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by zenorogue 225 days ago
No, you are confusing geometry and topology here. Topology does not change when you stretch the space but changes when you cut/glue it. Geometry does not change when you cut/glue but changes when you stretch. So portals change the topology but the geometry is Euclidean (you get a Euclidean manifold). This are the meanings used by mathematicians working in these areas.

(The original meaning is of course about breaking 5th postulate while all the others hold, showing that it was possible was a celebrated result in mathematics, while it is trivial to break the postulates in some arbitrary way.)

1 comments

The modern meaning of "geometry" may not change, but cutting and gluing space definitely break Euclidean geometry, as in, specifically the one defined by Euclid. You can't break a mathematical system much harder than to kill it at the axiomatic level. 4 out of 5, if not 5 out of 5, axioms do not hold if you include portals. That's pretty dead.
For an analogy: an Abelian group is a structure in which four axioms hold. A non-Abelian group is a structure in which three of these axioms hold, and the fourth does not. It is not a structure in which some random proper subset of axioms holds, because such a notion would be useless. While structures where specific subsets of axioms hold (non-Abelian groups, semigroups, monoids, etc.) are useful.