10 ms·
Wormhole Tunnels in Spacetime May Be Possible, New Research Suggests
- inter_netuser 5y agoActual meat: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01920 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.01920
- shakezula 5y agoThey mention the magnetization of blackholes - is this related to the other black holes post on front page today? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223520 Utilizing the extreme magnetic polarization of a black hole seems pretty sci-fi but sounds sweet as hell.
- the8472 5y agoSeems unrelated. This paper is talking about the black hole itself (not its accretion disk). And it's also talking about a magnetic charge rather than a magnetic field. This would require magnetic monopoles, which are hypothetical.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cryptoz 5y agoRelated, but not wormholes: Last night I watched this video on loop for a long time, of stars at the center of our galaxy orbiting the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Really a mind-blowing video. https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1825e/ https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1825e/
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y agoWow. That is $)(*ing awesome. In the traditional sense of inspiring cosmic awe.
- Swenrekcah 5y agoAmazing video, thanks! Really interesting to see the sudden increase in speed in that one star. I wonder if it has any detectable effects on that star’s planets. Edit: after watching it again it seems to be a matter of perspective but I thought it was about how close it orbited the black hole.
- thinker403 5y agoThis absolutely made my day. I had no idea this existed! Putting it on .25 speed and looping it allows you to really see the warping taking place. I wonder if the four or five similarly sized light orbs moving in and out are really just the distorted light from one star?
- pp19dd 5y agoIt's just amazing how satisfying these little incremental observations are, and equally amazing how much work goes into it. What I found similarly fascinating was this interactive of our neighborhood - 33 light-year field, green are detected planets: https://gruze.org/fly_10pc/ https://gruze.org/fly_10pc/ (mouse wheel, click n drag, right click and drag)
- cat199 5y ago> Last night I watched this video on loop for a long time, Sounds like you found a different kind of wormhole :)
- wearywanderer 5y agoA few thoughts: 1. The possibility of wormholes isn't new. 2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what they're talking about. 3. They're stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits: And because entanglement is a standard feature of quantum physics, it is relatively easy to create. “It’s really a beautiful theoretical idea,”
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago> stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits I take it they mean "easier than supplying 1000 galaxies-worth of energy" or similar
- wearywanderer 5y agoRight. It's 'easy' relative to the utterly impossible. But it's 'utterly impossible' relative to anything any reasonable human might consider easy.
- thereddaikon 5y agoThen they are using the term right. They said relatively easy, not absolutely easy.
- wearywanderer 5y agoI agree that it's not flat wrong, it's just a huge stretch. Compared to what they propose, a commercially viable fusion power plant is "relatively easy."
- judge2020 5y agoIt’s not helpful to the reader, though.
- fnord77 5y agocommunication through them should be possible, though, no?
- del_operator 5y agoYeah, possible like the chance of hitting a rational on the real line with a dart — dense jokes of measure zero.
- seph-reed 5y agoOut of curiosity -- if wormholes were mastered -- would that allow us to reach things currently believed to be beyond our cosmic horizon? Or would there already have to be something on both ends?
- layer8 5y agoEven if microscopic, wormholes that allow information to be transmitted through them would still be interesting if the ends can be moved independently: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Time_travel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Time_travel
- sschueller 5y agoI want two network cards that have trillions of entangled quantum states between them so I can network to anywhere. Sadly that is not how quantum entanglement works.
- vimacs2 5y agoThat's not how quantum entanglement works but assuming that you could have microscopic wormhole ends that can be moved independently of each other, that would essentially let you do what I imagine you want. If it turns out that wormholes are impossible, a future internet powered by neutrinos (presuming we discover/invent a material that can absorb them consistently in a compact way) would be the next best thing.
- nojokes 5y agoSo the first to implement it would be HFT?
- cosmodisk 5y agoAnd then PornHub would follow shortly after.
- freddealmeida 5y agoNo it is not. As a maths guy I can tell you two things. One: math does not make it true. Two: You need to be able to build a disprovable model against this. No. No wormhole. Its not even needed to explain behavior. this is pure science fiction.
- del_operator 5y agoProved by seductive physics maybe
- msgilligan 5y agoScientific American is becoming the new version of Bob Guccione's Omni magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_(magazine)
- Diederich 5y agoI had a subscription in the late 70s and early 80s. Very enjoyable material. (: Some fraction of it would be somewhat rigorous science, but the rest was pretty fanciful, fun stuff. ADDED: Beautiful, and here's the relatively short lived TV show Omni Magazine: The New Frontier (1987) https://youtu.be/kdwEGc_g6Gw?t=68 https://youtu.be/kdwEGc_g6Gw?t=68 Great stuff.
- msgilligan 5y agoMy mother subscribed in the late 80's because she was dating a science professor (who she eventually married) and wanted to be more conversant in science. I remember visiting her and picking up the latest issue from her coffee table. The headline story: DINOSAUR SEX -- complete with full-color artist's renditions. I had a great time teasing her about it. https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2017/07/vintage-dinosaur-art-tyrannosaurus-sex.html https://chasmosaurs.blogspot.com/2017/07/vintage-dinosaur-ar...
- froh 5y agoThey should call it "The Omnion" to avoid confusion with America's Finest News Source.
- lsiunsuex 5y agoI'm going to venture to guess anything and everything is possible How many billions of light years big is our universe? A size so huge, we can't fathom that number or distance. We observe or think we're observing black holes, dieing stars, super novas, etc... We think dark matter exists and fills the voids of what we can't view We observe viruses and try to kill them, atoms, etc... We're on the edge (few years? decade max?) of producing picometer processors So yes - wormhole travel is possible. Reversing the pull of gravity is possible. Traveling faster than the speed of light is possible. We are just not smart enough (yet) to do these things. What's the saying? If life exists elsewhere other than earth, there are probably thousands and thousands of civilizations out there due to the size of the universe? Then yes, all these things are possible and something has probably already done it - we're just not there yet.
- jimhefferon 5y agoFolks who, like me, are interested but not professional physicists, may find illuminating Sean Carroll's podcast. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/ He is a CalTech faculty physicist with wide interests and perhaps a third of the episodes are about research physics. I remember several that discussed wormholes and associated topics seriously, from the standpoint of world-class researchers. I think anyone interested in HN would be able to follow the conversations closely.
- gyldenlund 5y agoThanks for this!
- crmd 5y agoI can’t recommend enough Sean’s “Biggest Ideas in the Universe” video series [1] It’s a series of 24 1-2 hour lectures + Q&A/recitations that assumes no prior knowledge of physics and aims to get you roughly to the knowledge level of a modern undergrad BA physics. For someone who loves science documentaries but was frustrated at most being aimed at high school-level and skipping all the math, Sean’s series was a game changer for me. [1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3jyjUUrJlnoyzX https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3jyjUU...
- jimbob45 5y agoDid you say BA on purpose or did you just generally mean undergrad degree? Yes, stupid question, I know.
- wheels 5y ago> It’s a series of 24 1-2 hour lectures [...] level of a modern undergrad BA physics. Wait, what? That's completely bonkers. There's absolutely no way to condense four years of studies into two days of YouTube. I can't believe I'm even having to say this. I'm hoping what you mean is "introduce you to the topics that would be covered in an undergrad physics degree". In 24 hours you could reasonably mention each of the topics covered in a degree and describe what that field is about.
- Ansil849 5y agoDoes anyone else get just a little bit sad that we will not be around to see actual practical advances made with wormholes? I wonder if this is what people in earlier centuries felt, a bit of melancholy at the dream that hundreds of years from now someone may be able to walk on the then newly-discovered moon, and knowing they would not be around to see it happen.
- capableweb 5y ago> Does anyone else get just a little bit sad that we will not be around to see actual practical advances made with wormholes? Thing is, I felt sad when I heard about IP the first time, and some people said we were gonna have a huge network everyone can talk with each other, across borders. Because I thought we'd never achieve that in my lifetime. But here we are, things move a lot faster (sometimes) than what you think. Maybe because of the inviting incentive of basically teleportation, research on wormholes will be faster.
- Ansil849 5y agoI don't think a new networking protocol is remotely comparable to an entire new form of matter.
- capableweb 5y agoI'm not comparing them, I'm comparing the feeling of "This will be so far in the future that I will never experience it" that I got from IP and international networks, since someone else felt the same way about wormholes.
- Normille 5y ago>I wonder if this is what people in the 17th century felt, a bit of melancholy at the dream that hundreds of years from now someone may be able to walk on the then newly-discovered moon... I'm no historian. But I'm pretty sure people had discovered The Moon a wee while before the C17th.
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- jnurmine 5y agoThe concept of "travelling backwards in time" is very odd. To "travel in time" I guess first one would have to define what exactly is this "time" one is about to travel backwards in. So... what exactly is "time"? And does "time" even exist as something concrete which can be traversed? Or, is "flow of time" just something created within the brain as a way to keep track of changes in things we experience? Or is it something else, something totally different? (I don't know the answers, I'm asking based on what "time travel" could be possible in the first place. Hoping John Titor chimes in, too.)
- warent 5y agoI don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can say with confidence that the "flow of time" is not an invention of the brain. We can (and frequently do) make measurements that demonstrate time is an objective dimension of the universe that interacts with space and matter. There have been really awesome experiments around this. For example, it has been demonstrated that moving a particle at relativistic speeds increases its half-life, which can only be explained by time dilation.
- jnurmine 5y agoThank you. I'm only a layman who likes to do the occasional thought experiment, but does time really have to be an objective (concrete and elastic and traversable) dimension to explain time dilation? Isn't there any alternative explanation? For example, to illustrate what I mean, let's think about time dilation: Particles moving at relativistic speeds must by necessity travel larger distances (space) as they move: something moving at ~ 299 km/s moves obviously 299 km in a second, whereas something moving at 1 m/s would have moved only 1 meter. Presumably things like fields and other force carriers, which make matter interact with matter etc. will also have to travel larger distances to interact. They have to cover the distance between the particle(s) moving together as well as the parts of the universe which aren't moving as fast. This way, in the outside observer's frame (=the one with the clock), these fast-moving particles seem to "slow down" because the things facilitating interaction are travelling larger distances, which takes a longer "time" (=more ticks of the observer's clock). And thus the half-life becomes longer. Now, one can follow-up this thought experiment: what if there was an Ant-Man in a tiny space ship looking at his wall clock and moving at relativistic speed? The Ant-Man would not spot differences in himself, in his frame, since his clock and bodily processes and matter-matter interactions etc. would run slower too. However, the Ant-Man would see the outside world slowing down (I think), since travelling larger distances takes a longer time. When Ant-Man brakes, his experience would be for the outside world to accelerate (I think) possibly in some kind of a jumbled manner towards the end, and then "lock" into place. And as Ant-Man's chemical reactions and matter interactions slowed down, moving at relativistic speeds resulted in him having "aged" less compared with people who were stationary.
- benlivengood 5y agoThe most useful thing wormholes could be used for is hypercomputers (if causality can be violated); or simply bypassing the Bekenstein bound with FTL communication in a processor exceeding the mass that would turn it into a black hole if it was spatially adjacent; or building an interstellar network that could survive the big rip. Anything that mastered wormhole creation is also likely to expand into the universe at close to the speed of light with wormhole-carrying Von Neumann probes, making the Fermi paradox even more extreme if wormholes can be created.
- whereis 5y agoWormholes were a core principle of the lesser-known Sci-Fi TV show called "Farscape".