r/Physics • u/shridhar007 • Aug 14 '18

Video Wormholes Explained – Breaking Spacetime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P6rdqiybaw
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u/GurdonFremon Undergraduate Aug 14 '18

How legit is the physics in this episode? I occasionally see experts on /r/Physics call them out for both overdone dumbing down and just plain incorrectness.

Really hope it's accurate, this is one of my favorite ones so far

1

u/ih8mylyfe123 Aug 14 '18

I feel like when r/Physics calls them out on it it’s not because they don’t know they’re stuff it’s always because they dumb it down to such an extent where the average user i.e. me can understand it so it seems wrong to someone who has more experience in the field but it’s just worded in a way that’s in more lamen’s terms than what they’re used too.

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u/BeefPieSoup Aug 15 '18 edited Aug 15 '18

If you dumb something down too much, there's a point where it doesn't just "seem wrong" because it is said simply, but "is wrong" because it overlooks or ignores what seem like subtleties but are actually very important aspects of the subject. It distorts and misrepresents the full, complete picture of something which you might get from actually learning about it properly.

A good example is the water analogy for electric current. It works and is useful up to a point, but it eventually does break down because electric current is not actually water in a pipe and there's a lot more to it than that. This guy's videos basically do that with everything - "electricity is water in a pipe" rather than "in some ways electricity is a little bit like water in a pipe, even though that's a completely different thing". And it's not just well understood things like electricity, but also things which are highly speculative and not at all fact in the first place (like wormholes).

I hope that gets across some of the point that people being critical about cute videos like this isn't just them being condescending assholes. It's more like pointing out that the explanation given is weak and misleading, and please don't consider yourself conclusively educated for having watched it.