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In the film Interstellar, a character called Cooper travels into a black hole and falls straight into the so-called "tesseract". The tesseract is a 5-dimensional portal in which the ordinary time of 4d spacetime is spatial and can be accessed like an axis on a graph,

Tesseract

Was this scene based on science or fiction?

Qmechanic
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Achmed
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    No, I don't remember that scene because I haven't seen it, and I don't know what "access time like an axis on a graph" means. Please don't make having watched a movie a prerequisite for understanding a question, but include all necessary details in the question itself. – ACuriousMind Nov 14 '16 at 11:34
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    @ACuriousMind In the (painful to watch) film, the main character can physically access different points in time of his daughter's bedroom, simply by moving from one room in a sequence to another. I vote to close this question; it goes without saying this particular aspect of the film is far removed from any mainstream physics. – JamalS Nov 14 '16 at 11:36
  • I asked this question Because I read article that claim

    Interstellar : Discovered the Gravitational Waves before everyone else.

    https://medium.com/the-cinéphilia/interstellar-discovered-the-gravitational-waves-before-everyone-else-a505b508aedd#.f8o4xkn46

     – Achmed Nov 14 '16 at 11:52
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    Yes, the fictional scene about fictional characters was fictional. – Kyle Kanos Nov 14 '16 at 12:02
  • There is another scene in the film that was interesting،

    In that scene a teacher claims: Apollo missions were faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union!

     – Achmed Nov 14 '16 at 12:12
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    Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist , known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, most notably for the Christopher Nolan film, Interstellar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kip_Thorne – Achmed Nov 14 '16 at 12:20
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    Kip Thorne's help on the film does not mean that it is any less fictional. – Kyle Kanos Nov 14 '16 at 12:24

2 Answers2

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Yes, the "tesseract" scene was completely fictional.

This movie is notable for its realism in some scenes, due in part to Kip Thorne's involvement as a consultant. In particular, the depiction of the black hole when seen from the outside is accurate in some respects. (See the answers here for details.) The scenes with the wormhole also depict optical effects from the bending of space-time in a realistic manner, though the existence of the wormhole itself is not realistic. New rendering software was developed for those scenes.

However, a major theme of the movie is that physics can't tell us what can be found inside a black hole. In the movie, aliens created the tesseract there so that Cooper could send messages back in time, but that's completely fictional.

Community
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N. Virgo
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In the film Interstellar, a character called Cooper travels into a black hole and falls straight into the so-called "tesseract".

A tesseract is a "four-dimensional analog of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square"

The tesseract is a 5-dimensional portal in which the ordinary time of 4d spacetime is spatial and can be accessed like an axis on a graph. Was this scene based on science or fiction?

Fiction. Absolute total fiction. The problem with interstellar is that it was billed as having robust bona-fide science, but actually it didn't. Google on Interstellar pseudoscience to find out more. And I'm afraid this isn't the first time Kip Thorne has peddled "woo" under false pretences. See this article where he's promoting time travel.Wormholes are pseudoscience too.

John Duffield
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