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Yes, Wormholes, those nifty little holes in space time, let you traverse vast intergalactic voids and leap millennia of time in ways that would make Captain Kirk look like Fred Flintstone.
A wormhole is a sort of tunnel through space, through which matter can pass. In order to understand what a wormhole is, imagine a rabbit hole in the ground, which has only two openings. The ground represents space, and that rabbit hole is the wormhole. Although you can travel between the two entrances by walking along the ground (space), you could also go between the entrances through the rabbit hole (wormhole). Wormhole are useful because the journey through the tunnel is often much shorter than the ground above it. This is why wormholes are often referred to as shortcuts through space.
There are two main reasons why traveling through a wormhole could be much shorter than traveling through normal space.
One reason is that space is curved. Return to the rabbit hole analogy, where the two entrances of the rabbit hole are connected by a tunnel. Imagine that the two entrances of the rabbit hole are separated by a large hill. Any trip across this hill, or around it, would take much longer than a trip along the rabbit hole, which goes directly through the hill.
The second, and
even more significant reason that the wormhole has a shorter
distance is that the space inside the wormhole is stretched. As
you travel through the wormhole, the space is so stretched and
distorted that travelling one inch in the wormhole might be the
equivalent of one light year in normal space. Think of this
thought experiment:
- There is a 12 inch ruler with two screws in it, Screw A and Screw B, which are five inches apart.
- A 1 inch long rubber band is stretched and put around both screws.
- Now imagine a creature that lives on the ruler, and he wants to get from Screw A to Screw B, but he can only travel at a speed of one inch per year.
- Traveling straight across the ruler would then take five years. (a long time for a creature with a life span of only 3 years!)
- However, if he traveled across the rubber band, which is only an inch long, the entire journey would only take one year!
This rubber band represents the wormhole, and provides a shortcut across the ruler because one inch of "rubber-band space" is stretched out across five inches of "ruler space".
Yes!!! Besides just leading toward other places, wormholes can also be portals into the past, and possibly even lead to different Universes! Although we have no idea what other universes this might lead to, we do understand much about how a wormhole can go through time.
To understand this, you might want to visit our relativity page. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of special relatively, suffice it to say that as an object moves faster, time moves slower for that moving object. So Imagine what would happen if one end of the wormhole was moving compared to the other end. What do you think would happen?
Because time would move
slower for the moving end, the wormhole would begin to be
stretched out through time. Take this example of a wormhole with
two entrances, A and B.
- Entrance A is stationary, while entrance B is flying through space at a tremendous speed.
- Entrance B is moving so fast that for every minute of time that passes for entrance A, only 59 seconds pass for entrance B. Therefore, entrance B loses one second for every minute that passes.
- Now suppose that entrance B and entrance A are now both still, after entrance A has been moving at that speed for one day
- Because entrance B lost one second for every minute it moved, it is now 24 minutes behind entrance A!
- This means that if you were to enter entrance A, you would emerge from entrance B 24 minutes before you entered the wormhole in the first place!!!
But which end is the "earlier" end? Which end do you come out of to go back in time? Answer: Both! Because both ends always appear to be moving compared to the other end, you would be traveling back in time either way you travel! And, because it is impossible to keep both ends perfectly stationary, ALL WORMHOLES ARE TIME MACHINES! Theoretically, if you traveled through any wormhole an infinite number of times, you would eventually travel back to the instant of the wormhole's creation!
Wormhole technology is, at best, theoretical right now. Wormholes cannot exist naturally and would have to be artificially created. Even if we knew how to create a wormhole, which we don't, it would collapse almost immediately after creation, and any traveler would be crushed. A good analogy of this problem is this thought experiment.
Thought Experiment: A wormhole collapsing
- Think of a whirlpool in a lake, going all the way to the bottom.
- It sucks up everything near it and pulls is underwater. This is a Black Hole.
- Now imagine two, right next to each other, and there bottoms suddenly hit each other.
- For a short time their bottoms are connected and it forms an underwater tunnel. This is a wormhole. Soon the centrifical force that was keeping it open is easily overwhelmed by the weight of the water above, and it collapses into the two original whirlpools.
There is hope, however, because recently a physicist showed that a type of exotic matter that would have the energy to keep the wormhole open could be put in the wormhole. There are problems with this, however. Any traveler using the hole would have to fly through high densities of this matter, which might be harmful. Then again, it might not interact at all with ordinary matter. At this stage, we can only guess.
There are two main ways wormhole creation has been proposed.
At an extremely small sub-atomic scale, space-time begins to break down into a strange foamy structure. At this scale, tiny wormholes are created and destroyed spontaneously and continuously. In the future, we may be able to stabilize the wormhole going where we want and then enlarge it, creating a passable tunnel that we can travel through.
It has been theorized that some black holes are actually wormholes. By shooting yourself into a black hole at an angle, you could theoretically go to anywhere in the universe, instantly appearing at your destination. This theory is even more radical than the theory of wormholes, but it does explain what happens inside a black hole and where all the matter goes when it falls into a black hole. It is dispersed and becomes cosmic background radiation. There is one tiny little problem, however, because the tidal forces inside and near most black holes would almost definitely rip you and your ship into your constituent atoms. To overcome this obstacle, you would need to use a black hole that was so big that it had little tidal forces. Unfortunately, there are no known super massive black holes in this galaxy (These very large black holes may be found in the centers of some galaxies).
Oh, no! It's the end! Repent, sinners! Were all going to die! One problem with this is that, if this type of paradox has happened before, which is likely, why are we still here? Why isn't the universe been destroyed? Despite the fact that many movies have been made about this scenario, it is in reality very unlikely.
For this one, I have to change the story a little.
This theory, although the simplest, implies that the future is predetermined and can't be changed. The possibility that the universe has a predetermined future is not only displeasing to people, it would also mean that the entire theory of quantum mechanics would have to be changed.
To understand this scenario, you must realize that the universe constantly divides into several different parallel realities. Although these realities are very similar to each other, they also have slight differences. Whenever you travel back in time, you are actually appearing in one of these different realities. Therefore, you could never affect your past, just the past of a parallel world.
The diagram on
the right illustrates this concept.
First you travel through the wormhole to point C, starting from A.
Instead of traveling back to point A, the universe forms a "branch" and you will instead travel to point B.
This is essentially a parallel universe; therefore, you would not affect yourself at all, you would merely be affecting your duplicate.
So all you did was kill your duplicate. So what? Well, I guess you just have to take his place in this reality!
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