Wormholes

No, I’m not talking about those tiny animals you see about everywhere, though I believe it should be easier to explain how earthworms eat the soil and excrete part of it to dig their holes and find their way underground. Well, for now, we aren’t really going “underground” but rather above ground, far in space where man still hopes to find his greatest discovery.

So back to our topic: wormholes. The word itself sounds creepy enough, making you think of those little digging creatures (again) who use these holes to travel. Our wormhole has the same use, technically, for it provides a “tunnel’ connecting two different points in space-time. Of course, if it were such a simple thing as tunnel, it wouldn’t be such a fascinating phenomenon for all physicists. These tunnels allow the bending of space-time in such a way that a trip through them would take far less time than it we were to go the normal way. Well, I guess I should be finding a wormhole to take me to Pluto rather than dying in a spaceship before actually reaching there… Why Pluto? I’ve always wanted to go to Pluto to see if there were any dogs there…

Pluto is still in our galaxy (unless it has been decided otherwise and I haven’t been informed of it xD) , which would mean I would have to find intra-universe one unless I want to end up in some other galaxies where well, I would feel like an alien and the non-aliens which technically are aliens for us would want to study me to find “answers” about the other universes. I’m starting to think I’m not making any sense here but oh well… xD Now if you are crazy enough to want to be in such a situation, just go to an inter-universe wormhole-stop and you’ll end up where you want to be.

But you would want to be careful. Wormholes are supposed to be highly unstable and can collapse if even the tiniest amount of matter attempts to pass through them. A solution to this problem might be to use exotic matter to prevent the wormhole from disintegrating. Exotic matter is completely opposite to all matter known to man for they are not made from protons and neutrons or any other particles I might not know the name (I dropped chemistry at a pretty early age ). But then, we are faced with yet another problem for the existence of such matter or even the wormhole is purely hypothetical.

Wormholes could open a world of opportunities or rather, worlds of opportunities, for it is believed they could be the foundation to high-speed space travel or time travel. Such high ambitions and one wonders what actually was the trigger to these. It all started when Einstein published his famous theory of relativity based on the close connections of energy, mass, space and time. It seemed by studying the simplest outcome of these equations, which is not exactly what I’d call simple, i.e. the black hole effect, Ludwig Flamm discovered the possibility of yet another outcome, which would now be called the white hole.

The black hole is said to be the beginning of the wormhole. It is like this vortex which absorbs everything because the pull is too great. The white hole on the other hand, is, as its name indicates, the complete opposite. Instead of absorbing, it spits away energy and matter out, making it reasonable to assume that the white hole is indeed the end of the wormhole.

So many theories… one would hardly expect the men of science to remain quiet about such discoveries. Many continued their research to look for what is supposed to be impossible, and three such warriors were rewarded. Michael Morris, Kip Thorne and Uri Yertsever realized that a journey along a wormhole could actually be possible if it could be held open long enough for something to pass through it. Of course, to do that, exotic matter would be needed and it is not that common, if I may be allowed to say so. Great research lies behind this theory, and it would have given me lots of pleasure to write about it, but alas, I haven’t yet managed to grasp the whole concept.

For someone who said she abandoned physics, I find myself drowning yet into that black hole called relativity and I see no way out yet. Some journeys into wormholes are longer, it seems.

P.S. This was a request by Viru5 who wanted to “relax” a little during his exams period. I wish him luck.

~ by Nussaibah on March 8, 2009.