ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Weyl transformation

Okay, imagine you have a toy car that moves only forward and backward. But what if you wanted it to also move left and right? You could turn the car around and move it in the opposite direction, but that's not really convenient. Instead, you could rotate the car so that it faces left or right and then it can move in those directions too.

Similarly, in the world of physics, we often deal with space and time. But what if we wanted to change the way we measure those things? We could rotate space and time in a way that would make it easier to measure things in different directions. This is where the Weyl transformation comes in.

The Weyl transformation is like taking a ruler and stretching it or compressing it, depending on what you want to measure. If you're measuring something small, you can compress your ruler to make it easier. If you're measuring something big, you can stretch your ruler to get a more accurate measurement.

This transformation is named after a mathematician called Hermann Weyl, who came up with this idea more than a hundred years ago. He used it to help explain some basic concepts in physics and it is still used today in many fields of research.

Think of it this way, when you draw a picture with a pencil, you can change the thickness of the lines by pressing harder or softer. The Weyl transformation is like being able to do that with the entire universe! You can make the universe more 'dense' or 'sparse' depending on what you want to measure.

So, the Weyl transformation is a tool that helps scientists describe and measure the fundamental properties of the universe. It allows them to manipulate space and time to make it easier to understand the world around us.