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/
Ever see the movie “Paycheck” with Ben Affleck?
He was hired to finish work on a time machine.
But it used technology to see around the curve of time/space to SEE into the future.
Maybe this could be used Similarly?
Alas! Decoherence would already have done its damage...😕
You gotta keep ‘em near absolute zero.
Not a big problem in space, just the one here..............
Avoiding the need for negative energy to inflate the throat and counter a collapse upon transit? Kip Thorne pleased!!!
The Warp guys are still at it—Erik W Lentz.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abe692
LASER
I think I’ll go into the space energy business... Next to a wormhole I’ll build a station and have a sign saying: Last rest stop for next 10 light years... 😀
The only thing at the other side of a wormhole is a black hole.
Not a good trip, other than you accelerate to the speed of light before disintegrating into oblivion.
And some people believe it’s entirely possible that extraterrestrials have visited earth at some time. Even plausible.
And they don’t comport with your pejoratives.
“We are not alone” is the most original and basic of all human beliefs. To be aware of self is to know there are others.
Only “Beer is Good” is in the same lofty category.
Hi.
“If we’re going to send weird stuff, can we start with Pelosi?”
That is a great idea. See if her atoms reconstitute.
If not, oh well. She did it for science.
5.56mm
There are also people who believe that if beings that appear to be aliens do show up, that they will in fact be demons from Hell. Those people’s lives will then gain all sorts of meaning as they will believe that the Apocalypse is upon us.
As you point out, these are basic conceptual representations. Really what you're seeing is a 2-D image of space being bent across a higher dimension (third). In reality, our 3-D space would likely be "bent" via a higher (fourth) dimension. This wouldn't be perceptible to us anymore than a 2-D creature could understand us bending a piece of paper over itself and poking a hole through the two parts.
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