A wormhole is an inter-dimensional tunnel between two points in time-space. Imagine the ability to fold a map so that your current location touched a place that you would like to go. If you could then jump between those two points on the map, then you would have something like a wormhole. Wormholes allow you to get between those two points on the map without having to go through any of the places between them. What if there is a shortcut that allows you to move around space-time instead of having to move through time-space?

The most interesting model of a wormhole that I ever heard was a model of an apartment building. Your apartment is directly against another apartment. You can hear what is going on in the other apartment through the wall that both apartments share. However, if you want to actually attend the party at your neighbor’s apartment, you have to go the long way. In fact, you have to leave your apartment, go down the stairs, leave your building, enter your neighbor’s building and then go up the stairs in that building to get to your neighbor’s door.

In this model, a wormhole would be like a door in the wall between the apartments. This door would be a shortcut around all of the space that you would otherwise have to go through in order to get between the two apartments. It is interesting to note that we do not actually know that distant points in space are really further apart than the two apartments. Our understanding of distance involves how much space we would have to go through in order to get from one place to another place. In absolute terms, this idea could be completely wrong and two planets could actually be as close as these two apartments in the model.

Another observation that might interest you is that wormholes run through time-space. This means that a wormhole can run through time as well as space. Einstein would have a problem with this because you could, theoretically, move backwards through time and send a message to yourself before you left. Moving at the speed of light, the message could start far enough in your past to reach you before you left. This violates the no signaling property of faster than light travel.

Anything that you change by sending the message to yourself in your past could cause a conflict in the time-line. Provided that there is only one time-space manifold for this universe, this would cause a dreaded paradox. If it is possible for each possibility to branch off its own time-space manifold, then the paradox idea loses traction. You would be sending a message to a copy of yourself who lives in a completely different universe even though his life mirrors your life up until that point. We do not know which model of the universe is closer to the real universe.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.