Large object is pushed through a small wormhole, what happens? A simple question about wormholes: What happens if a large object is pushed through a much smaller wormhole? For example, what happens if I push an elephant through a palm-sized wormhole? My intuition is that depending on the magnitude of the force applied, either a part of the elephant is ripped out, or the elephant sort of gets stuck in the wormhole, as if hitting a wall. Is this correct?
 A: It depends on the type of wormhole.
The simplest type of wormhole to understand is the sort described by Matt Visser. I've talked about these briefly in Negative Energy and Wormholes, and also on the Sci-Fi Stack Exchange. This type of wormhole has minimal tidal forces. If you pushed your protesting pachyderm towards this type of wormhole it would try to pull the elephant apart, but no more strongly than if you pushed the elephant towards a door too small for it. The force to tear the elephant apart would have to be supplied by your push, so unless you pushed very hard indeed the elephant is unlikely to be troubled by the experience - it simply wouldn't go through the wormhole.
I'm glossing over the possibility of the elephant contacting the string of exotic matter you used to make the wormhole because to be honest I'm not sure what that interaction would be like.
The other type of wormhole, and probably the one most people think of is the Morris-Thorne wormhole. This type of wormhole has enormous tidal forces at its mouth, so you could only survive unscathed if its mouth was enormous. If a Morris-Thorne wormhole was too small for your elephant it would convert the elephant to a great length of elephant string, a process quaintly knwn as spaghettification.
If you want some detail there is a nice article here (NB it's a Microsoft Word file).
