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One Theory Beyond the Standard Model Could Allow Wormholes that You Could Actually Fly Through
Wormholes are a popular feature in science fiction, the means through which spacecraft can achieve faster-than-light (FTL) travel and instantaneously move from one point in spacetime to another.
And while the General Theory of Relativity forbids the existence of "traversable wormholes", recent research has shown that they are actually possible within the domain of quantum physics.
The only downsides are that they would actually take longer to traverse than normal space and/or likely be microscopic.
In a new study performed by a pair of Ivy League scientists, the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model could mean that there are wormholes out there that are not only large enough to be traversable, but entirely safe for human travelers looking to get from point A to point B.
The study, titled "Humanly traversable wormholes," was conducted by Juan Maldacena (the Carl P. Feinberg Professor of theoretical physics from the Institute of Advanced Study) and Alexey Milekhin, a graduate of astrophysics student at Princeton University. The pair have written extensively on the subject of wormholes in the past and how they could be a means for traveling safely through space.
[...] However, Maldacena and Milekhin emphasize that their study was conducted for the purpose of showing that traversable wormholes can exist as a result of the "subtle interplay between general relativity and quantum physics."
In short, wormholes are not likely to become a practical way to travel through space – at least, not in any way that's foreseeable. Perhaps they would not be beyond a Kardashev[*] Type II or Type III civilization, but that's just speculation. Even so, knowing that a major element in science fiction is not beyond the realm of possibility is certainly encouraging!
Preprint Reference:
Juan Maldacena and Alexey Milekhin, Humanly traversable wormholes, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.06618.pdf
[*] Kardashev Scale
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by c0lo on Monday August 31 2020, @02:27PM (1 child)
Practically speaking:
Sobering. And refreshing on the other side: we're still alive and the Earth still almost intact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @03:36PM
And, on a scale with annual earth-intercepted solar power being a 1, what's the energy requirement to form a 2m diameter wormhole from here to Alpha Centauri? Like 4 Trillion, or???
I can imagine that the first experimental wormhole formations would be... unpredictable, and therefore dangerous on an existential level, but to obtain the required energy you would need to be close to a star or other massive high energy object.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by dioxide on Monday August 31 2020, @02:43PM (4 children)
At what point do you start wondering if they're just making up math to fit their fantasy?
OTOH, it's my fantasy too, and that'd be pretty damn cool.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @02:53PM (1 child)
At what point do you create the reality by making up the math?
I mean, runaway fission thermonuclear reactions happen with or without knowing how to make them happen, but you have to admit: they have happened a lot more frequently on the Earth since it was understood how to make them happen.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday September 01 2020, @08:52AM
The problem comes with testing and proving in a real world scenario. We can and have tested thermonuclear reactions, but we can't test the various quantum theories very much.
As I once heard someone say: a theory of astronomy could be 90% certain, but it's built on another theory which is 90% certain... which is built on another theory which is 90% certain, and so on and so on. At some point, the certainty doesn't quite add up. Dark Matter is very much this. We have no clue what it is and can't run tests on it, but there are all sorts of different conflicting theories running around about it. It's the same with quantum theory.
(Score: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Monday August 31 2020, @04:15PM (1 child)
Or bending fantasies to fit the math. Calling "microscopic" areas of immense gravity "human-traversable" falls into fantasy, for example, I'd say.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @11:13PM
It might not be human traversable, but it would still be extremely useful and revolutionary physics if you can even shove a photon through it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday August 31 2020, @02:51PM (9 children)
Since when does GR forbid traversable wormholes? Last I heard, wormholes were entirely based on GR. You do run into some conflicts with causality if they're traversable, but strictly linear causality is more of an assumption than a law. And an assumption that's already being called into question by a growing body of QM experiments that seem to indicate that retrocausality* may be a real phenomena. E.g. performing a variant of the classic "measurement determines whether you get interference patterns on the wall" experiment, only with the measurement being done to an entangled second particle, *after* the first particle has already hit the wall.
*(future events determining past outcomes)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @03:00PM (7 children)
So, we have experiments where the measurement (interference pattern) is dependent on a future action?
Given that, one should be able to encode the winning lottery numbers with future actions and read them from the experimental results before the numbers are drawn.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday August 31 2020, @03:53PM (3 children)
Yes, that's how it works. Causes and effects do not necessarily come in any particular order in quantum theory. Impossible things at macro scale happen routinely at quantum scale.
A problem for exploiting this for lottery, assuming you work out all the other details, is that ticket sales are usually suspended some nontrivial amount of time before the drawing (say, 1 hour before), but your scheme only gives exploitable information moments before the drawing. I guess this was planned for from the start.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @04:23PM (2 children)
My scheme involves a cascade of overlapping experiments - if you can transmit information t microseconds into the past, a duplicate experiment picks up that information at -t/2 and re-transmits that information to -3t/2, repeat as necessary to casually text the winning lottery numbers to a purchaser at a retail sales point a comfortable amount of time before sales blackout.
For more information, deposit 0.25BTC to account AB3458F284E34812AE2340589BD3250879C
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by requerdanos on Monday August 31 2020, @05:16PM (1 child)
I have clearly underestimated your plan, for which I publicly apologize, and lend my support.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @05:48PM
Thank you for inspiring my sig. As a special thank you, I will tell you that 29e051c90531025e6edca9c8e9376005 is the MD5 hash of "Sucker"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @07:06PM
This works so well, four years ago someone picked up on the idea and made a video about it! And yes, you can totally do this... Unfortunately, you can't recover the information until you get corresponding classical information.
https://youtu.be/2Uzytrooz44 [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 01 2020, @04:23AM (1 child)
>So, we have experiments where the measurement (interference pattern) is dependent on a future action?
Well, it certainly seems that way at least. For now though the time window seems fairly small - whatever tiny fraction of a second it takes the second photon to traverse the somewhat longer distance to the detector.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 01 2020, @01:17PM
That sounds like a measurement/assumption error - not exactly, but something along the lines of: the photons actually travel "forward" along a sine wave path with some amplitude and their speed along the axis of this path is what we call c. The difference they're measuring could then be attributable to a difference in the phase of the two photons.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @07:10PM
Fuller and Wheeler showed that they are unstable and that their ends pinch off faster than light can traverse them. Ever since that paper, people have been looking for the conditions for them to be traversable. Kip Thorne found a solution in the 80s, but it required unphysical space-time stress tensors.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday August 31 2020, @03:29PM (14 children)
Rush, rush, rush. Seems most everyone always wants to go faster. Wants things sooner, wants it yesterday. Our Science Fiction is badly infected by that attitude. Most science fiction has some means of Faster Than Light travel, or at least communication. Star Trek has warp drive, Star Wars and many others have hyperspace, and some have various wormhole-like phenomina such as Alderson points. Yet another idea is that of a galactic well of sorts, outside of which it is possible to travel much faster.
And why? Pretty much so we can repeat on a stellar scale our most recent centuries of discovery and expansion. What is Captain Picard but a modernized Christopher Columbus? 5 year mission, yeah. Why 5 years? Because long ocean voyages in sailboats, such as Magellan's circumnavigation which took 3 years, worked on that kind of time scale? Because of the human lifetime of roughly 100 years, or the career span of 50 years?
On the other hand, I don't agree with the thinking that traveling faster than light would necessitate traveling backward in time. Yes, of course, that is a logical extrapolation of relativity. As an object approaches light speed, passage of time for it slows towards zero. Thus to go faster than light, time must pass at less than zero speed, ie, backwards. One should always be cautious about extrapolation. I really see no reason why FTL travel, if possible at all, can't be done without traveling backward in time and breaking causality. And indeed, FTL in SF does not cause time travel into the past.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday August 31 2020, @04:06PM (11 children)
Columbus was a slaver who made all his men swear they were in Asia.
Picard may be fictional, but his character and navigational skills seem somewhat better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @04:43PM (4 children)
Picard had a couple of centuries of decent telescopic information about the territory he was sailing into, information from the Vulcans, Kirk, and what-all. He also had "subspace" communications with the entire fleet, when needed - a telepath advisor, reliable medical care, onboard resources for years beyond mission needs of most refit and resupply, a freakin' 1000 head "family pod" city to call home while exploring...
Columbus was literally sailing over the edge of the earth, not only where no European man had gone before, but where no (southern) European man had ever received any shred of reliable information from, on three scraps of wood blown by the wind.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday August 31 2020, @08:43PM (3 children)
Columbus had a map made by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli [wikipedia.org] showing the location of a large land mass West of Europe. Which was thought to be Asia.
Also Europeans had already made it to North America almost 500 years earlier. Lief Eriksons's voyage to what he called Vineland, around 1000CE, and even Lief's trip was based on earlier information from Bjarni [wikipedia.org] who reported seeing a large land mass West of Greenland in 986CE though Bjami did not make land fall.
While they weren't from Europe there are also claims that the Olmec civilization in Central/South America may have been started, or at least strongly influenced by, travelers from China around 1200BCE.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @11:44PM (2 children)
Thus: no Southern European.
Doesn't sound too reliable to me. Was Toscanelli's map based on the writings of Strabo the Greek (1st Century BC/AD)? The Greeks, believing in a round earth, may well have made a map showing Asia lying to the West, because, well - round earth and all - you're sure to get there eventually. This would be similar to advice in the Kirk Star Trek Universe to seek God by slingshotting around a black hole to travel back to the beginning of time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday September 01 2020, @04:38AM (1 child)
"Believed" nothing! The Greeks had already measured the circumference of the Earth to within a few percent of its actual size, and educated Europeans were well aware of that, Columbus's "brilliance" wasn't realizing that the world was round, but that he believed it to be about half the commonly accepted diameter, so that Asia could be reached by sailing west, rather than such a voyage being impossibly long and dooming everyone to death at sea, which would have been the outcome if the if the Americas hadn't unexpectedly gotten in the way.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 01 2020, @01:22PM
Well, right or wrong, the Greeks lacked certain objective proofs of the spherical shape of the earth's surface, just as we lack objective proof of the infinite expansion, or cyclic expansion/contraction of the universe.
Any "flat earther" today who cares to can strap on a watch, get in a jet, and "follow the sun" westward long enough to get a pretty good sense that they are indeed circumnavigating a globe. I'd be willing to bet there was a sizeable (probably illiterate and forgotten) portion of the Greek population who believed that the mathematicians and their theories of the spherical surface of the earth were a waste of breath.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday August 31 2020, @05:37PM (4 children)
Columbus brought back slaves because he wanted to justify his mission to the king, if you want something evil from him, he imposed taxation. Slavery is widespread nowadays, only because you do it by proxy, using money, laws, peer pressure it does not mean it is not there. So being up in arms about "slavers" of the past ends up being a way to whitewash the current ones, and boy is people falling for this.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31 2020, @08:16PM
I concur, "modern slavery" exists, and is widespread, but it's quite a bit improved from the days of literal slaver ships with property clapped in irons for the crossing.
May we continue to improve: with UBI sufficient to provide food and shelter we would remove the fear of hunger and exposure from the owner/worker class relationship, and I believe the lives of both classes would improve similarly as they did with the removal of literal slave ownership. We no longer have a "wild continent" to tame to Western ideas of civilization - nature lost, game over - if we don't stop playing we're going to destroy the playing field.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 01 2020, @12:52AM (2 children)
Or if you want something really evil, he began the extinction of the entire Taíno culture.
There were 60,000 people living on this island [when I arrived in 1508], including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? [wikipedia.org]
He wasn't terribly nice to Spainish colonists, either: [wikipedia.org]
But taxation was the nasty bit?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 01 2020, @10:43AM (1 child)
Between the two, yes.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 01 2020, @10:24PM
Wow, you're claiming taxation is worse than genocide.
I'm not sure how to respond to that. I'm not allowed to mod, so I can't make it +1 Funny, which I assume is what you're going for?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @05:54PM
> Picard may be fictional, but his character and navigational skills seem somewhat better.
Yeah, it's pretty easy to develop mad navigational skillz when one is fictional.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Osamabobama on Monday August 31 2020, @04:08PM (1 child)
Minor quibble: Kirk was on a 5 year mission; Picard was on a 'continuing mission'.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @10:26PM
minor quibble: chris was real, jim and john-fluke were fiction.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday August 31 2020, @03:31PM (2 children)
Every time they talk about wormholes I hear/see the classic Dr.Who, by Delia Derbyshire, intro playing on repeat in my brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM8uBGANASc [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by Bot on Monday August 31 2020, @06:18PM (1 child)
Every time they talk about wormholes, I think about a half eaten apple.
As Peter Sellers in some movie went: what's worse than biting an apple and find a worm inside? biting an apple and find half a worm inside.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Monday August 31 2020, @09:42PM
Biting an apple and finding an eighth of a worm is even worse than that.
Take that to the limit, and the worst possibly outcome from biting an apple is to find no worm at all!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @04:16PM (3 children)
I had not realized that we were classifying civilizations on a Kardashian scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @10:54PM (2 children)
Oh yea! And you know the difference between a type I and type II Kardashian? The amount of energy harvested for cosmetic use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2020, @02:11AM
The standard model does not need so much cosmetics.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday September 01 2020, @09:09AM
Type 1 is Damar
Type 2 is Dukat
Type 3 is Garak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @05:40PM (1 child)
When a wormhole opens, it creates a sudden drop in surrounding atmospheric pressure, possibly making it difficult for humans in the vicinity to breathe, especially if inside a building.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31 2020, @07:22PM
tl:dr - Wormholes suck!
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday August 31 2020, @09:57PM
Even if it's a small fraction of c, the utility could be in the "cleanliness". A worm-hole free of radiation, dust and debris might be the only safe way to reach the stars. It might still be multi-generational, or maybe not if you could obtain a significant fraction of c.
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