Love is the One Thing That Transcends Time and Space: The Science and Fiction of Interstellar

Design Credit: Maisie Nievera

A choir of strings breathes soft and steady, like the light that peeks through the threads of curtains as the sun moves above the horizon. The violins fall in and out of consciousness amongst themselves, but are immediately awoken by an organ’s bellowing strides. He pounds on the bones of anyone who dares to lend their ears to his terror. The sun is in high noon as it beats down on his subjects, and a frightening panic settles down on the choir of strings as they shelter and place before the sun goes back to sleep. For one more night, they let out a relieved sigh as they rest, safe and sound, unknowing of what the next day brings.

The constant tug-of-war of intensity between organ and strings in the symphonic composition from Hans Zimmer in the movie “Interstellar,” directed by Christopher Nolan, pulls the audience into a dried-up Earth. In Nolan’s imagined future of our planet, humans hopelessly scramble for survival  as the planet dies faster than science can keep up. With chords that are constantly building and wide-angle shots that frame its subjects in pitch-black vacuums next to blinding masses of energy, every detail of “Interstellar” serves to emphasize the gravity of the uncertainty that Cooper, retired NASA pilot, and his team can find a livable planet in time. On a less empirical note, this gravity is also represented by the inexplicable force of love that puppeteers the human drive to sustain. It’s this intersection of tangible science – the equations, evidence, and experiments – and inexplicable forces – love and the 5th dimension – where gravity lies, and what makes “Interstellar” the perfect movie for both the left and right-brained, believer and non-believer.

What hooks the viewer on “Interstellar” is its artful telling of a complex, other-worldly story. The film attacks equations and theories most viewers couldn’t fathom to understand yet still incites awe at the unknown. However, for those interested in whether the theory in “Interstellar” holds any water, the physicists behind the movie made sure what could be proven wrong wasn’t, give or take some creative liberty. 

In fact, the driving force of the movie’s mind-bending mechanics lies in the fact that the black holes and wormholes depicted in the movie are so massive that they warp spacetime in ways unimaginable on Earth. Imagine a medicine ball weighing down a mesh blanket, where the strings, representing space and time, closer to the middle are stretched out. The stretched-out movement of time as a result of the large body is exactly what devastated Cooper as they explored Miller’s planet, one of the three potentially habitable planets on their mission to find humans a new home. Here, one hour is spent exploring equated to seven years on Earth due to Miller’s close positioning to the supermassive black hole, Gargantuan.

The interplay between gravity and time causes Cooper’s crew to lose touch with their families on Earth. Namely, Cooper’s 10-year-old daughter, Murphy, begins to resent him for leaving and is driven to join the workforce to find humans a new home herself. Murphy’s bitterness towards her father is ultimately fueled by their once close relationship, as he was the one who introduced her to her passion for the universe. Consequently, longing to see him led to her derivations of the equations needed to send humans to space for good. After her father’s departure, Cooper is able to communicate with Murphy at any point in her life through the Tesseract – the breaking of the 5th dimension through the wormhole he enters to get back to Earth – to send her the proper clues to save humanity. However, where the movie diverges from science is through the inexplicable force that sent Cooper to the Tesseract.

Throughout “Interstellar,” the characters wondered about  the force that pushed them onward. The gravity of black holes and burning stars could be explained with numbers, but what about the force that allowed Cooper to break the laws of space-time, or gave our survivors the strength to leverage everything on a chance that promised nothing in return? As little Murphy dreamed of the impossible, chasing forgotten drones across cornfields, the audience is able to catch a glimpse of light – a light that traveled far from the end of a desperate tunnel, but a light nonetheless – in her conclusion that the dust on the floorboards of her room were the workings of a ghost. Even as a cold-blooded scientist, her untethered soul behind the lab coat and calculations held onto this belief, allowing her to decipher father’s message in the stuttered ticking of the watch he gifted her, so many years after he’d disappeared. 

Ultimately, the gravity of love led Cooper and Murphy back to each other, and humans back to a future. It was Cooper’s love for Murphy that sent him banging on the walls of the Tesseract, and it was Murphy’s love for her father that drove her to pick up on the Morse code clues left for her 25 years ago. While Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation might have provided the skeleton, the structural support, of Nolan’s science fiction drama, no equation can prove the gravity of the human soul. And the further you look into the equations, the more you start to realize how they are simply theory, how the interplay between gravity and time includes the soul as you contemplate our beginnings, purpose, and motivation to push onward.

“Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends time and space” — Anne Hathaway as Brand (“Interstellar,” 2014)

As Nolan’s film reveals the blurred lines between empirical and theoretical, “Interstellar” isn’t just science fiction, but a love story its viewers can learn from. Evidence isn’t everything, and the only thing with an unbroken track record to sustain human life is the biological wiring to survive, its circuits powered by the inexplicable force of love and faith. Altogether, the ability to blend the empirical logic of spacetime with the passionate drive of the human soul is what earns “Interstellar” its spot among the greatest movies of all time.