Interstellar: The Official Movie Novelization

by Greg Keyes

“I thought you were a ghost,” she said. Cooper saw she was serious. “There’s no ghost, Murph,” he mumbled.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, dumb-ass,” Tom said.

“Fine,” he said. “Murph, you wanna talk science, don’t just tell me you’re scared of some ghost. Record the facts, analyze—present your conclusions.”

“Murphy’s Law doesn’t mean bad stuff will happen,” he explained gently, really wanting her to understand. “It means ‘whatever can happen… will happen.’ And that sounded just fine to us.”

When gravity writes map directions on the floor of your house, you don’t take your little girl to find out how and why. He wasn’t an idiot.

An orbit was a controlled fall, really, and most weren’t stable over time. That had been known as far back as Newton, who spent gallons of ink trying to figure out why the planets hadn’t tumbled into the sun or spun off into space. In the end his best guess was that God just didn’t want it that way, so now and then He would toss a comet through the solar system to put everything back on track.

“Evolution has yet to transcend that simple barrier—we can care deeply, selflessly for people we know, but our empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.”