> several including myself

Nice to meet the unicorn! Meanwhile, how many textbooks are on the shelves at Barnes&Nobel? Not exactly bestsellers, right? Even the University of Washington bookstore puts the textbooks in a separate room in the basement.

> Textbook-level treatment of a subject is usually very shallow

Maybe the ones you read are. The ones Caltech uses aren't, like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/06911...

If so, we must credit academic scholasticism for turning Einstein's simple theory presented in couple of brief journal articles into a 1,275 page book (over 5 pounds!). If those original papers required such a book to make them intelligible, then I would not call General Relativity a simple theory.

The book is of course GR bible Gravitation by MTW.

https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/07167...

> But fiction is harder

That's too general a statement. You're certainly correct that a engaging consistent story with good characters is much harder than, say, the average cookbook or travel guide.

But many textbooks in science and math seem like absolutely Herculean effort. Surely, Gravitation[1] by Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler or The Art of Electronics[2] by Horowitz & Hill (both non-fiction) are equivalent in intellectual effort to all ~5000 Harlequin Romances (fiction) put together.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/06911...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521...

I had no idea Kip Thorne was a producer for this. For non-physicists, Thorne is one of the authors of _the_ general relativity book for graduates, _Gravitation_ [1]. It's this huge telephone book sized tome that was published in 1973, and while it has fallen behind the times with respect to experimental data included in it, it is still unparallelled in scope and depth today in covering Einstein's theory.

I certainly enjoyed the movie, and I really loved the visualizations of a wormhole and of the large spinning black hole, things you usually have to imagine as a physicist without ever seeing with your eyes.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Physics-Series-Charles-Mis...

here's an explanation of gravity http://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Physics-Charles-W-Misner/d...

long story short, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. objects of mass cause the curvature, and the curvature in turn causes objects to move locally along geodesics (shortest-distance paths), which causes the curvature to shift

when you throw a ball and it's moving through a parabola, that curve taken with time in a riemannian space is actually the straightest line possible from one end of the throw to the other

this is Einstein's magnum opus General Relativity