Early in Interstellar, when Cooper first visits the NASA facility, he is shown a giant, cylindrical enclosure being constructed to carry thousands of humans into space and house them for many generations: a space colony. And he's told there are others being constructed elsewhere.
"How does it get off Earth?" Cooper asks the Professor. "Those first gravitational anomalies changed everything," the Professor replies. "Suddenly we knew that harnessing gravity was real. So I started working on the theoryand we started building this station."
At the end of Interstellar we see everyday life back on even keel, inside the colony, floating in space (Figure 31.1).
How did it get lifted into space? The key, of course, was the quantum data (in my scientist's interpretation, the quantum gravity laws) that TARS extracted from Gargantua's singularity (Chapters 26 and 28) and Cooper transmitted to Murph (Chapter 30).
In my interpretation, by discarding quantum fluctuations from those laws (Chapter 26), Murph learned the nonquantum laws that govern gravitational anomalies. And from those laws, she figured out how to control the anomalies.
As a physicist, I'm eager to know the details. Was Professor Brand on the right track in the equations that covered his blackboards? (Chapter 25 and this book's page at Interstellar.withgoogle.com.) Did he really have half the answer, as Murph asserted before getting the quantum data? Or was he way off? Is the secret to anomalies and controlling gravity something completely different?
Perhaps a sequel to Interstellar will tell us. Christopher Nolan is a master of sequels; just watch his Batman trilogy.
But one thing seems clear. Murph must have figured out how to reduce Newton's gravitational constant G inside the Earth. Recall (Chapter 25) that the Earth's gravitational pull is given by Newton's inverse square law: g = Gm/r2, where r2 is the squared distance from the Earth's center, m is the mass of the Earth, and G is Newton's gravitational constant. Cut Newton's G in half and you reduce the Earth's gravity by two. Cut G by a thousand and you reduce the Earth's gravity by a thousand.
In my interpretation, with Newton's G reduced inside the Earth to, say, a thousandth its normal value for, say, an hour, rocket engines could lift the enormous colonies into space.
As a byproduct, in my interpretation the Earth's coreno longer compressed by the enormous weight of the planet abovemust have sprung outward, pushing the Earth's surface upward. Gigantic earthquakes and tsunamis must have followed, wreaking havoc on Earth as the colonies soared into space, a terrible price for the Earth to pay on top of its blight-driven catastrophe. Vffien Newton's G was restored to normal strength, the Earth must have shrunk back to its normal size, wreaking more earthquake and tsunami havoc.