A team of physicists from the Universities of Alberta and Prague in Canada have discovered a ‘randomness’ in the laws of physics that allows wormholes to travel through time without breaking any laws. The paper, which will be published soon in ‘Physical Review T’, is now available for consultation on the preprint server. arXiv.
As is well known, wormholes are, in theory, veritable ‘shortcuts’ in the spatiotemporal fabric. For nearly a century, physicists have wondered whether these (as yet unobserved) substances might one day enable us to travel faster from one place to another (or from one time to another) in the universe.
In its most spectacular variant, in fact, a wormhole would allow a human-sized mass to travel tens of thousands of light-years in a second, or move freely through time, traversing its course from past to past. future, and vice versa, with absolute freedom.
Of course, for that, the first thing is to find one, something that hasn’t happened yet, but physicists are stubborn and keep trying. When they succeed, they hope, at least in part, that they will be able to directly study what happens in these strange objects, requiring quantum physics to go hand-in-hand with Einstein’s general relativity, the two hitherto irreconcilable theories that describe the universe. We live in it
The key lies in quantum effects
At a deeper level of physics, the world of subatomic particles allows us to explore ‘counter-intuitive’ situations in physics, that is, they do not follow the logic we are used to in the macroscopic world around us. But there, at the smallest scale of reality, quantum effects give both time and distance a certain edge manipulation. And that’s precisely where the study’s authors suffer.
As Albert Einstein explained, as we humans move, space-time contracts and expands due to the effect of gravity. In this way, a very large object (a planet, a star, a galaxy …) bends the space-time around it, forcing objects (moons, rays of light, etc.) to follow those curves.
But if we keep adding more and more mass to any given point, there comes a time when space-time becomes so curved that it exhibits two outer surfaces. Surfaces connected by a wormhole. In theory, matter cannot move from one side to the other, but there are particles at both ends that are ‘stuck’ with each other so they are closely packed, even though each is at one end of the hole.
Quantum entanglement is an effect that has been widely studied and reproduced in many laboratories. If we change the position of one entangled particle, the other immediately responds and assumes the same position, however far away from the first.
For decades, researchers have been searching for real and theoretical scenarios that allow quantum effects and even whole particles to make it through exotic forms of spacetime. Shapes like inside a wormhole.
Ring worm hole
In their study, the researchers propose the existence of a so-called ‘annular wormhole’, which differs from the classical model and would connect different ‘planes’, i.e. distant regions of the universe or different universes.
Using the right physics, these ring-shaped masses can create some interesting space-time distortions in classic flat space-time, according to the researchers. That is, a ‘hole’ connecting two separate parts of the universe.
In their work, the authors ‘travelled’ the hole from one side to the other and in different settings. For example, what effect would another stationary mass have on the ring? What if the input loop or the output loop are in the same or different universes?
The team thus found various solutions, including one called the ‘closed time curve’, which describes an object or ray of light traveling along a line and returning to the same starting point. And not only in space, but also in time. Thinking about this possibility, the late Stephen Hawking said that during this ‘circular’ journey, many obstacles will surely arise that prevent this loop from happening. But who knows? The possibility exists, and sometimes physicists discover some other ‘randomness’ in the laws of physics, which opens the door to these journeys, science fiction today.
