Thursday, December 19, 2019

Wormholes


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.
To solve the problem, science fiction authors have used essentially two different procedures:
  • 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
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Manuel Alfonseca

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