[HN Gopher] Wormhole Tunnels in Spacetime May Be Possible, New R...
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Wormhole Tunnels in Spacetime May Be Possible, New Research
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Author : awb
Score : 121 points
Date : 2021-05-20 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| del_operator wrote:
| Yeah, possible like the chance of hitting a rational on the real
| line with a dart -- dense jokes of measure zero.
| seph-reed wrote:
| Out of curiosity -- if wormholes were mastered -- would that
| allow us to reach things currently believed to be beyond our
| cosmic horizon?
|
| Or would there already have to be something on both ends?
| elevaet wrote:
| There has to be something placed on both ends, in all of the
| scenarios I've read.
| krapp wrote:
| You can get to Alpha Centauri tomorrow... you just have to
| wait a few years for the other jump gate to get there first.
| jnurmine wrote:
| The concept of "travelling backwards in time" is very odd.
|
| To "travel in time" I guess first one would have to define what
| exactly is this "time" one is about to travel backwards in.
|
| So... what exactly is "time"?
|
| And does "time" even exist as something concrete which can be
| traversed? Or, is "flow of time" just something created within
| the brain as a way to keep track of changes in things we
| experience?
|
| Or is it something else, something totally different?
|
| (I don't know the answers, I'm asking based on what "time travel"
| could be possible in the first place. Hoping John Titor chimes
| in, too.)
| warent wrote:
| I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can
| say with confidence that the "flow of time" is not an invention
| of the brain. We can (and frequently do) make measurements that
| demonstrate time is an objective dimension of the universe that
| interacts with space and matter.
|
| There have been really awesome experiments around this. For
| example, it has been demonstrated that moving a particle at
| relativistic speeds increases its half-life, which can only be
| explained by time dilation.
| grishka wrote:
| IANAPhysicist, but traveling backwards in time would violate at
| least the law of conservation of matter. Traveling forward in
| time, on the other hand, feels like something actually
| possible. You're already traveling forward in time at the rate
| of 1, so nothing would break if you somehow created a bubble of
| space around you where time ticks at a different (positive)
| rate.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > Or, is "flow of time" just something created within the brain
| as a way to keep track of changes in things we experience?
|
| If it wasn't, odds are somebody would have built a computer by
| now that "remembers" the stock prices for tomorrow.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Related, but not wormholes: Last night I watched this video on
| loop for a long time, of stars at the center of our galaxy
| orbiting the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Really a
| mind-blowing video. https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1825e/
| cat199 wrote:
| > Last night I watched this video on loop for a long time,
|
| Sounds like you found a different kind of wormhole :)
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Amazing video, thanks! Really interesting to see the sudden
| increase in speed in that one star. I wonder if it has any
| detectable effects on that star's planets.
|
| Edit: after watching it again it seems to be a matter of
| perspective but I thought it was about how close it orbited the
| black hole.
| thinker403 wrote:
| This absolutely made my day. I had no idea this existed!
| Putting it on .25 speed and looping it allows you to really see
| the warping taking place. I wonder if the four or five
| similarly sized light orbs moving in and out are really just
| the distorted light from one star?
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Wow. That is $)(*ing awesome. In the traditional sense of
| inspiring cosmic awe.
| pp19dd wrote:
| It's just amazing how satisfying these little incremental
| observations are, and equally amazing how much work goes into
| it.
|
| What I found similarly fascinating was this interactive of our
| neighborhood - 33 light-year field, green are detected planets:
| https://gruze.org/fly_10pc/ (mouse wheel, click n drag, right
| click and drag)
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Folks who, like me, are interested but not professional
| physicists, may find illuminating Sean Carroll's podcast.
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ He is a CalTech
| faculty physicist with wide interests and perhaps a third of the
| episodes are about research physics. I remember several that
| discussed wormholes and associated topics seriously, from the
| standpoint of world-class researchers. I think anyone interested
| in HN would be able to follow the conversations closely.
| gyldenlund wrote:
| Thanks for this!
| jperras wrote:
| Sean Carroll is incredible, and his textbook on Spacetime &
| Geometry was the only reason I understood anything in my
| graduate-level class on general relativity. There's truly an
| art to be able to explain incredibly complex topics in an
| easy(er) to understand way.
| crmd wrote:
| I can't recommend enough Sean's "Biggest Ideas in the Universe"
| video series [1]
|
| It's a series of 24 1-2 hour lectures + Q&A/recitations that
| assumes no prior knowledge of physics and aims to get you
| roughly to the knowledge level of a modern undergrad BA
| physics.
|
| For someone who loves science documentaries but was frustrated
| at most being aimed at high school-level and skipping all the
| math, Sean's series was a game changer for me.
|
| [1]
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3jyjUU...
| wheels wrote:
| > _It's a series of 24 1-2 hour lectures [...] level of a
| modern undergrad BA physics._
|
| Wait, what? That's completely bonkers. There's absolutely no
| way to condense four years of studies into two days of
| YouTube. I can't believe I'm even having to say this.
|
| I'm hoping what you mean is "introduce you to the topics that
| would be covered in an undergrad physics degree". In 24 hours
| you could reasonably mention each of the topics covered in a
| degree and describe what that field is about.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Did you say BA on purpose or did you just generally mean
| undergrad degree?
|
| Yes, stupid question, I know.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| A few thoughts:
|
| 1. The possibility of wormholes isn't new.
|
| 2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what
| they're talking about.
|
| 3. They're stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous
| limits: _And because entanglement is a standard feature of
| quantum physics, it is relatively easy to create. "It's really a
| beautiful theoretical idea,"_
| fnord77 wrote:
| communication through them should be possible, though, no?
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm betting if it's possible, it will happen within our
| lifetimes, possibly as soon as 20 years ago.
| libria wrote:
| If you haven't had any messages sent to you from Future
| fnord77, suffice it to say we won't have figured out how to
| do that in our lifetime.
| firebaze wrote:
| If we'll figure this out, we'll (very) probably also have
| figured how out to calculate the effects of communicating
| with the past.
|
| So, no. This doesn't tell us anything about the
| possibility, it merily tells us, even if it _was_ possible,
| we're collectively to stupid yet to deal with it without
| destroying our future which would've led to inventing such
| a device.
| taberiand wrote:
| That sounds like something someone communicating from the
| future would say...
| chasd00 wrote:
| unrelated tangent but this reminded me a funny thing i read
|
| inspirational quote: "Your future self is complaining about
| how much time you waste"
|
| person: i'll show him! i'll ruin his f**ing life!
| jmeyer2k wrote:
| In the abstract of the linked paper in the article, they
| mention that wormholes "can't violate causality" [1]. So,
| this wouldn't be possible even if we were able to invent
| wormholes in our lifetime.
|
| [1]:
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP12(2017)151
| mrfusion wrote:
| It could be you can only communicate back to the point
| where it was built.
| lumost wrote:
| The physics of interacting with your previous self are
| undefined with many plausible solutions.
|
| It is entirely plausible that the universe limits your
| interactions with your past causal self to a small range,
| allows arbitrary overlapping world lines, blocks all causal
| violations entirely, or has disastrous consequences for
| time loops.
|
| My personal bet is that the universe has no reason to care
| that you've interacted with your past self given a
| consistent proper time worldline. This however removes
| conservation of energy and momentum in the universe, which
| General Relativity also does not preserve.
|
| Of course this does allow for misuse of causal loops to
| generate arbitrarily large/infinite amounts of energy
| without any bounds on observability.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Your comment echoes the film 'Interstellar' and I now
| have a desire to watch it again.
|
| Who says science can't fill the soul with wonder?
| dataflow wrote:
| I really _want_ to think that was a pun. Relatively easy, just
| quantumly hard.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Every thing is easy relatively to impossible
| slver wrote:
| They're saying tunnels are possible. They didn't say people (or
| any organic life on Earth) would travel through them.
|
| Honestly just encoding any communication through them
| successfully would turn our world upside down.
|
| That said, wormholes are a bit of the pet crackpot theory of
| the scientific community right now. Black holes are definitely
| a thing. White holes are pure conjecture based on extrapolating
| math in very hand-wavey ways. And wormholes (i.e. the idea of
| black/white holes where information can travel between them)
| are even less plausible.
| _Microft wrote:
| The last link in the article is to a paper called "Humanly
| Traversable Wormholes". Here is an excerpt from its conclusion
| _" In fact, it allows for solutions where the wormholes are big
| enough that a person could traverse them and survive. From the
| outside they resemble intermediate mass charged black holes.
| Their big size comes from demanding that a human traveller can
| survive the tidal forces."_, from [PDF]
| https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.066007
| nawgz wrote:
| > 2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti
|
| I understand this is some form of hyperbole, but would what
| they propose be sufficient to transport masses of some raw
| elements around? Let's say some advanced civilization sent out
| mining expeditions, and desired a way to transport back that
| material FTL for example
| wearywanderer wrote:
| From my reading of the PDF, they're talking about wormholes
| with a radius less than 10^-21 meters. The Bohr radius is
| 10^-11.
| teeray wrote:
| I'd be more interested in sticking one end into the sun's
| corona and getting an infinite rocket engine
| mLuby wrote:
| I wouldn't expect an exhaust plume passing through a
| wormhole to move the wormhole itself (or the heavily curved
| "portals" at its ends) any more than a plume would move
| "flat"/"normal" spacetime.
|
| Separately, Kurzgesagt did a video on stellar engines
| (which can be much less exotic than wormholes); sounds like
| what you're describing: https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Please use somebody else's sun
| grishka wrote:
| > You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through
| what they're talking about.
|
| Uh, so no stargates anytime soon? That's disappointing.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| > stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits
|
| I take it they mean "easier than supplying 1000 galaxies-worth
| of energy" or similar
| wearywanderer wrote:
| Right. It's 'easy' relative to the utterly impossible. But
| it's 'utterly impossible' relative to anything any reasonable
| human might consider easy.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Then they are using the term right. They said relatively
| easy, not absolutely easy.
| wearywanderer wrote:
| I agree that it's not _flat wrong_ , it's just a huge
| stretch. Compared to what they propose, a commercially
| viable fusion power plant is "relatively easy."
| judge2020 wrote:
| It's not helpful to the reader, though.
| echelon wrote:
| Sending matter probably isn't important. Data, though. That's
| valuable.
| lsiunsuex wrote:
| I'm going to venture to guess anything and everything is possible
|
| How many billions of light years big is our universe? A size so
| huge, we can't fathom that number or distance.
|
| We observe or think we're observing black holes, dieing stars,
| super novas, etc...
|
| We think dark matter exists and fills the voids of what we can't
| view
|
| We observe viruses and try to kill them, atoms, etc...
|
| We're on the edge (few years? decade max?) of producing picometer
| processors
|
| So yes - wormhole travel is possible. Reversing the pull of
| gravity is possible. Traveling faster than the speed of light is
| possible. We are just not smart enough (yet) to do these things.
|
| What's the saying? If life exists elsewhere other than earth,
| there are probably thousands and thousands of civilizations out
| there due to the size of the universe? Then yes, all these things
| are possible and something has probably already done it - we're
| just not there yet.
| layer8 wrote:
| Even if microscopic, wormholes that allow information to be
| transmitted through them would still be interesting if the ends
| can be moved independently:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Time_travel
| sschueller wrote:
| I want two network cards that have trillions of entangled
| quantum states between them so I can network to anywhere.
|
| Sadly that is not how quantum entanglement works.
| nojokes wrote:
| So the first to implement it would be HFT?
| cosmodisk wrote:
| And then PornHub would follow shortly after.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| Actual meat: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01920
| [deleted]
| shakezula wrote:
| They mention the magnetization of blackholes - is this related
| to the other black holes post on front page today?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223520
|
| Utilizing the extreme magnetic polarization of a black hole
| seems pretty sci-fi but sounds sweet as hell.
| the8472 wrote:
| Seems unrelated. This paper is talking about the black hole
| itself (not its accretion disk). And it's also talking about
| a magnetic charge rather than a magnetic field. This would
| require magnetic monopoles, which are hypothetical.
| shakezula wrote:
| Interesting! Thank you for the clarification. I am a total
| noob at astrophysics but the two seemed coincidentally
| related.
| zardo wrote:
| Is there a working EM theory where div B != 0
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Does anyone else get just a little bit sad that we will not be
| around to see actual practical advances made with wormholes?
|
| I wonder if this is what people in earlier centuries felt, a bit
| of melancholy at the dream that hundreds of years from now
| someone may be able to walk on the then newly-discovered moon,
| and knowing they would not be around to see it happen.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Does anyone else get just a little bit sad that we will not
| be around to see actual practical advances made with wormholes?
|
| Thing is, I felt sad when I heard about IP the first time, and
| some people said we were gonna have a huge network everyone can
| talk with each other, across borders. Because I thought we'd
| never achieve that in my lifetime.
|
| But here we are, things move a lot faster (sometimes) than what
| you think. Maybe because of the inviting incentive of basically
| teleportation, research on wormholes will be faster.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| I don't think a new networking protocol is remotely
| comparable to an entire new form of matter.
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm not comparing them, I'm comparing the feeling of "This
| will be so far in the future that I will never experience
| it" that I got from IP and international networks, since
| someone else felt the same way about wormholes.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| i'm pleased to inform that the moon is quite visible to the
| naked eye.
| Normille wrote:
| >I wonder if this is what people in the 17th century felt, a
| bit of melancholy at the dream that hundreds of years from now
| someone may be able to walk on the then newly-discovered
| moon...
|
| I'm no historian. But I'm pretty sure people had discovered The
| Moon a wee while before the C17th.
| jorvi wrote:
| > Does anyone else get just a little bit sad that we will not
| be around to see actual practical advances made with wormholes?
|
| Depending on your age, you will. With the massive progress
| quantum computing and further advances in AI will bring. I have
| a feeling we will be able to 'back up' people their brain
| within a few decades. Regrowing a body or producing a
| sufficiently advanced (and cheap) robotical surrogate may be
| further away, but technical immortality might be very
| achievable.
| grishka wrote:
| > Does anyone else get just a little bit sad that we will not
| be around to see actual practical advances made with wormholes?
|
| Speaking of other things that feel like science fiction,
| there's a good chance that we cure aging in the coming decades.
| amayne wrote:
| > I wonder if this is what people in the 17th century felt, a
| bit of melancholy at the dream that hundreds of years from now
| someone may be able to walk on the then newly-discovered moon,
| and knowing they would not be around to see it happen.
|
| Could you elaborate on this newly-discovered moon you're
| speaking of?
| ithkuil wrote:
| Clearly humanity saw and knew about the Moon since forever,
| and somebody likely did think of walking on it or whatnot.
|
| At some point in the 17th century our technology allows us to
| have a better view of the Moon and even led to this
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/17th-
| century-a...
|
| I think this may count as a new "discovery" phase of our
| relationship with the familiar celestial object, and may have
| indeed prompted an uptake in fantasies about perhaps one day
| walking in it.
| sva_ wrote:
| Whenever somebody mentions melancholy, I immediately think
| about this engraving:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I#/media/File:Albre...
|
| (Sorry for relative offtopic)
| benlivengood wrote:
| The most useful thing wormholes could be used for is
| hypercomputers (if causality can be violated); or simply
| bypassing the Bekenstein bound with FTL communication in a
| processor exceeding the mass that would turn it into a black hole
| if it was spatially adjacent; or building an interstellar network
| that could survive the big rip.
|
| Anything that mastered wormhole creation is also likely to expand
| into the universe at close to the speed of light with wormhole-
| carrying Von Neumann probes, making the Fermi paradox even more
| extreme if wormholes can be created.
| freddealmeida wrote:
| No it is not. As a maths guy I can tell you two things. One: math
| does not make it true. Two: You need to be able to build a
| disprovable model against this. No. No wormhole. Its not even
| needed to explain behavior. this is pure science fiction.
| del_operator wrote:
| Proved by seductive physics maybe
| msgilligan wrote:
| Scientific American is becoming the new version of Bob
| Guccione's Omni magazine:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_(magazine)
| froh wrote:
| They should call it "The Omnion" to avoid confusion with
| America's Finest News Source.
| Diederich wrote:
| I had a subscription in the late 70s and early 80s. Very
| enjoyable material. (: Some fraction of it would be somewhat
| rigorous science, but the rest was pretty fanciful, fun
| stuff.
|
| ADDED: Beautiful, and here's the relatively short lived TV
| show Omni Magazine: The New Frontier (1987)
| https://youtu.be/kdwEGc_g6Gw?t=68
|
| Great stuff.
| msgilligan wrote:
| My mother subscribed in the late 80's because she was
| dating a science professor (who she eventually married) and
| wanted to be more conversant in science.
|
| I remember visiting her and picking up the latest issue
| from her coffee table. The headline story: DINOSAUR SEX --
| complete with full-color artist's renditions. I had a great
| time teasing her about it.
|
| https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2017/07/vintage-dinosaur-
| ar...
| [deleted]
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I'm not a maths guy, can you clarify why you're so certain?
| Your post lacks evidence or details so, as a layman, I don't
| know what makes you certain.
| aduitsis wrote:
| I dare say the important part is being able to come up with
| experiments that, if successful, would disprove a theory:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
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