In Interstellar movie I almost had a syncope when Dr. Romilly explains how a wormhole works to Cooper as if he were a 5-year-old child and not a former NASA astronaut.
I have been in the room where seasoned doctors are talking to junior doctors like this, I think its normal. Sometimes people that are really smart can dumb down their subject of expertise in a way that an outsider might seem like they are talking down to someone
i think it’s partly because it’s often very easy for experts to overestimate what non-experts know, even people with some knowledge in the field (relevant xkcd as usual), so it’s probably easier to just dumb it down as much as you possibly can. That way you’re sure most people can actually understand.
She was actually explaining it to the movie going audience, in a break of the fourth wall indirectly, but y’know
;)
There’s probably an explaining shit to the expert TV Tropes page.
I’d look for it, but I wouldn’t be able to escape the gravitational pull of that site for several days…
Thanks! I’ll take your word for it 😁
Do NASA astronauts have a course on wormholes? You know… just in case.
syncope
You’re not going to believe the name of Christopher Nolan’s production company.
Syncopy.
I was a former 5-year-old child.
It’s cute how humans always think they are capable of explaining such things as these.
I 100% support theoretical investigation, and the pursuit of scientific examination… But we don’t KNOW a whole lot about wormholes. We can only GUESS based on visual evidence.
What visual evidence of wormholes? If I’m not mistaken, they’re purely theoretical objects at this point.
If we’re really being pedantic, that’s technically true about everything. For all you know you’re hallucinating me right now
I knew it!
I am the Boltzmann brain!
No, it’s different. With you, there’s at least something that we observe that we might be hallucinating.
With worm holes, we’re taking mathematical equations that were modelled to reflect what we’ve observed of reality and then we’re pushing them to extreme cases where they’re likely to not anymore model reality correctly, and that is where we’re seeing the theoretical possibility of worm holes. No one has observed nor hallucinated worm holes.
“Libera te tutemet ex inferis.”
where we’re going, we wont need eyes to meme
Will the mirrors be real?
How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real?
I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.
An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.
Thanks, Stargate & Stranger Things!
Pretty sure this explanation came from Event Horizon first.
More like A Wrinkle in Time, the 1962 book
Alas, I have not read that book.
It is by no means an exhaustive list. Those are just the ones that sprang to mind.
I wonder if anyone has posted a supercut of this trope on YouTube…
I think remembering that, at least in movies, it originated with Event Horizon is critical because it is the only one that takes into account any downside to transdimensional travel…and what a downside it was.
I will always mourn the loss of any possible director’s cut of Event Horizon where the footage was so insanely over the top that the execs almost shit their pants.
More info here if anyone wants to read about the lost footage: https://web.archive.org/web/20210130023507/https://theunheardnerd.com/what-could-have-been-26-event-horizon/
It would have been a classic for the ages. The spike through the mouth alone is enough to make it live in infamy.
I wonder if the movie still holds up. I haven’t seen it in 20 years, but it was the most terrifying movie I had seen up until that point, and for a long time afterwards too.
I don’t like this explanation, because if you don’t know what wormholes are before, you might think wormoles are represented by the hole stabbed through the paper by the pencil.
Correctly stretching the paper to make a 2D wormhole is hard, but maybe you should just use a bagel or something
People are supposed to include the fact that the pencil can go through because (layman terminology abuse ahead) of the “shape” the space-time topology is presenting (or I guess being induced to present as, if Sci-fi hypothetical) before you get to the explanation of the pencil as craft/observer and how the hole is how that shortened path through the wormhole appears from frames of reference not the pencil.
I like the bagel idea but then you have to hold it all horizontal while explaining so they don’t see the hole too early and you’re then just left intently staring at your audience across a bagel held at eye height like a slowly hungering loon. Or so I’ve heard.
Do the bottom one first. Then as next step, do the math of singularities with a paper cylinder and a paper cone, falling through curved spacetime. That’ll take a little more time and effort but you might just start blowing their minds a little deeper with the same pencil and paper folded in 3D.
Pfft, I got it the first time.
The “math” is repeated with horizontal symmetry too; these explanations are the same.
