Gargantua's Spin
When Christopher Nolan told me how much slowing of time he wanted on Miller’s planet, one hour there is seven years back on Earth, I was shocked. I didn’t think that possible and I told Chris so. “It’s non-negotiable,” Chris insisted. So, not for the first time and also not the last, I went home, thought about it, did some calculations with Einstein’s relativistic equations, and found a way.
I discovered that, if Miller’s planet is about as near Gargantua as it can get without falling in4 and if Gargantua is spinning fast enough, then Chris’s one-hour-in-seven-years time slowing is possible. But Gargantua has to spin awfully fast.
There is a maximum spin rate that any black hole can have. If it spins faster than that maximum, its horizon disappears, leaving the singularity inside it wide open for all the universe to see; that is, making it naked—which is probably forbidden by the laws of physics (Chapter 26).
I found that Chris’s huge slowing of time requires Gargantua to spin almost as fast as the maximum: less than the maximum by about one part in 100 trillion.5 In most of my science interpretations of "Interstellar," I assume this spin.
However, I can imagine situations—very rare or never in the real universe, but possible nevertheless—where the spin gets much closer to the maximum, even as close as Chris requires to produce the slowing of time on Miller’s planet, a spin one part in 100 trillion less than the maximum spin. Unlikely, but possible.
This is common in movies. To make a great film, a superb filmmaker often pushes things to the extreme. In science fantasy films such as "Harry Potter," that extreme is far beyond the bounds of the scientifically possible. In science fiction, it’s generally kept in the realm of the possible. That’s the main distinction between science fantasy and science fiction.
Interstellar" is science fiction, not fantasy. Gargantua’s ultrafast spin is scientifically possible.
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