Wormhole Theory may not hold
Yay! It's Wednesday! Unfortunately it's a rainy Wednesday. Almost couldn't wake up this morning. Just wanted to cover myself with my blanket and sleep for another hour, but I couldn't of course. So I had to get up and brave the cold heavy rain to come to work. Sigh... I can't wait for the holidays. I need to sleep...
Don't you ever wish you could time travel? Go back or forwards in time so that you can skip a particularly unhappy time, or change something you did wrong? I know I do, especially now, when I wish I could just travel backwards in time a little, so that I can go back to bed. Unfortunately, the bad news is that one of the most popular theories for time travel, the use of Wormholes, may not be possible.
Wormholes are hypothetical tunnels that are essentially shortcuts through space and time. But it's unknown whether such tunnels are actually possible. Some claim that Black holes in space are actually openings of wormholes, but even the properties of black holes are still not known. A common way to visualise wormholes is to mark 2 holes on the 2 opposite ends of a sheet of paper. These holes represent 2 distant places in the Universe. Now if you bend the paper such that the 2 points meet, you will have a shortcut via the holes in the paper. So the wormhole basically bends space and time and creates a shortcut. To help you guys visualise further, here's a picture of a 2D analogy of a wormhole I got from Wikipedia.
Now the theory for using wormholes for time travel goes like this. If you can build a wormhole that is big enough for a person to pass through, then you could pass through space and time. The type of wormholes that are desirable to would be time-travellers are called "semi-classical" wormholes. Such wormholes only show weak deviations from the laws of classical physics, and supposedly allow the creators to control exactly where and when they want to travel to. Wormholes totally governed by the laws of Quantum physics, on the other hand, would just transport people to any time and place.
Some recent research is showing that such "semi-classical" wormholes may be fundamentally flawed. The problem is that building such a wormhole requires a form of matter called "exotic matter", which is repelled by gravity and has negative energy. The research shows that even if such exotic matter existed, and you manage to combine it to build a wormhole, the wormhole would be too unstable. Basically, it would be impossible to build such a "semi-classical" wormhole that would be of any use. The good news is that some scientists do see problems with the conclusions in the research, which means that it still may be possible to build such wormholes.
Well, I certainly look forward to the day when wormholes are a reality, even if its just for travelling through space. Cos I think travelling through time is a little too much to hope for just yet, plus I think that we aren't ready for all the potential time paradoxes that could occur when time travel becomes a reality. But who knows, maybe it already is a reality, and our future selves have already visited us a couple of times...
Click here for the full article.
Don't you ever wish you could time travel? Go back or forwards in time so that you can skip a particularly unhappy time, or change something you did wrong? I know I do, especially now, when I wish I could just travel backwards in time a little, so that I can go back to bed. Unfortunately, the bad news is that one of the most popular theories for time travel, the use of Wormholes, may not be possible.
Wormholes are hypothetical tunnels that are essentially shortcuts through space and time. But it's unknown whether such tunnels are actually possible. Some claim that Black holes in space are actually openings of wormholes, but even the properties of black holes are still not known. A common way to visualise wormholes is to mark 2 holes on the 2 opposite ends of a sheet of paper. These holes represent 2 distant places in the Universe. Now if you bend the paper such that the 2 points meet, you will have a shortcut via the holes in the paper. So the wormhole basically bends space and time and creates a shortcut. To help you guys visualise further, here's a picture of a 2D analogy of a wormhole I got from Wikipedia.
Now the theory for using wormholes for time travel goes like this. If you can build a wormhole that is big enough for a person to pass through, then you could pass through space and time. The type of wormholes that are desirable to would be time-travellers are called "semi-classical" wormholes. Such wormholes only show weak deviations from the laws of classical physics, and supposedly allow the creators to control exactly where and when they want to travel to. Wormholes totally governed by the laws of Quantum physics, on the other hand, would just transport people to any time and place.
Some recent research is showing that such "semi-classical" wormholes may be fundamentally flawed. The problem is that building such a wormhole requires a form of matter called "exotic matter", which is repelled by gravity and has negative energy. The research shows that even if such exotic matter existed, and you manage to combine it to build a wormhole, the wormhole would be too unstable. Basically, it would be impossible to build such a "semi-classical" wormhole that would be of any use. The good news is that some scientists do see problems with the conclusions in the research, which means that it still may be possible to build such wormholes.
Well, I certainly look forward to the day when wormholes are a reality, even if its just for travelling through space. Cos I think travelling through time is a little too much to hope for just yet, plus I think that we aren't ready for all the potential time paradoxes that could occur when time travel becomes a reality. But who knows, maybe it already is a reality, and our future selves have already visited us a couple of times...
For budding time travellers, the future (or should that be the past?) is starting to look bleak.
Hypothetical tunnels called wormholes once looked like the best bet for constructing a real time machine.
These cosmic shortcuts, which link one point in the Universe to another, are favoured by science fiction writers as a means both of explaining time travel and of circumventing the limitations imposed by the speed of light.
Click here for the full article.
posted by CS at 8:27 AM
1 Comments:
Yah. Haha. I'd love to time travel to the future too. But I wanna go far far into the future. I wanna see how far technology brings us. Maybe see flying cars, space ships, even aliens! Haha.
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