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A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada) =============================================================== In my last post, I talked about the idea of warp drive and whether it might one day be possible. Today I'll talk about another faster-than-light trick: wormholes. Wormholes are an old idea in general relativity. It's based on work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who tried to figure out how elementary particles might behave in curved spacetime. Their idea treated particle-antiparticle pairs as two ends of a spacetime tube. This Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like a black hole on one end, and an anti-black hole,...

Few sports have seen the explosive growth enjoyed by Cornhole. Millions of players around the globe grab their sacks and fling them at holes in boards. Resembling something like a cross between hopscotch and competitive ax throwing, Cornhole is a game of stamina and speed. Cornhole has become so popular that in some circles, you can hear discussion of it becoming an Olympic event. Earl Flopper, President of the Cornhole Association Of Greenland says that it can’t come soon enough. “It can’t come soon enough.” Where do you stand on this, the most important issue of our time? Should Cornhole...

Device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an “extra special dimension”Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space. "This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. "From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension."...

Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox A bold new idea aims to link two famously discordant descriptions of nature. In doing so, it may also reveal how space-time owes its existence to the spooky connections of quantum information. By: K.C. ColeApril 24, 2015 Comments (19) One hundred years after Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, physicists are still stuck with perhaps the biggest incompatibility problem in the universe. The smoothly warped space-time landscape that Einstein described is like a painting by Salvador Dalí — seamless, unbroken, geometric. But the quantum particles that occupy this space are more like...

Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen the movie "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable." This is the hypothesis put forward in a study published in Annals of Physics and conducted with the participation of SISSA in Trieste. The paper, the result of a collaboration between Indian, Italian and North American researchers, prompts scientists to re-think dark matter. "If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the...

Is it a message from far beyond out own galaxy? A brief mysterious pulse detected by Arecibo telescope has baffled boffins. The discovery of a split-second burst of radio waves by scientists using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico raises major new questions over what caused it. The finding by an international team of astronomers, published July 10 in The Astrophysical Journal, marks the first time that a so-called 'fast radio burst' has been detected using an instrument other than the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

~snip~ In 1967 British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left stunned by mysterious pulsing signals she detected coming from outside the solar system. For months she suggested the signals could be of an extraterrestrial intelligent origin, but they were later proven to be rapidly spinning stars known as pulsars. However, a new series of mysterious signals, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), has again got astronomers scratching their heads and wondering if, maybe, we’re picking up alien messages...

The test rig for the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at Fermilab. I picked this image today because it kinda sorta looks like the wormhole-making machine from the film version of Contact. [Credit: moi]A lot of science fiction plot devices are devoted to getting around the speed of light. In the real Universe, nothing with mass can travel faster than light, which means we can’t travel to distant stars without taking decades, centuries, or longer in transit. So, sci-fi draws from teleportation, hyperdrive, warp drive, and the ultimate cosmic short-cut: wormholes.[1] In some cases, the source of a science fiction...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Wormholes are one of the stranger objects that arise in general relativity. Although no experimental evidence for wormholes exists, scientists predict that they would appear to serve as shortcuts between one point of spacetime and another. Scientists usually imagine wormholes connecting regions of empty space, but now a new study suggests that wormholes might exist between distant stars. Instead of being empty tunnels, these wormholes would contain a perfect fluid that flows back and forth between the two stars, possibly giving them a detectable signature. The scientists, Vladimir Dzhunushaliev at the Eurasian National University in Kazakhstan and coauthors,...

I think that to completely dismiss the "alien" abductions and UFO sightings is just not very intelligent. The truth is that SOME THING is doing these things. People have their unborne babies taken with no trace. People awake with peices of symetrical metal under their skin with no visible mark. People have thousands of hours of UFO videos, of which SOME are quite legitimate. There have been millions who have said they've been abducted. I highly doubt that every single one is lying. Even if just 5 people are telling the truth then there IS somthing "out there". As a...

<p>Ronald Mallett hadn't even heard of physics when he read H.G. Wells' 1895 classic, "The Time Machine," just a few months after his father died at age 33.</p> <p>The 10-year old assumed that to build such a device, and see his father again, he should go into electronics, his dad's field. It was only during his stint at the Strategic Air Command that he learned that it was physicists who were discovering seeming impossibilities: that space can bend, time can slow, particles can be waves and waves, particles. It was physics, he realized, that offered the hope of making Wells' fiction -- and his boyhood hope -- a reality.</p>

If anyone is interested, here is a link that has approx 3 hours of streaming video (Real and Quick Time) of PBS's The Elegant Universe. It begins with Newton and ends up with Witman's unifying of the 5 string theories. Very well done IMO...Good educational piece for the sciences.