Murph is named after Murphy’s Law. While Murphy’s Law is usually taken to mean “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”, Cooper reinterprets it as “anything that can happen will happen”.

This principle becomes important when the crew is deciding which planet to live on, because none of them are guarantees. This leads Cooper to pick the planet where he believes the most good things could happen, not the place where the least bad things could happen, which is another subtle prod from Nolan to aim for something spectacular even if it’s risky.

Fun Fact: The simulation of the movie’s black hole “Gargantua” actually helped the movie’s advisor, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, better understand how a black hole works.

We learned [that] when you have a fast-spinning black hole, without any accretion disk, and let it just lens the distant sky—a star field—we saw a fantastically beautiful structure that is sort of like a fingerprint, but much more complex… To me it’s a lovely kind of discovery in the sense that it is really very beautiful and it arises from a collaboration between a scientist and a group of computer artists. We are submitting a paper about this and about the particular method that Double Negative uses to the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGbrEmVrhc

The classic Dylan Thomas poem is quoted many times throughout the movie by Michael Caine’s character, and speaks to one of its important themes – survival instinct.

In my opinion, this is what makes movies like Interstellar so popular – they function as escapism for those that are afraid of doing great things on their own. That is why Nolan lures us in with a film that seems to promise an escape from reality, but instead decides to challenge us to improve our realities.

Screen Rant explains who “they” are here (SPOILERS!)