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>Tyson describes the gravitational effect of a black, who's
>gravity is so severe that light can't even escape it, as being
>so severe as to break apart any matter into absolute molecular
>matter.
This is tricky, because part of the issue is historical, and part of it is physical and astrophysical.
The view of a black hole horizon as a "point of no return" from which one is destined for a sure, grim, spaghettified death at the singularity, developed over the fifty or so years when we only knew about the simplest kind of black hole: the nonrotating, uncharged black hole discovered by Karl Schwarzschild in the trenches of WWI.
In the 1960s, we finally started to discover the richness of structure in more generic black holes, including these weird things involving time travel. So the colloquial understanding of black holes known to the general public and to astrophysicists like Tyson is naive because it developed at a time when this extra structure hadn't yet been seen.
That said, still to this day, we have reason to think that these closed timelike curves can't exist in the real world. We've seen examples of instabilities that would destroy certain special cases, but like I've said, no general mathematical proof, so many cases remain open. The main reason theoretical physicists assume these features must be ruled out in the real world is to avoid time travel paradoxes, but science fiction writers *want* the time travel paradoxes, so they keep a more open mind.
>The way the ship "explodes" at the end is sort of in
>line with this, but that changes the whole time warp premise
>that they originally came up with. I would really not have a
>problem with it at all if they just stuck with a consistent
>take on blackholes: are they folds in universe that allow for
>time travel or are they the most destructive force in the
>universe? You can't have it both ways without the audience
>going "what?"
Why can't you have it both ways? If you're in a kayak and you go off a waterfall you might eventually find yourself safe further down the river or you might end up with your head cracked open on a rock. The issue, in the case of the movie, is whether the ship happens to come into contact with a region of the black hole where the tidal stresses are enough to overcome the strength of the ship's material.
>The other part of them ejecting their nuclear cells INTO the
>blackhole at the end, it allowing energy to propel out of the
>black hole and push them a safe distance away...is that
>theoretically possible for energy to extend outward from a
>black hole at that rate or for the nuclear explosion to even
>be observable outside of the blackhole? It's just so
>strange...especially if the blackhole was as powerful as it
>was acting, overcoming the "warp 4 (four times the speed of
>light)" thrust speed the enterprise was putting out at the
>end.
Well, it isn't necessarily a nuclear explosion. It's whatever fuel they use to create artificial wormholes to propel the ship to superluminal speeds, which is presumably a hell of a lot more powerful than ordinary nuclear reactions. Black holes are dynamical objects, and I see no obvious reason why interaction with other dynamical processes, such as large explosions, couldn't slightly alter the causal structure just outside. Someone could go ahead and do the calculation, but I doubt the writers expected anyone to go to such lengths to debunk what they admitted from the beginning was a work of fiction. It would kinda be missing the point.
>The science talk either shouldn't have been in the movie or
>should have been really, really sound, and it just wasn't.
I disagree. The science in science fiction serves a purpose in getting people interested in the science. I certainly wouldn't have studied physics without the help of Star Trek. And the fiction serves a purpose in providing compelling stories that don't need to be told in equations.
Also, once they decided, back in the sixties, that in the future they'll find a way to travel faster than light, or create artificial gravity, or land on arbitrary planets without pressurizing or breathing equipment, or transport their entire bodies (including consciousness) immediately across space, or speak English to creatures who've never come into contact with humanity before, the idea of passing through the interior of a black hole automatically became plausible.
I will, however, take this opportunity to put in a plug for a movie in early preproduction from a collaboration between one of my PhD advisors, Kip Thorne (who will produce and get a "story by" credit, though Jonathan Nolan is writing the screenplay), and Steven Spielberg (who will produce and direct). The working title is "Interstellar." The plan is for it to be the first Hollywood sci-fi movie to be based mostly on established science, though it will involve some more speculative ideas as well. It'll also have a companion book explaining in detail what is and what isn't established science.
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