ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Malament–Hogarth spacetime

Okay kiddo, let's talk about something called malament-hogarth spacetime. This is a really big and complicated idea in physics, but we can try our best to break it down into something a little easier to understand.

First, let's start with spacetime. You know how we live in a big world full of things like trees, houses, and cars? Well, all of those things exist in a space, right? They have a physical location in the world. Now, imagine taking all of those physical locations and putting them on a big grid, kind of like a map. That's what we call spacetime - it's the way we measure where things are in the world around us.

Now, let's talk about the two people who came up with the idea of malament-hogarth spacetime - William Malament and C. J. S. Hogarth. They were physicists who were trying to understand how we could measure things like time and distance in the universe.

One of the things they discovered is that there are certain events in spacetime that are “spacelike separated". This means that there is no way to get from one event to the other by traveling at the speed of light or slower. For example, imagine two stars. If they are far enough apart, they are spacelike separated. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, you could never reach one from the other.

Another thing they discovered is that there are certain events that are "timelike separated." This means that it is possible to get from one event to the other if you travel at a speed slower than the speed of light. For example, imagine you were walking from one end of a street to the other - this is a timelike separation (because you can actually get from one end to the other).

Now, what does all of this have to do with malament-hogarth spacetime? Well, Malament and Hogarth looked at how these events - the spacelike separated and the timelike separated ones - relate to each other. They came up with a mathematical equation that helps us measure these relationships in spacetime. It's really complicated, but it basically helps us understand how different events in spacetime are connected to each other, whether they are spacelike or timelike separated.

Understanding malament-hogarth spacetime is important because it helps us understand how the universe works. We can measure time and distance, and we can also explore how different events in the universe are related to each other. It's like having a big map of the universe that helps us understand how everything fits together.

So, to sum it up - malament-hogarth spacetime is a really complicated idea that helps us understand how time and distance work in the universe. It's like having a big map of the universe that helps us see how all the different events are related to each other.