Interstellar' strengthened my faith

Interstellar is a great movie. It has been talked about much and from many different views. One interesting one that I came across, was that the story is actually told from the perspective where the main character Cooper, played by Mathew McConoughey, has actually died in the very start of the movie and everything is all about the afterlife. I didn't agree with it, but it was interesting to think about.

I had watched the movie back when it was released in 2014 and at the time I watched it only because I like the actor. At the time, my knowledge about space was as much as I had learnt in high school where Pluto was still a planet and gravity was still a force that pulled everything toward the surface of the earth. I watched it this time around knowing not only that Pluto is not a planet and gravity pushes from the top due to the curvature of space-time rather than exerting a pull from the ground, but I also know and understand some fantastic space and physics realities that can be mind-numbing if you were to read about them for the first time.

As Muslims, we believe that, upon entering heaven, we will live a life that will be eternal. That we will not be bound by the same rules of aging due to the passage of time. We know that the arrow of time is one directional. The movie shows in the most remarkable manner that time can stop for some people when they get too close to a blackhole because of its high gravity. We know that we don't know what's inside a blackhole and what happens to information that goes inside a blackhole. The laws of physics known to mankind do not apply beyond the entry point of the blackhole called the event horizon. Would it be too much of a stretch to compare that to what our understanding of heaven is?

The most important scene for me is the one toward the end of the movie where Cooper jumps into a blackhole and comes on the other side into what they call a tesseract. Despite the fact that the arrow of time is one directional, Cooper can see and access time as a physical dimension inside that tesseract. He is given access to a higher dimension beyond from the 3 dimensional reality of us earthlings. And from there he can go back and forth between different times of the inside of his daughter's bedroom.

Let me tell you a little about these dimensions. Scientists now believe that there are 11 dimensions. We cannot access these dimensions. We do not know where they are and we do not know where to point the finger at them. Not yet. But we can imagine them. We know that they can exist. Anyone from a higher dimension would be able to jump in and out of different times. As Muslims, we believe in realities around us, we just can't see or touch them. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence as Carl Sagan said.

We are also told that even if time travel were a possibility, we would not be able to go back in time and change anything. The famous rationale is that if I could go back in time and kill my father before he married my mother, I would not be here writing this article today.

But in the movie, a human being is sent to save humanity by becoming a bridge between the earthlings and the higher beings, which are actually the humans that have evolved into those very higher beings into the distant future. Those higher beings can change the course of history by steering humanity into a certain direction. We are the reflection of the Almighty on earth. We are His creation. And a messenger was sent to guide humanity to save it from darkness. That messenger acted as a bridge between humanity and the Lord Almighty from a higher dimension. I am convinced that Christopher Nolan must have read the Holy Quran and truly understood it.