Listener supported WNYC Studios.

If the movie Interstellar was made today, what would be different?

Christopher Nolan was describing the wonderful things he could have done with gravitational waves

if only he had kept them in the movie and then said, well, there's no turning back time.

It's Monday, December 23rd, and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm sci-frey producer Kathleen Davis. The sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis.

The sci-fi film, Interstellar, turns 10 years old this month.

For a lot of us, it was our first encounter with some pretty advanced astrophysics,

taking sci-fi concepts like wormholes and time-warping and backing them up with actual science.

Now we're revisiting the impact that movie science had on pop culture

and how astrophysics has advanced in the past decade.

If it was made today, what would be different?

Here's Ira Flato with the movie's Science Advisor, Dr. Kip Thorne.

He's also a professor of a theoretical physics at Caltech, and since the film's release,

he won a Nobel Prize for his contributions for the detection of gravitational waves generated

from black holes.

Welcome back to Science Friday.

Good to have you.

Great to be here, Ira.

Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, you were the, as I say,

the science advisor for the movie. Remind us how the movie came about because you played a pretty big role in that too, right? Yes. Well, the movie began when a former girlfriend of mine,

...