Another question about the Interstellar movie.
When the crew (or what's left of it) arrived near Miller's planet orbiting Gargantua, a team was sent to the planet to rescue Miller who was sent there to investigate if the planet could be habitable. One particle physicist (?) was left behind in a spacecraft orbiting the planet.
Now the particle scientist (who stayed in the spacecraft orbiting the planet) in the movie explained that if the team stayed a few hours on the planet he himself would have experienced much, much more time gone by (which turned out to be a bit more than 23 years).
But how is this possible? The planet falls freely around the BH (freely falling bodies experience no change in the pace of time because falling bodies experience no gravity so in their frame of reference spacetime isn't curved) and we see that the team experiences a gravity on the planet comparable to that of the Earth.
Which means that the time for the team progresses more or less at the same pace as on Earth (if they would find themselves in a big box, through which one cannot see anything they wouldn't be able to tell if they were staying on Earth or on Miller's planet, supposing the gravity on Miller's planet is the same as on Earth, which seems not too far from the truth). Let's assume (which I think is reasonable) that the progress of time on the part of Miller's planet facing Gargantua is the same as the progress of time on the part of the planet facing the other direction, so we only have to deal with the planet's gravity.
Each member of the team would feel (almost) no difference with walking on Earth, so you would think time progresses for them a bit slower (like on Earth) than for the guy left behind in the spacecraft orbiting the planet. He is freely falling towards Miller's planet and Gargantua and feels no gravity at all which means his pace of time is maximal. He (and the team) may be in an orbit where time goes slower because of the gravity of Gargantua, but this going slower of time is only experienced by objects at rest relative to the BH (think of a rocket staying put at a safe distance from a BH by using a superstrong thrust mechanism).
Wouldn't all this imply that when the team returns to the ship orbiting the planet, the ages of the team members and the particle physicist differ by a VERY SMALL amount, instead of the 23 years difference which the movie wants us to believe? Which is to say that the team members are just a VERY LITTLE bit younger than our particle physicist, instead of 23 years?
Note that I analyzed the problem in the (approximate) inertial frame of the freely falling planet and the freely falling spaceship orbiting Miller's planet.