The Shape of Existence

Watched Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" for the first time this afternoon: for some reason - probably laziness - it had escaped my radar until Jane starting watching it today. Like most of Nolan's films, time features heavily, either as a subtextual technical device, as in Dunkirk, or here in full-on philosophical discourse meets higher mathematics/astrophysics mode. Long and hyperbolic though the final film was, it was pacy enough and threw out sufficient questions about the nature of our realit[ies]y to hold my attention for the thick end of three hours. I won't bother summarising the plot: the Wikipedia entry does a good enough job of that.

The concept of wormholes in spacetime has been around for some considerable time now, as has the general acceptance of the presence of black holes in the Universe: once merely also mathematically-conjectured theory, but now experimentally proven as real. What we don't know of course is what form reality might take at the extremes of gravitation that obtains within and around these structures. All we know is the mathematics and physics: the realities themselves can only currently be conjectured, based on equations and observational experiment at a distance.

If you've seen the film, you'll either have come away from the experience having been moved and your interest piqued, or you'll have dismissed the piece as over-long, overblown and over-theatrical. You takes it as you find it. For my part, I take the former view, as it slots right into my general streams and patterns of thought on where our place in existence lies [see multiple blog-posts passim]. The two pieces that  I've posted that sum this up the best are "Dreamtime", and, funnily enough "Dreamtime", an accidentally if appropriately recycled title from the previous post of the same name. If you've not seen the film, or indeed pondered the metaphysics of your being, give the former a look and ponder the latter as ye go...