Time Travel; the Wormhole Voyage

Science fiction movies/ authors love the idea of the ability to travel back in time. Spock did it in the 2009 Star Trek movie.

Jodie Foster passed through a wormhole on the 1997 movie Contact.

The subject of wormholes is a popular one in science.

What is a wormhole?

In simple terms, it is a passageway that links two points in such a manner that there would be no space between them.



^{Pixabay: A wormhole}


Using a balloon analogy, assume the balloon represent spacetime. On each opposite ends of the balloon are two dots. The wormhole is the shortest path that connects the two dots on either side of the balloon. This means someone can enter either side of the wormhole and transverse the universe without having to move through space.

This is a faster than light travel that eliminates the need to break the cosmic speed limit.

The two ends of this wormhole are not fixed in space but are quantum linked. Quantum entanglement specifies that two particles can be linked across any distance (including the diameter of the universe).

In order words, the two ends moving at different velocities could still meet each other at the other end, making a worm hole traveller to get to the other end.

Using the special relativity that states that the faster you travel through space, the slower the time.

What you need now is the technology to set up your wormholes. You could connect one end to the universe, and the other say to a spaceship. Flying through this wormhole at close to the speed of light in about twelve hours to and fro (6 hours each way) would set you back about ten years in Earth time! That was according to theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.

Birth of wormhole

Wormhole came into being due physicists Einstein and Nathan Rosen endless trial to find a unifying factor between electromagnetism and his theory of relativity. This messy detail in physics is known as singularities (the point where maths quantities become infinite). The idea that a particle could have its mass concentrated into an infinitely small point.

Einstein and Rosen published a paper in 1935 where they argued that the point could be extended into a path that leads to another location.

Going back to the balloon analogy for illustration, imagine a using a material to push the dots (which represents the singularity) from either side till they form a tube-shaped path known as Einstein-Rosen Bridge or more popularly as a wormhole.

Einstein in 1939 through his theory of relativity came up the idea of a black hole. The blackhole is a big singularity of which the reverse is a white hole. The blackhole is where the density and gravity reach infinity ensuring that nothing that enters can leave. The white hole is the reverse; nothing enters.

The theory of wormhole could fix the age old physics problem of faster-than-light travel as one could build a worm hole between separate universe and connect between the two.

The idea of wormhole is not just a smooth ride to utopia as it is not stable. It opens and closes up so fast that it is impossible for a subatomic particle to find a way through it.

But that does not end the idea as any physicist who knows his onion could always buttress the hole with exotic matter. Exotic matter has nehative pressure and density.

The idea of flying through the wormhole is like playing whack-a-mole;you kill one mole and another pops up. If you are able to travel through a wormhole, you would have to enter the blackhole and scientists believe this would spaghettify your body for enternity. Spaght=ettification is simply your body getting streched into spaghetti. Scary. I know.

A Journey Through the Wormhole

But what if all problems associated with travelling through a wormhole is fixed? What would the experience be like?

As you emerge from the black hole, you enter a wormhole where the flow of space turns around and you start to accelerate back outward. The wormhole ends at the entrance to a white hole, which is a time-reversed version of a black hole. Instead of falling inward, space falls outwards at a speed faster than light. Soon you experience another flash of radiation, this time containing a picture of the entire future of the universe.^{Source: Newscientist}

The third flash of light takes you to your destination. That is an unbeatable experience of any transport system including the best VR games!

Are you ready to do a time travel? Just wait a moment let scientist fix some "minor" problems of the wormhole.

References:

• Wormhole
• Birth of Wormhole
• Whitehole
• A Travel Experience Via The Wormhole