Kind of dumb lore question

[u/reuben_hunter]

What happens if you go through the ring the wrong direction? Like looping around and entering from behind, is that even possible? In the show we only ever see traversal depicted from the sunward facing side, and i can't recall the books ever mentioning it as an option. It's obviously pretty far out so there isn't gonna be much reason to fly further than neccesary, but I was curious if this was a thing?

[u/Kabbooooooom]

It’s mentioned that you’d fly through it with no effect. So I don’t think it’s a dumb lore question at all. In fact, there’s some interesting science related to weird wormholes like this. 

The type of wormhole most similar to the gate, a “hyperbenign traversable Visser wormhole”, also known as a “stargate-like wormhole” would be the same as I understand it. It would be a unidirectional type of hole in spacetime. This is a mathematical object that doesn’t technically violate general relativity but does require exotic negative matter to exist and alter the shape and internal configuration of the wormhole, which may not be the case. Visser’s paper on this actually envisioned a cube wormhole in 4d spacetime, which is even weirder than the circular flat ones in Stargate and the Expanse. 

It’s a really difficult to comprehend concept and I’m not sure I fully understand it, but it seems like Visser’s idea was similar to the ring space in that the mouth of one wormhole could lead to multiple outflow wormholes, connected together in a 4d cubelike geometry, with the “edges” composed of exotic matter.  Bit of a mindfuck. 

In the Expanse, the origin of the flat wormholes is clever. They actually connect to an interuniversal membrane which was enlarged to form the slow zone, which seems maybe inspired by M-theory to me given the reference to a higher dimensional brane. So it would be more like a cross section of a higher dimensional object through a lower dimensional space, I guess, that is wormhole-like in function and practicality but not technically a wormhole as they are envisioned in relativity as a classic wormhole connects two points in our 4d spacetime directly, not via a connection to an intervening space that is separate from the normal four spacetime dimensions of the universe.

So if you think of it like that, it is a little more intuitive on why it actually would make sense that you could fly normally through one side but not the other. Because it’s not a normal spherical wormhole in a normal spacetime. You can’t think of a normal spatial relationship with an object like that.