8 Things That Don't Look Anything Like They Do In Movies

1. We Still Can't Manage Black Holes

When Interstellar hit our screens, there was much made out of their remarkably realistic black hole. There were even some who hailed it as a scientific discovery in itself. Sorry to disappoint, but the truth is that, whilst Gargantua is a solid attempt, a physicist would probably describe it as "kinda realistic". Weirdly, this is actually on purpose as Nolan feared that the more accurate representation would be "too confusing" for the audience. Rude.

Well, take a good look at the image above, because this is the mind-blowingly confusing black hole that was published in a paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity. If complex mathematics are your thing, then give it a read.

The accretion disk appears to wrap over and around the black hole due to gravitational lensing - that's when the enormous gravitational force of the black hole causes light to bend and warp around it. This was featured in the final cut of the film, but the part that Nolan thought would be too confusing for a mass audience is that colour change from left to right due to Doppler shift and the gravitational frequency shift.

Both this black hole and the one featured in the movie have actually had their spin slowed down massively in order to make any sense at all. If the black hole was spinning at the speed required to create the kinds of time dilation effects seen in the movie, it would just be a jumbled mess and multiple images of the accretion disk would pop up at the edges. Okay, we can kinda see why they changed it now.

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