Pfft, I got it the first time.
The “math” is repeated with horizontal symmetry too; these explanations are the same.
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’d look for it, but I wouldn’t be able to escape the gravitational pull of that site for several days…
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.
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.
Thanks, Stargate & Stranger Things!
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.
“Libera te tutemet ex inferis.”
