A wormhole ... is a science fiction writer's favorite way to get from one place to another because you get to bypass the speed limit imposed by the speed of light: 186,000 miles per second. And that's really fast for anything we would normally encounter in everyday life, but if you want to cross the galaxy, you would be long dead before you got there.
And so a wormhole is a literal and figurative shortcut through the fabric of space. And you take your destination, wherever it is, warp the space between you and it. You bend it back on itself and then you cut a hole out of your dimension, through a higher dimension and reappear in the dimension you just left.
SAGAL: That's all right, man. You know, you were talking about "Beauty And The Beast" and...
PERLMAN: Why don't we talk about "Sons Of Anarchy"? That's a much funnier show.
SAGAL: That's the one where you kill a lot of guy?
PERLMAN: Yeah. It's like taking a sheet of paper and you want to get from one edge to another. But fold it over, and then you can bring the top part of the paper as close as you want to the bottom part of the paper, but you have to leave the paper to make that transition.
The math and the physics of it is sound; it's derived from Einstein's special theory of relativity. But we don't know how to make one, and even if we did make one, the equations show that they're unstable and they would collapse upon you if you tried to go through. So, that's where the science fiction comes in.
On the film's representation of relativity, which involves time slowing down for the astronaut explorers as compared to time on Earth
You can run the equations of general relativity and, when you run those equations, what you learn is that if you are in the presence of a strong gravity, you will have noticeable effects on how slow your time ticks, relative to anybody else who is looking at you from the outside.
And their ratio of how slowly they aged versus everybody else was extreme. You can find strength of gravity strong enough to equal what that difference in time ticking rates would be — you could find one and it is extreme. But they made it clear this is a planet orbiting a black hole. So, there it is. It's a time dilation effect, it's called — and this is real, by the way. ...
SAGAL: Yeah. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been tweeting about the science behind Interstellar. In an interview with NPR's David Greene, Tyson goes beyond those tweets, deep into wormholes, relativity and even some spoilers. Here's the non-spoiler version of what he had to say. To find out what Tyson thinks about the plausibility of the film's ending, click the audio link at the bottom of the page.
PERLMAN: There's humor in mayhem.
SAGAL: There's humor in mayhem, but we also notice that you appear as yourself without any makeup. One of the things you said is you got the role - or you were offered the role of beast is because you had - your first two big movie roles, which were "Quest For Fire" and "The Name Of The Rose," you had a tremendous amount of prosthetic makeup and you were known as a guy who could deal with sitting in the chair while they put that on. So is there - I mean, cause you say that for...
PERLMAN: And those were, in fact, my only credentials.
SAGAL: That was it. Well, that guy, Perlman, he'll sit there. Is there a trick for sitting in the chair?
PERLMAN: They said to me, could you sing happy birthday? I said no. They said, well, why don't you tell a joke, we'll see if you have any stage presence whatsoever. And that led to them saying, you know what, we'll fix it in post. Just put the makeup on. It'll only take you four and a half - five hours a day. No one will know you. Your own mother won't know you.
MAZ JOBRANI: What do you do for four hours when they're putting makeup on you?
PERLMAN: It depends on the gig. I mean, you know, "Hellboy" was Sinatra - Sinatra and Tom Waits. Margaret Baserra, who put on my makeup for "Beauty And The Beast" - she would alternate between watching "The Wizard Of Oz" while she was putting it on so that's every day for nine months. Or...
SAGAL: Wait a minute. She would like watch the wizard - I mean, you do look a little bit like the cowardly lion. I doubt...
PERLMAN: And there's a reason - there's a reason for that.
SAGAL: Right. Did she ever slip?
PERLMAN: Now you know what it is.
SAGAL: Did she ever slip up and, oh my God, you came onto the set as the tin man? Damn.
PERLMAN: One time I ended up with straw coming out of my...
SAGAL: Yeah, I understand.