Monday, December 1, 2014

Iván A. Padilla: Wormhole Time Travel is now a Reality

Every human being, at least once in his or her lives, must have fantasized about time traveling. In the formulation of the theory of relativity, Einstein theorized the traversable wormholes existence. Since Einstein theorized the traversable wormholes existence, it has not been more than fiction. Some “theoretical physicists have proposed that they could act as portals into the future and the past or connect two distant regions of space”(O’Neill). Do wormholes exist in nature? Are we able to construct them? The answer to all these questions will definitely be given by time and a lot of experiments. But for now, wormhole time travel is a reality just if you are a photon “and even photons may be too much of a stretch for the hypothetical shortcut through space-time”(O’Neill).

Even though so far just photons may travel, there’s no doubt that this is the beginning of something great. The “theoretical physicist Luke Butcher of the University of Cambridge has revisited wormhole theory and potentially found a way to bridge these notoriously unstable entities.”(O’Neill). Luke Butcher has not been the only one who has believe in this,
“Physicist Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, theorized that to make a wormhole traversable — as in to actually make these spacetime shortcuts stable enough to travel through — some form of negative energy would be required. In the quantum world, this negative energy could come in the form of Casimir energy.” (O’Neill)

With more than one physicist conducting experiments about this phenomenon, it has taken a lot of credibility and hope of making the whole idea of a wormhole time traveling possible. Just imagine yourself going through a portal that will instantly take you to another place. The idea of wormhole time traveling sounds a little crazy right now, but it could definitely be a reality for large objects or even humans in the future. 

One of the greatest problems the physicists are having in their experiments is that the wormhole collapse when it is not long and narrow. So there is no possibility of time travel to a large mass or a human being so far. The stability of the wormholes depends on the configuration they has. What if it is that the perfect configuration has not been discovered yet? Conducting more experiments, the wormholes may reach an enough stable configuration and it could be possible for a wormhole to sustain bigger quantities of mass and eventually a human being.  Even though, a barrier to this phenomenon would be all the restrictions that exist when you are working with human beings. It would be terrific if a human goes into a wormhole and the wormhole collapse, what would happen to that person? Could the person be rescued or will the process be completely irreversible? There are a lot of risks that this phenomenon could lead to if it is not worked with all the precautions that it requires. After some experiments conducted concerning this topic, Butcher said:  
“These results tentatively suggest that a macroscopic traversable wormhole might be sustained by its own Casimir energy, providing a mechanism for faster-than-light communication and closed causal curves.” (O’Neill)
The invention of a wormhole that could sustain from its start to its end a human being sounds too good to be real for the moment. Undoubtedly, if it happens to be real it would be one of the greatest inventions and discoveries of all times, if not the greatest. 

Work Cited

O’Neill, Ian. “Wormhole Time Travel 'Possible' (If You're a Photon)”. Discovery News. Discovery Communications. 21 May 2014. Web. 28 Nov. 2014.

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