Seite - 56 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 06/01
Bild der Seite - 56 -
Text der Seite - 56 -
tered around the main Judeo-Christian narrative, which constitutes the foundation
of Western culture. In addition, we will see that it is even possible to make a con-
nection between at least some of the scientific ideas explored in the movie and
religious ideas. Henri Bergson claimed that ethics, law, and scientific thought origi-
nated in religion, were integrated with it for the majority of our history, and remain
steeped in its spirit.8
Interstellar is a science fiction movie. Science fiction, as a genre, deals mainly
with futuristic fictional plots that develop existing contemporary ideas and trends
in the fields of science, technology, economics, and art, among others, and explore
their potential repercussions on the future of humanity. The science fiction author
Robert Heinlein defined science fiction as “realistic speculation about possible fu-
ture events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and pres-
ent, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific
method”.9
Interstellar follows the space voyage of a team of experts sent through a
wormhole to search for a planet fit for human settlement since Earth is in the grips
of ecological catastrophe that threatens to wipe out humanity. A wormhole is a hy-
pothetical physical phenomenon that would allow instant travel between two dis-
tant points along the space-time continuum, or in other words a passage between
two locations in three-dimensional space and even a way of traveling through time.
The film was written by the director’s brother, Jonathan Nolan, who took inspira-
tion from the work of physicist Kip Stephen Thorne, which implies that wormholes
in the space-time continuum could be a potential gateway to time travel. This fic-
tional idea of the wormhole, which drives the movie’s entire action plot, is based on
groundbreaking work that American Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech published
in 1988, in which they claimed that time travel is not just possible, but even proba-
ble under certain conditions.10 Theirs was the first paper that saw leading physicists
making a scientific claim for the possibility of changing the course of time. Michio
Kaku summarized: “If you could fall straight through to the black hole, there would
be another universe on the other side. This is called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, first
introduced by Einstein in 1935; it is now called a wormhole.”11 Their proclamation
was based on the simple hypothesis that an immense gravitational force, in accord-
ance with the general theory of relativity, could potentially bend time-space in such
a way as to link two distinct spots in the universe. The resulting “wormhole” would
then allow instant travel through three-dimensional space as well as through time,
8 Bergson 1954, 317.
9 Heinlein 1969, 22.
10 Kaku 1994, 19–20.
11 Kaku 2008, 209.
Biblical Narratives in Interstellar |
55www.jrfm.eu
2020, 6/1, 53–69
JRFM
Journal Religion Film Media, Band 06/01
- Titel
- JRFM
- Untertitel
- Journal Religion Film Media
- Band
- 06/01
- Autoren
- Christian Wessely
- Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
- Herausgeber
- Uni-Graz
- Verlag
- Schüren Verlag GmbH
- Ort
- Graz
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- Abmessungen
- 14.8 x 21.0 cm
- Seiten
- 184
- Kategorien
- Zeitschriften JRFM