A wormhole is a hypothetical shortcut that could connect one side of a galaxy to another. Despite populating many science-fiction plots, wormholes have been hard to justify theoretically. Now, two separate groups present models that make wormholes seem less exotic and slightly more credible for human use [1, 2].
The idea of a wormhole is nearly as old as that of a black hole. However, the existence of wormholes remains an open question. Even if a wormhole could form, the gravitational attraction of the matter inside it would presumably cause its throat (the narrowest point in the tunnel) to close, preventing travel from one side to the other. Theorists have proposed ways to keep a wormhole open, usually by adding exotic matter whose properties resist the gravitational collapse. Now Jose Blázquez-Salcedo from the Complutense University of Madrid and his colleagues have found a traversable wormhole solution that requires no exotic matter [1].
The team model their wormhole using a semiclassical framework, in which matter is treated as a set of generic fermions (spin-1/2 particles, such as electrons and positrons) described by quantum wave functions. Matter interacts through classical electromagnetic fields, which simplifies the equations.
By varying parameters, including the fermions’ charge and mass, Blázquez-Salcedo and his colleagues found that traversable wormholes could exist when the ratio of the total charge to the total mass within the wormhole exceeds a theoretical limit that applies to black holes. The researchers speculate that this solution should remain valid in a more complete model, where the fields corresponding to matter interactions are quantized.
But the wormholes that Blázquez-Salcedo and his colleagues envision are microscopic—too small for any human to squeeze through. Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study, New Jersey, and Alexey Milekhin from Princeton University have explored wormholes that would provide safe passage to an intrepid voyager [2]. Their model assumes that wormholes form in a five-dimensional spacetime, as proposed in some string-theory cosmologies (see Focus: An Invisible Dimension). The researchers show that a human-friendly wormhole—with accelerations less than 20 g—could allow a cross-galaxy journey in less than a second. This short duration would only apply to the person in the wormhole, as an outside observer would measure the trip as lasting thousands of years.
–Michael Schirber
Michael Schirber is a Corresponding Editor forPhysics Magazine based in Lyon, France.
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The predicted Einstein-Rosen wormholes would be useless for travel because they collapse quickly. "You would need some very exotic type of matter in order to stabilize a wormhole," said Hsu, "and it's not clear whether such matter exists in the universe."
While most wormholes only last for 24 hours, there are some variations to this rule. When a static wormhole collapses a new one with the same properties will spawn somewhere else in the same system. It will have to be scanned down. When a non-static wormhole collapses it simply disappears forever.
A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions one could theoretically use a wormhole to cut the travel time down to hours or minutes.
Still, we don't live in the upside-down universe in which these wormholes could exist. Besides, any passage through a wormhole would demand negative energy to keep it open during transit. Quantum physics permits some of this, but only so much.
A wormhole. If you could safely pass through a wormhole, ending up 1000 light years away, would 1000 years pass on earth or would it be instantaneous? Yes.
If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole, you won't be coming back.It will snap shut behind you. But on the way, you may have just enough time to send one last message home. That's the finding of a new analysis.
To create a wormhole on Earth, we'd first need a black hole. This is problematic: creating a black hole just a centimetre across would require crushing a mass roughly equal to that of the Earth down to this tiny size. Plus, in the 1960s theorists showed that wormholes would be incredibly unstable.
White holes are the opposite of black holes, in that they spit out light and matter, rather than trapping it. So far, white holes are purely hypothetical objects, but astronomers are contemplating how they could form in reality.
The major distinction between a wormhole and a black hole is that a wormhole is a funnel-shaped space-time tunnel between two points between universes, whereas a black hole is a cosmic body with extreme gravity from which nothing can escape.
Time dilation may be regarded in a limited sense as "time travel into the future": a person may use time dilation so that a small amount of proper time passes for them, while a large amount of proper time passes elsewhere. This can be achieved by traveling at relativistic speeds or through the effects of gravity.
Wormholes are a classic trope of science fiction in popular media, if only because they provide such a handy futuristic plot device to avoid the issue of violating relativity with faster-than-light travel. In reality, they are purely theoretical.
For a simplified notion of a wormhole, space can be visualized as a two-dimensional surface. In this case, a wormhole would appear as a hole in that surface, lead into a 3D tube (the inside surface of a cylinder), then re-emerge at another location on the 2D surface with a hole similar to the entrance.
Humans could survive a trip through a wormhole, but there's a catch. There are drawbacks to this method — namely, such wormholes would be only microscopic, which means even the most hardcore exercise routine wouldn't make humans thin enough for the trip.
Time traveling to the near future is easy: you're doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, time's flow depends on how fast you're moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass.
If, somehow, an advanced civilization could construct such wormholes, they could be used as a galactic or intergalactic transporta- tion system and they might also be usable for backward time travel.
A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions one could theoretically use a wormhole to cut the travel time down to hours or minutes.
Answering this question requires understanding how time actually works – something physicists are far from certain about. So far, what we can say with confidence is that travelling into the future is achievable, but travelling into the past is either wildly difficult or absolutely impossible.
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