Five key concepts for you to better understand Interstellar

Still photo of "tesseract", a five-dimensional space, in the movie Interstellar.[Photo/ movie.mtime.com]

Five-dimensional space

In Einstein's theory of general relativity, time is considered a dimension like height, width, and depth, creating a four dimensional universe called space-time. Normally, a decision one makes at a particular moment will influence a person's life path. But, imagine if you can go back time and change the very decision you made in the past, you present life situation would be different. Thus in science fiction, sometimes the author or director often makes his leading character go back to the past to fight the evils so that the history can be rewritten.

However, Interstellar uses a different conception that Cooper drops to a five-dimensional space created by the future human being. The five-dimensional space is portrayed as an extra-dimensional "tesseract" where time appears as a spatial dimension. Cooper is able to see across space and time to the inside of his daughter Murphy's bedroom back on Earth at various times in the past. However, Cooper cannot go through it, but he realizes that, by using gravitational waves, he is able to send the data of the singular point of the black hole by Morse code to the adult Murphy, allowing her to solve the gravity equation.

However, in physics, the fifth dimension is a hypothetical extra dimension beyond the usual three spatial dimensions and one time dimension of relativity.

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