The science fiction film, Interstellar, tells the story of a team of astronauts searching a distant galaxy for habitable planets to colonize. Interstellars story draws heavily from contemporary science. The film makes reference to a range of topics,
from established concepts such as fast-spinning black holes, accretion disks, tidal effects, and time dilation, to far more speculative ideas such as wormholes, time travel, additional space dimensions, and the theory of everything. The aim of this article is to decipher some of the scientific notions which support the framework of the movie.
I give an epistemological analysis of the developments of relativistic cosmology from 1917 to 1966, based on the seminal articles by Einstein, de Sitter, Friedmann, Lemaitre, Hubble, Gamow and other historical figures of the field. It appears that mo
st of the ingredients of the present-day standard cosmological model, including the acceleration of the expansion due to a repulsive dark energy, the interpretation of the cosmological constant as vacuum energy or the possible non-trivial topology of space, had been anticipated by Georges Lemaitre, although his articles remain mostly unquoted.
What is the shape of the Universe? Is it finite or infinite ? Is space multi-connected to create ghost images of faraway cosmic sources? After a dark age period, the field of cosmic topology has now become one of the major concerns in astronomy and c
osmology, not only from theorists but also from observational astronomers. Here I give a personal account of the spectacular progress in the field since the beginning of the 1990s, when I started to work in it.
