Don’t Ever Travel Down A Wormhole. You’ll Die (2024)
I know the wormholes are a staple of almost every science fiction show. And it's no surprise: wormholes are shortcuts through space-time. When traveling to distant parts of the universe your choices are either to slug it out over the countless light-years, twiddling your thumbs waiting for something interesting to happen (and in an interstellar space being struck by a hydrogen atom counts as “something interesting”), or you can zip through the entrance of a wormhole and pop out at your destination without even breaking a sweat.
It's no wonder that wormholes are frequently chosen. TV episodes can only last so long.
And it's not like science fiction writers made up wormholes just for the sake of convenience. They do have a theoretical grounding in real physics. Wormholes are a natural prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, our understanding of gravity that links the contents of the universe to the bending and warping of space-time, and that bending and warping of space-time to the motion of the contents of the universe.
Wormholes have been a topic of interest among physicists for basically as long as there's been a general theory of relativity - almost a hundred years.
Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, wormholes don't exist in the real universe.
The biggest challenge facing wormholes is that they are catastrophically unstable. If you were to find a wormhole and send a single bit of light - a single photon - down the tunnel, the reaction of that photon’s energy to the space-time around it would be enough to completely destroy the wormhole faster than the speed of light. This means that as soon as you are able to construct a wormhole it collapses before you can even send us a signal down it.
In order to stabilize a wormhole, you have to counteract the effects of any positive energy or mass flowing down the tunnel (that means you ). And to counteract positive mass you need negative mass.
That's right: negative mass. As far as we can tell negative mass is not a thing in our universe either. Imagine kicking a ball and sending it flying in the opposite direction. Or setting a negative mass particle next to a positive mass particle and watching them accelerate off to infinity, violating the conservation of momentum. It's just such a nonsensical topic that most physicists don't even touch it with a ten-foot positive-mass pole.
We do have a thing called negative energy, but it remains to be seen if we can turn negative energy into the required amounts to stabilize a wormhole. After decades of trying results do not look optimistic.
I can't tell you what would happen if you were to try to travel down a wormhole. My best guess is that parts of you would end up distributed throughout the known universe, which means you technically achieved interstellar travel, but probably not in the way that you had hoped.
In 1935, Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen described how two sheets of spacetime can be joined together, creating a bridge between two universes. This is one kind of wormhole – and since then many others have been imagined. Some wormholes may be “traversable”, meaning humans may be able to travel through them.
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.
Wormholes connect two points in spacetime, which means that they would in principle allow travel in time, as well as in space. In 1988, Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever worked out how to convert a wormhole traversing space into one traversing time by accelerating one of its two mouths.
Wormholes are just theoretical. That is, scientists think they could exist, but no one has ever seen one. If they do exist, wormholes could provide shortcuts to distant parts of the universe. Or they might serve as bridges to other universes.
Because Einstein's theory has been tested many, many times and found to be correct every time, some scientists do expect wormholes to exist somewhere out in the universe. But, other scientists think wormholes can't possibly exist because they would be too unstable.
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.
The short answer is probably not, though the mathematics of the universe doesn't quite rule it out. By themselves, the only thing at the center of a black hole is a singularity — a point of infinite density. In theory, however, a black hole may be paired with a mirror twin, called a white hole, to form a wormhole.
Do we age slower in, say, a black hole, or a wormhole? No matter where you are in the universe, you will always experience time (and thus aging) at the same rate that you always do.
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.
Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They've never been seen, but according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, they might exist.
A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.
We show that wormholes are not mathematically allowed in the spherical metric of a newly-released unified quantum gravity theory known as collision space-time [1] [2] [3].
If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won't be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have just enough time to send a message to the rest of us from the other side, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Physical Review D.
If you ever happen to fall through a wormhole in space, you won't be coming back. It will snap shut behind you. But you may have just enough time to send a message to the rest of us from the other side, researchers report in the Nov. 15 Physical Review D.
I think it's worth a warning about what would happen if you fell into a wormhole. Depending on its size, you might get spaghettified – your body stretched into noodles – by the powerful gravitational forces. If you were somehow immune to that, the plasma inside an accreting wormhole would immediately incinerate you.
If an object or somebody walks through the incoming wormhole, it will be destroyed, or pulled back, or the receiving gates event horizon will be like a wall, as wormholes are one-way travel only, except for certain forms of energy, including radio waves.
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