Science fiction novels make it
clear that, even if we were able to reach relativistic speeds (close to the
speed of light), our need to personally explore the universe wouldn’t be satisfied.
We’d like to travel to other stars with the same ease with which we cross the
Atlantic today. We’d like to measure in days, if not hours, the time of a trip
to the center of the galaxy (which probably contains a large black hole). Is
there any chance of this happening?
To do this, we should discover in
the future some property of the universe, now unknown, that would help us
break the speed limit of light, which seems firmly established, and which would
make us spend thousands of years on trips to most stars, except the nearest.
- Speeds greater than that of light. I talked about this in another post
in this blog.
- Wormholes. They are based on the assumption that space is more complex than it seems, and that it’s possible to find shortcuts that would let us cross huge distances in a short time. Of these wormholes there would be three different types:
- Euclid wormholes, which would make use of unknown geometric dimensions.
- Lorentz wormholes, whose theoretical existence, compatible with the theory of
general relativity, was proposed in 1957 by physicist John Wheeler.
- Schwarzschild wormholes, tunnels entering through a black hole and exiting through a
white hole (a hypothetical structure, whose existence is unknown). These wormholes,
if they exist, might allow, not just to travel in space, but perhaps also
in time.
The problem is that we don’t know
where Euclid wormholes would take us; Lorentz wormholes would be too unstable
to be used in practice, according to Wheeler's analysis; and Schwarzschild wormholes
would be unstable and very dangerous, as people using them must enter a black
hole, with the danger to be dismembered as a result of the huge gravity attraction.
The existence of wormholes, like
that of multiverses, is one of those fancies that physicists like to do, which probably
will never lead us to any practical result. John Horgan called them ironic
science. However, a way to locate wormholes has recently been proposed
in an
article published in Physical Review D. As is often the case, the proposal
has received many criticisms by other researchers. However, the headline
assigned to this news in the Spanish
major newspaper ABC is rather more drastic:
A way to find Milky Way wormholes has been discovered
As usual, what the authors of the article present
as a possible method, is converted
by the media into a fully certain procedure.
The proposed method consists in analyzing the
movement of a star located near the giant black hole in the center of our
galaxy, to see if it’s subject to the attraction of some unexplainable
object, which could be located at the other side of the hypothetical wormhole
that would begin inside the central black hole.
Unfortunately there are so many unknown and
imprecise elements in this analysis, that it’s very doubtful that the method would
work, even if such a hypothetical wormhole exists, which is highly improbable.
Other researchers argue that such a wormhole would be unstable, therefore
this procedure wouldn’t work anyway.
The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Popularization of Science: Previous Next
Thematic Thread on Space Exploration: Previous Next
Manuel Alfonseca
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