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If you have trouble understanding what "magnetic wormhole" means / what researchers actually did, this figure from the original paper explains it pretty well:
by bd 11y ago
If you have trouble understanding what "magnetic wormhole" means / what researchers actually did, this figure from the original paper explains it pretty well:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep12488/figures/1 http://www.nature.com/articles/srep12488/figures/1
Note red lines showing magnetic field, how they get cloaked by spherical device, starting on right side, then they re-appear on the left side.
This is the figure they use to show "wormhole", but it's just the figure above with erased spherical cloaking device (which must be physically present, field is still there, just the device hides it):
https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/dn28071-3_800.jpg https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...
And this is how it looks in real life:
http://www.uab.cat/Imatge/758/790/cucweb.jpg http://www.uab.cat/Imatge/758/790/cucweb.jpg
Still very cool, but now you can see it's basically just some sort of shielding of magnetic field that creates distortion of the field on the other end, nothing is getting teleported.
- kbenson 11y agoWhich is why we didn't just discover FTL communication. The term "wormhole" is a fairly loaded term for the layman. One of those rider concepts is instantaneous.
- elektromekatron 11y agoI am not sure I agree. For the layman, wormholes come in a couple of popular forms, and the most common is the one with a weird energy tunnel thing between the entrance and the exit. The version where the entrance is the exit, such as in the game portal, seems to be much less popularly considered.
- kbenson 11y agoFair enough. It may be more accurate to say one of the rider concepts is they allow FTL.
- elektromekatron 11y agoI guess, is just that to think that FTL matters and ties up with causality means to grok relativity, and causality issues may be a result of a layman physics views of wormholes, but it generally isn't really a part of it. I think you are making a category error by saying that wormhole is too loaded a term for the layman in this instance. Non-technical people are generally better at dealing with ignoring the details of a metaphor anyway.
- laxatives 11y agoMaybe a better description is that this object is "space-shifting" a magnetic field to its opposite end, or playing telephone with magnetic waves.
- Asbostos 11y agoWhy weren't those excellent pictures in the article? This looks like it should just be called "superconductor for magnetic fields" or "superpermeator"?