A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada) Posted on 03/16/2021 10:03:00 AM PDT by Red Badger
A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada)
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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, or white hole, on the other end.
The particle physics idea never panned out, but work inspired other researchers to study ER-bridges as a possible shortcut through space. If wormholes were traversable, you could burrow through spacetime like a worm burrowing a hole through an apple.
It didn't take long for theorists to discover this wouldn't work. Although wormholes are valid solutions to Einstein's equations, they collapse so quickly you'd never have time to go through them. In general relativity, wormholes aren't traversable.
Of course, impossibility never stops a persistent theoretician, and soon they figured out you could make a wormhole traversable by lining it with some kind of negative energy. The same kind of negative energy that could be used for warp drive. But as I mentioned last time, matter with negative mass/energy doesn't seem to exist.
But all is not lost. We know that Einstein's theory must break down at quantum scales because it is a classical theory. Presumably, there is some quantum theory of gravity that supplants general relativity.
We don't yet have a complete quantum gravity model, but we do have several approximate models that will point us in the right direction.
One of these models is known as the Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell theory. It is so named because it includes aspects of Einstein's theory of gravity, Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, and Dirac's theory of quantum particles. Recently a team found a wormhole solution to the Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell equations.
The team found that their wormhole solution was fully traversable. What's more, the solution doesn't require any negative-energy states. In principle, that would allow you to travel through the wormhole without needing negative mass.
At small scales gravity must have a quantum nature. (The Wolfram Physics Project)
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The only catch is that you would need to be in a quantum state. So microscopic clumps of atoms could travel through this wormhole, but not people.
While this is interesting work, it is just a toy model. There are lots of solutions to Einstein's equations that can't exist for reasons beyond gravity. The team plans to explore their idea further to see if their solution is yet another impossible idea, or whether there might be a way to create this kind of quantum wormhole.
And if this idea does work, it will still be easier to pass through the eye of a needle than it will be to enter the distant heavens.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article:
https://www.universetoday.com/150536/wormholes-could-allow-travel-across-the-universe-as-long-as-your-spacecraft-is-microscopic/
“Equations don’t fully describe reality, and that’s the problem. Taking the equations as predictions of what will happen is not very scientific.”
We do it all the time.
No, the solution is a unobtainium and the blood sacrifice of each of the 52 genders.
Well, even worse than that, these aren’t even real things that they are studying, these are just mathematical equations that describe one possible solution to one potential model of the universe that remains unconfirmed. So they’re not describing the properties of anything that actually exists, as far as we know.
Probably not even for communication. Every attempt at faster-than-light communication through quantum phenomena seems to inevitably get tripped up by one insurmountable problem or another.
Yep. Convincing yourself intellectually that God does not exist does nothing to change your emotional desire for a relationship with God. It just might drive you to invent new “gods” in a vain attempt to satisfy that need.
Cosmic Laundromats and Dry Cleaners.
All you need is the spice.
Good luck trying to get it from the worms.
You will need at least a 40 watt plasma rifle with extra batteries.
And some FRiends.
5.56mm
Beam me into that worm hole!
“I signed aboard this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered across space by this gadget.” - Bones McCoy
Quantum entanglement fascinates me. I think it proves there is definitely a layer of reality we’re missing.
“So microscopic clumps of atoms could travel through this wormhole, but not people.”
So we can pollute the entire universe with evil socialism.
Waaaay back in the late 80’s, I had this idea for an ‘instantaneous communications device’ that would communicate voice or digital information across vast distances, like from here to Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, etc.
You would take a perfect crystal, like a diamond, silicon or whatever was available, and from it cut TWO crystals that were exactly alike in size, shape and form down to the millionths of an inch, which is quite possible, even back then.
On the basis of Quantum entanglement, whatever happens to one crystal will also be ‘felt’ by the other, no matter how far away it is, at the same exact time.
So, if you modulated the crystal you have in some electronic fashion, the other, say on a spacecraft a billion miles away, would also be modulated at the same time. .......................
The Kwisatz Haderach could do it without the spice. Only he could be in the present and future at the same time.
We’re kinda short on Kwisatz Haderachs at the moment...................
I was just thinking: hey, we could pass notes to distant entities. Or we could just start sending weird stuff through them. Can you imagine discovering some little toy floating through space?
If we’re going to send weird stuff, can we start with Pelosi?
Not a "little" catch is it?
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