I’ve been reading the Wikipedia page for wormholes to kill some time.
The theatrics of a wormhole I understand somewhat through the diagrams and visualisation, but how do math equations represent the theory itself? To me it comes across as… well, just maths.
**Please do actually ELI5, I hardcore sucked at physics and maths in school.**
Link for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole
In: 0
All of physics is math. It’s not that math is used to explain how things behave, it’s that things behave in a way that is best explained through mathematics. This is as true of wormholes (if they actually exist) as it is of tracing the trajectory of a golf ball. The words and diagrams we use help with visualizations and sometimes useful analogies, but those words and diagrams are imprecise and paint an approximate picture at best. Useful for the layperson, but not rigorous enough for modern physics.
Discoveries like black holes and wormholes emerged FROM the math – physicists developed equations that precisely (or nearly so) described what they could see, and through the process of extending and solving those equations, things like black holes and wormholes emerged. For a long time, we weren’t certain black holes actually existed or whether we were just extending the equations to a realm where they didn’t apply (or were just missing some key part of the equation(s).
Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, postulates that the universe (actually the multiverse) fundamentally IS mathematics. Not that math is a useful tool to help describe the universe, but rather it is the math itself that is fundamental and all that we see (and touch, taste, hear, etc.) somehow emerges from the existence of the math, almost as if the universe is somehow solving the equations through its existence (and that’s why it exists – to solve the fundamental equations that are the true essence of reality). Heady stuff, and there’s no way I can do it justice.
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