gourimoko
Fighting the good fight!
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The entire first, second, and third act is actually a single closed-timelike curve.
In the first act, the gravitational disturbances in the crop machines are Cooper interacting through the gravitational force (which can and does traverse higher dimensions).
The dust particles and how they grouped together on the floor in the beginning of the movie, is Cooper, again, interacting through the gravitational force by slicing his hand through space.
The books falling... Cooper..
Now here's the kicker.... The wormhole appearing near Saturn..... That was also Cooper (or in other interpretations, humanity in general).
The bookcase (or "tesseract") was not a construct of some "higher dimensional beings" but of Cooper having traversed the inner horizon of a rotating black hole and his mind interpreting the surroundings the same way ours interpret our surroundings on Earth.
Cooper could interact with all of the places he had been, because he had previous been there; he knew of them, and since he was effectively in all places and times at once, his mind constructed the tesseract in a way that he could interpret and understand.
Is this physics? Well.. very loosely.
The physics is consistent in that Cooper could change his own past; many physicists reject the chronology conjecture outright (just as many reject firewalls, and other self-consistent conjectures that don't have mathematical foundations).
This part of the movie loses people because quantum effects do not move in a single dimension with respect time. This is explained though, in the movie, but it probably lost quite a few people.
I'll try to explain this briefly:
There are various mathematical solutions to general relativity that result in the creation of black holes (this is actually my area of expertise).
The most commonly cited solution (and the simplest) is the Schwarzschild GR solution which describes a non-rotating, non-charged gravitationally collapsed mass.
When most folks think of a black hole, they think of a Schwarzschild black hole for simplicity sake.
But this isn't a common occurrence in nature, because most stars spin and angular momentum is conserved at all times; even during gravitational collapse. In fact, the spin of the collapsing core accelerates often to relativistic speeds as the core shrinks.
For quite a few reasons this doesn't result in a Schwarzschild black hole, but one of the most commonly cited is that due to angular momentum being conserved, the traditional point particle-like singularity would be incapable of demonstrating spin (points can't spin), therefore, the most base object (configuration of matter-energy in the universe) capable of conserving angular momentum is a zero-thickness ring with a net positive radius.
This 2-dimensional ring would now have two event horizons, instead of just one; an outer and inner event horizon.
From the outside, it would look like any other black hole (but it would have spin and likely have an accretion disc - we see this all the time). Once you cross the event horizon, it would be like any other Schwarzschild black hole event horizon and you'd find yourself being pulled towards your doom at the singularity.
But unlike a non-spinning black hole, once you crossed the inner event horizon, things would change.
You would now regain freedom of motion and freedom of your future worldline (on a penrose diagram the transformation that takes place when you cross the first event horizon would be reversed).
In front of you would be a large ring which would have a repulsive gravitational effect, and through the center of the ring would exist (potentially) a conduit to any other potential past or present timelike infinity (everywhere and everytime).
We can assume that Cooper passed through the ring singularity and was nestled for an indeterminate period of "time" in this region between universes (what the movie refers to as "the Bulk"). It is at this point where Cooper is affecting changes in what would seem to him to be his past. <-- it might not be his past, but in fact a parallel future (many worlds + consistent chronology).
This may seem irrational, but it isn't. From Cooper's perspective, the universe exists in a space around him; it has literally curved around him into a closed (unstable) bubble held open by the negative energy of the ring singularity.
Now.. is any of this predicted by science? Like the bookshelf, and mental perception of higher dimensions, etc?
No.
But, what happens within an event horizon, let alone near a singularity is mostly unknown. The very concept of a singularity is largely rejected by most popular quantum gravity theories like Loop Quantum Gravity and most popular interpretations of String Theory.
So... we have no idea, and that's kind of the point of the movie.
There's a great deal of metaphysical speculation that takes place not only throughout the movie (Love being a force of nature for example) but particularly at the end with respect to Cooper's experience in "The Bulk" and the formation of the tesseract.
The movie more or less is trying to demonstrate how life is not just a biological phenomena but something more; that the mind isn't confined to the physical confines of the brain; and that emotions like love are real physical phenomena and not just biochemical responses to stimuli.
This was Dr. Brand's argument as to why they should go to Edmund's planet (and she was right) - and why Cooper knew his daughter would eventually go back for the watch (and he was right).
From a science standpoint, yeah it's very loosely possible (in the loosest sense imaginable), but not remotely probable; yet from a literary standpoint I think it's brilliant.
