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.
I’d look for it, but I wouldn’t be able to escape the gravitational pull of that site for several days…
“Libera te tutemet ex inferis.”
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.
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.
If we’re really being pedantic, that’s technically true about everything. For all you know you’re hallucinating me right now
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.
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.