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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) 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.