beginning to collapse--it can't just be a coincidence that as it moved through spacetime its path just happened to overlap that of the Endurance (a tiny object in the vastness of space, or even the vastness of the space inside the wormhole) and temporarily match velocities with it, so this must have been something it did "intentionally". But since the handshake seems unnecessary to Cooper's "mission" or to saving humanity, I think this supports the idea that it was just responding to his thoughts.
stoifics42 wrote:For it to "dock to any place depending on the person," that would imply there was more than one Tesseract, which we have no evidence for. The Tesseract we saw was a 5D hyperspatial construct designed around Cooper and Murph.
You are assuming that the tesseract was designed to dock to one specific place, but Kip Thorne doesn't actually say that in the quote you posted. It could be that it was designed merely to read the thoughts of the person inside it and go to wherever they wanted to go, and since Cooper was feeling great regret over having left Murph as a child, it read those thoughts and docked to her childhood bedroom. Also note that the tesseract temporarily took him to see Amelia Brand and "shake hands" after his main mission was done and it was beginning to collapse--it can't just be a coincidence that as it moved through spacetime its path just happened to overlap that of the Endurance (a tiny object in the vastness of space, or even the vastness of the space inside the wormhole) and temporarily match velocities with it, so this must have been something it did "intentionally". But since the handshake seems unnecessary to Cooper's "mission" or to saving humanity, I think this supports the idea that it was just responding to his thoughts.
Ah, that wording makes more sense. So you're saying the Tesseract had no specific destination; it would instead choose the most useful destination based on Cooper & Murph's emotional connection. An interesting way to look at it.
stoifics42 wrote:Ah, that wording makes more sense. So you're saying the Tesseract had no specific destination; it would instead choose the most useful destination based on Cooper & Murph's emotional connection. An interesting way to look at it.
Are you Harry Potter fan? Think of it like Mirror of Erised. It takes you to a place in space-time where you desperately want to go.
Cooper wanted to say goodbye properly, hence the handshake. Then his desire to meet his daughter took over and the Tesseract docked to her room.
