How to Peer Through a Wormhole

Nov 13, 2019 · 12 comments
David Underwood (Citrus Heights)
If you are going to talk about multiple universes, you need to find another description, since Universe means the sum total of all that exists, there can only be one universe, what would be between them if there were such? As for traveling through one of these worm holes, you would have to reach the speed of light, and your mass would become infinite, actually you would become just another electromagnetic wave.
Dave (Wisconsin)
I'm currently of the belief that there is something much more simple than the current 'standard model' that explains everything in the standard model and everything else. In that model, wormholes don't exist but are just a mathematical artifact. The proper way to travel faster than light in a new model is by manipulating gravity itself, which is the same as manipulating inertia. In this model, the speed of travel is limited only by the ability to find a path free of debris. It is dangerous stuff, but given what we know about the universe, it would be possible to do this with a pretty low risk. The main risks are simply the stupid scattering of debris that is possible on current day Earth. It is no wonder the ET life would be concerned about what we're doing here. We can't send junk out into interstellar space without imperilling galactic travel.
margaret_h (Albany, NY)
Ah, at last something less plausible than string theory
Dave (Wisconsin)
I'm currently of the belief that there is something much more simple than the current 'standard model' that explains everything in the standard model and everything else. In that model, wormholes don't exist but are just a mathematical artifact. The proper way to travel faster than light in a new model is by manipulating gravity itself, which is the same as manipulating inertia. In this model, the speed of travel is limited only by the ability to find a path free of debris. It is dangerous stuff, but given what we know about the universe, it would be possible to do this with a pretty low risk. The main risks are simply the stupid scattering of debris that is possible on current day Earth. It is no wonder the ET life would be concerned about what we're doing here. We can't send junk out into interstellar space without imperilling galactic travel.
MJG (Boston)
If wormhole exist I would assume, at minimum, they are two lane streets. Have we encountered anything to support this? Aside from Trump rallies the answer has to be no.
Felix Qui (Bangkok)
A timely reminder of how little we know. While it's sensible to follow the best current scientific knowledge, it's also prudent to realize that that might be radically changed very quickly, as Copernicus, Galileo et al did 500 years ago, as Newton and co. did 300 years ago, and as Einstein and the quantum men did just over a century ago. We can guess, but cannot know what is just around the corner.
Jeff M (CT)
The problem is that you need negative energy to keep a wormhole open. Quantum mechanics says you can get negative energy, but the uncertainty principle says it can only exist for vanishingly short time periods. So no traversable wormholes. There's quite a bit of research on this.
bruce b (highland park nj)
yes there is a cosmic A* subway station at the center of our Galaxy. I have been waiting there but they just announced that the A* is running on the D* line because of FastTrak. What do I do now?
bill zorn (beijing)
“Gravity is just a property of space-time itself, so if you shake one end of it, you will feel it on the other end too,” i can testify to this. as can my other end.
John (Cleveland)
"Physicists have an infinity of freedom in building models for traversable wormholes.” That "freedom" may be getting us nowhere; at least nowhere near the truth. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's recent book "Lost in Math" is predominately about that point.
Martha (SC)
@John Interesting observation.
Peace wanted (Washington DC)
Wormholes, black holes and time machines are so wonderful that fascinate so many people for time traveling and space tunneling. But science is serious without any margin for fantasy. Current cosmology has inherited a fatal mistake from Einstein's relativity which uses its own artificial time and space to replace the real time and space, which make modern physics fall into the same doctrine of the medieval religion. The big bang theory is just like another version of the Genesis of the Bible. A physical clock is a physical process such as the rotation of the earth around the sun in which the physical time is recorded by the status change of the process. The status change of a physical process is always represented by the product of the lapse of the theoretical time and its progressing rate divided by a calibrate constant in either Newtonian mechanics or relativistic mechanics. That is, the physical time T measured by a physical clock is: T = tf/k where t is the theoretical time, f is the frequency of the clock and k is a calibration constant. In Newtonian mechanics, since the theoretical time is absolute and thus the frequency is a frame independent constant. We can set k = f to make T = tf/k = tf/f = t, which means a physical clock measures the absolute Galilean time. This also confirms that physical time measured with physical clocks is absolute, which has been confirmed by the absolute time shown on all atomic clocks on the GPS satellites, and thus time is not relative.