The wormhole that carries Interstellal’s crew to another galaxy has a scientific connection to Contact: physicist Kip Thorne began exploring traversable wormholes after Carl Sagan asked him how a character could cross interstellar distances quickly.
Sagan was writing Contact in the mid-1980s and initially imagined a journey through a black hole. Thorne explained that the trip would be lethal. His proposed route was a wormhole held open by exotic matter with negative energy density, a theoretical shortcut through space.
Thorne developed the physics, later formalizing the work in a paper with his student Michael Morris. Sagan used the idea in his novel and credited Thorne in the author’s note. The 1997 film adaptation kept the wormhole journey.
For Interstellar (2014), Thorne helped develop the premise with producer Lynda Obst and served as both an executive producer and scientific consultant. His general-relativity equations gave the visual-effects team the mathematical basis for rendering the wormhole near Saturn and the black hole Gargantua.
Obst produced both films, and her connection with Thorne also ran through Sagan, who’d set them up on a blind date years earlier.
Matthew McConaughey connects the casts, too. He played religious philosopher and spiritual advisor Palmer Joss in Contact, then former NASA pilot Cooper in Interstellar. The stories are unrelated, and they share a physicist, a producer and an actor.
