• lawrence@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • RoabeArt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • 0ops@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      If we’re really being pedantic, that’s technically true about everything. For all you know you’re hallucinating me right now

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        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.

  • rasensprenger@feddit.org
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    5 months ago

    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

    • Promethiel@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • credo@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Pfft, I got it the first time.

    The “math” is repeated with horizontal symmetry too; these explanations are the same.