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 SciFright 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 professor of

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 uh when a former girlfriend of mine linda oakes called me up and said would you like to

brainstorm with me for a movie uh i had helped her and carl sagan a little bit with the movie contact

on which carroll played a role similar to mine

on Interstellar in the end. And so I said, yes, of course. I thought, how better to reach a

very large audience with the beauties of astrophysics than through a movie like this. And so we

brainstormed and Stephen Spielberg's assistant came around to visit Linda a few weeks after we started brainstorming and asked her what movies she was thinking of doing. And she described the movie we were thinking about. And he went back, talked to Stephen. I called her up and said, can you have a treatment on my desk by Monday?

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