The Nature of Time in Interstellar

Time is one of the foundamental concepts that shapes human life. We believe that we are moving in a linear pattern between the past, present, and future. However, physics suggest that time might have a much more complex structure than that. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, often referred as a cinematic work of art, is one of the best interpretations of these scientific theories. Throughout the movie, Nolan keeps playing with the concept of time like a toy, sometimes extending it and sometimes transforming it. Interstellar is a journey in space, but also in time. That said, let us take a closer look into Interstellar's time perception (with spoilers!).

To briefly sum up the story, far into the future, in a time where earth is close to becoming uninhabitable, our main character Cooper leaves his home and his children to go into a journey that would save humanity. Him and a crew of astronauts from NASA take off to explore three different planets to be the new earth. However, their biggest obstacle at this stage, is the time itself. At this point in the movie, we encounter the idea of flexible time and space. This idea views space as a pliable structure, rather than linear distance, which means this structure can be bent by large objects. Therefore Cooper and his crew, basically take a shortcut called a wormhole to go to these planets, which bends space and allows them to directly pass into the other side using a tunnel.

From there, the movie starts showing that time can flow differently in different settings. The idea of time flowing at different speeds is based on Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which suggests that excessive gravitation can bend spacetime, therefore slowing it down. In the movie, this is seen at Miller's Planet, which is found near a huge black hole called Gargantua. About an hour that the crew pass on this planet, equals to seven years on Earth. This is because the planet is inside the extremely strong gravitation area of the black hole, slowing the time in there.

Lastly, the most striking point of the movie and the most extraordinary piece of time perception is introduced when Cooper falls into Gargantua. As soon as he enters the black hole, he finds himself in a structure called tesseract. He basically enters another dimension, where time doesn't work the same way it does perceived by people, but it turns into a landscape that can be observed. In this dimension, different memories from the past can be viewed at the same time, and possibly even intervened. This is where the most emotional part of the movie comes in, as Cooper sees past memories of his kids and tries to send his daughter a message to stop himself from going into that journey.

At the end, when Cooper comes back to Earth and meets his daughter, he sees an old woman at her deathbed while he is still the same age as when he left. From its release in 2014 to this day, Interstellar has not lost one bit of its sensation. What Christopher Nolan presented in this movie is a spectacle of cinema, with the science, the emotions, and the quality that it puts forward.