The following is a popular science article that
Richard,
Vitor and I have written for the IST Physics Magazine
"Pulsar" (
here is the Facebook page) and that will also appear in the Portuguese Physics Magazine "
Gazeta de Fisica". A pdf version is available
here (in English), and
here (in Portuguese).
1. One Hundred Years of Gravity
The latest Christopher Nolan's movie,
Interstellar, is about a future human civilization able to undertake cosmic travels to black holes using special shortcuts, ``wormholes''. Science-fiction as it might seem, Interstellar screenplayers --who happen to be the Nolan brothers-- have worked side by side with Kip Thorne, a professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and one of the fathers of modern General Relativity, the theory that explains what wormholes and black holes are and how they form in the Universe.
Thorne's contribution is to ensure that the movie --starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway among others-- doesn't contain scenes that would make Albert Einstein cringe.
Does this mean that travel agencies are about to sell (roundtrip!) tickets to a black hole? Not quite, but in a few years from now, theoretical physicists and astronomers will be able to study them as never before. The scientific payoff of these studies will largely overcome
Interstellar's box-office, with all due respect to Mr. Nolan!
