• DOI:10.1119/1.4916949
• Corpus ID: 37645924

Visualizing Interstellar's Wormhole

@article{James2015VisualizingIW,
  title={Visualizing Interstellar's Wormhole},
  author={Oliver James and Eug{\'e}nie von Tunzelmann and Paul Franklin and Kip S. Thorne},
  journal={American Journal of Physics},
  year={2015},
  volume={83},
  pages={486-499}
}

• Oliver James, E. Tunzelmann, +1 author K. Thorne
• Published 12 February 2015
• Physics
• American Journal of Physics

Christopher Nolan's science fiction movie Interstellar offers a variety of opportunities for students in elementary courses on general relativity theory. This paper describes such opportunities, including: (i) At the motivational level, the manner in which elementary relativity concepts underlie the wormhole visualizations seen in the movie; (ii) At the briefest computational level, instructive calculations with simple but intriguing wormhole metrics, including, e.g., constructing embedding diagrams for the three-parameter wormhole that was used by our visual effects team and Christopher Nolan in scoping out possible wormhole geometries for the movie; (iii) Combining the proper reference frame of a camera with solutions of the geodesic equation, to construct a light-ray-tracing map backward in time from a camera's local sky to a wormhole's two celestial spheres; (iv) Implementing this map, for example, in Mathematica, Maple or Matlab, and using that implementation to construct images of what a camera sees when near or inside a wormhole; (v) With the student's implementation, exploring how the wormhole's three parameters influence what the camera sees—which is precisely how Christopher Nolan, using our implementation, chose the parameters for Interstellar's wormhole; (vi) Using the student's implementation, exploring the wormhole's Einstein ring and particularly the peculiar motions of star images near the ring, and exploring what it looks like to travel through a wormhole.