Spoilers Einstein-Rosen bridge

briggart

Adventurer
“wormhole” is a description-by-analogy. It was certainly first used by physicists, but it’s not a scientific term. It’s quite common for things to have common name and a technical name, eg “rotary wing aircraft” is more commonly called a helicopter.
I’m not sure I get your point. Lots of physics terms are description-by-analogy and technical terms at the same time, like color in QCD or inflation in cosmology. Scientific papers mostly use wormhole.
 

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Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
Whenever you have scientists talking about one they are going to use the scientific terminology, rather than a colloquial term rooted in science fiction.

Rooted in science fiction? The term "wormhole" was coined by John Archibald Wheeler in 1957.

This analysis forces one to consider situations ... where there is a net flux of lines of force, through what topologists would call "a handle" of the multiply-connected space, and what physicists might perhaps be excused for more vividly terming a "wormhole".

— Charles Misner and John Wheeler in Annals of Physics


We can also note that "wormhole" is a term for anything we'd characterize as a tunnel through spacetime. An Einstein-Rosen bridge is one specific sort of possible tunnel, but there are others.
 


Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
The term is used in Donnie Darko as well, off the top of my head. Though I believe it's the male science teacher who uses it. Although maybe the female therapist used it first?

I'm working my way through A Brief History of Time and Hawking explicitly says "wormhole" is the modern term for an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
Maybe it was more prevalent in his circles as of 1988, but we've definitely seen a lot of usage of the term E-R B since then, so maybe the prevailing cultural aesthetic current turned back.
 


Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
Maybe it was more prevalent in his circles as of 1988, but we've definitely seen a lot of usage of the term E-R B since then, so maybe the prevailing cultural aesthetic current turned back.
I suspect its use in fiction isn't related to science so much as it being better technobabble. I think even a casual science fiction fan has a rough idea of what a wormhole is, versus an Einstein-Rosen Bridge sounding more exotic.
 

Mannahnin

Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
I suspect its use in fiction isn't related to science so much as it being better technobabble. I think even a casual science fiction fan has a rough idea of what a wormhole is, versus an Einstein-Rosen Bridge sounding more exotic.
I think that's what I was getting at referring to "in his circles" vs. "the prevailing cultural aesthetic".

I suspect that while the book was new it probably had greater impact on pop culture, though coming from the perspective of the scientific community.
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
I suspect that while the book was new it probably had greater impact on pop culture, though coming from the perspective of the scientific community.
I probably know more astrophysics than most, thanks to a kid who's been obsessed with it for almost all of his life, but yeah, there's relatively little stuff in here that I hadn't heard about previously at this point in 2024.

And there are more recent and much better popularizers of science, most notably Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who have gotten these ideas out into the public much more effectively* and broadly in the years since A Brief History came out.

* Hawking's a bad science communicator in multiple ways, including assuming all of his readers know calculus, going off on tangents to talk crap about people who have nothing to do with the concepts he's talking about, sharing gossip about dead people who aren't around to defend themselves (and are again irrelevant to the topics at hand), and talking about how hot his assistant is. I strongly recommend Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry over this book.
 

Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
I'm working my way through A Brief History of Time and Hawking explicitly says "wormhole" is the modern term for an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

That's a great book. And it is perhaps best to say all Einstein-Rosen bridges are wormholes, but not all wormholes are Einstein-Rosen bridges.

(Picky bit: Einstein-Rosen is capitalized, because they are proper names of human beings. We don't generally capitalize bridge.)
 

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