Reading the headline, my immediate reaction was "No. OK, maybe one planet in a trillion or quadrillion-ish."
... he says with an increasing sense of misery.
... says Schnittman, with more than a hint of wishful thinking.
This sense is quickly lost as he moves on to other reasons to be pessimistic.
This Schnittman guy sounds like the most expressive bi-polar astrophysicist ever (is he challenging my title?). Or, more likely, the author enjoys a fair bit of embellishment.
I had a homework assignment on nonlinear surface waves, and one case with the limit of ~0 background/unperturbed depth, with a near-infinite wave amplitude, like the waves on the Interstellar black hole planet. The difference is, in Interstellar, I presume that the wave/s is/are tidally locked with the black hole, and the planet beneath is rotating. There would have to be a sweet spot of rotation/revolution rate on the planet for the waves to be coherent, although it could cycle through phases or something for not-sweet-spot rotation rates. That'd be a chaotic system, though, so the concept of "phases" would at least somewhat break down. But yeah, for the same planet near nothing else, if you created a huge column of water and somehow gave it just the right amount of push, it does indeed propagate with relatively little change in shape or other characteristics.
Stop posting good shit, I have a job now.