Wormholes: when your brain won’t stop ticking over

A couple of nights back I was laying in bed thinking about some sci fi. Basically I was looking to rip off the wormhole technology from Peter F Hamilton’s great in places Commonwealth saga for my own nefarious means.

The problem is I’m cursed with a brain that gets snagged on various minutiae. Thinking about running through a medieval castle? Wait, my brain has to trip over how the hinges and locks would have been made and the best way to lock a door behind you. Are they time period appropriate? Working on genetic improvements to make a super human? How would I keep a secure back up of the data off site without falling foul of the government?

Curse you brain.

And now my night time musings have possibly ruined the “science” of wormholes in one of my favourite sci fi series of recent years. I’m no scientist, an A Level in chemistry over 20 years ago is as far as my science went, and consequently I only really understand the basics of wormholes- a hole in spacetime that connects two places (put as simply as I can put it), some stuff about exotic matter, energy and stuff. The issue I had late at night though is a thorny one and I can’t see a solution:

If a wormhole connects two unconnected fixed points in spacetime, having a wormhole on a planets surface will create issues- the planet itself is rotating, and orbiting it’s star. Every instance that the wormhole is open will require it the origination point be moved to a new 3D coordinate in space because of this.

Considering the earth rotates at around 600mph here in St Albans, that means without some sort of corrective action, my wormhole I opened in our sitting room would be 268 metres away one second later (ignoring the effect that orbit would have on the movement of course).

How the hell am I going to correct for that?

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