Happy Thursday everyone!
Today we will be taking a look at wormholes (continuing discussion from our dimensions). Now currently we know nothing about wormholes except what we have seen from star trek. :P After some poking around however, I found a pair of experts on the subject; EinsteinTail, and RosenEar, a pair of white mice. They have started a science club which meets on the great golden bridge every 5th Tuesday. A smarter pair of mice you have never seen. They even managed to beat the rabbits at Parcheesi last night! And as any observer will tell you, rabbit-Parcheesi with its Calvin-ball-rules and card swapping is no easy feat. Through these lengthy discussions at the golden gate bridge (sometimes lasting for hours at a time) led to the discovery of wormholes, or is as formally known by the club: the Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
This time I traveled to the golden gate bridge to talk to these two mice, and decided to meet with their club a few days ago. They lost me in their debating and endless chattering, but the cheese buffet was delicious!
A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen Bridge, is an unobserved hypothetical phenomenon that is basically a tunnel or shortcut from one location to another. Picture a 2-dimensional world, where the observer can only see in 2 dimensions. a wormhole would be a 3-dimensional tunnel from one spot to another. To the observer, an object would seem to disappear from sight, then re-appear in another location entirely. Now picture this in our world, only the tunnel would have a sphere as the opening, pull the object out of our 3-dimensional space, and into a different dimensional space where the distance from any one point to any other point could easily be much shorter. This is what a wormhole is. Although one has never been observed, the math behind these wormholes is sound, and many thought-experiments have developed. A senior mouse of the club, Schwarz, would often begin these thought-experiements, which included lots of paper, hard thinking, and plenty of erasers. Sadly, he was unable to come up with anything helpful. His child, a very tiny mouse, was perhaps the first to to discover a solution to a wormhole problem. He hypothesized that a wormhole in the center of a black hole meets the required properties to exist without violating natural law. A black hole has the densest matter in the universe. This gravitational pull could create, then collapse a wormhole in such a way that the entrance to the wormhole and the exit to the wormhole are in exactly the same spot. If you can picture that, imagine that because one can observe particles entering the black hole from either side, one must be able (potentially) to see them exit either side. Thus, the black hole has two sides if you will, one for the entrance of the wormhole, and one for the exit of the wormhole. These would enter and exit in to locations, or possibly in two universes. Needless to say, the small mouse was immediately praised and given a cup of hot chocolate for his efforts. Upon further examination the club discovered that such a phenomenon would almost immediately collapse in on itself. But it gave opened the door for traversable wormholes which were discussed during a very cold winter when the mice lit their fire.
It was a cold day, and the mice lit a small fire for the first time that season. They noticed that there were still 2 logs left over from last year. While the small mice began to build the fire, two older mice, known as Thorne and Morris, began theorizing about a wormhole allowing space and time travel. They wondered if the two logs represented a stable wormhole (which they conceded is impossible without some form of undiscovered exotic negative-energy), then the wormhole would start and finish at the same time in the fireplace. However, if the wormhole were created, and the 2nd log was placed in a spaceship, sent to mars and back, then by the laws of time dilation, the 2nd log would have aged 1 minute less than the 1st log which had stayed in the fireplace the whole time. Therefore, by jumping through the wormhole from the 2nd log, they would likely have traveled back in time by 1 minute. They then extended the analogy to a close-to-light-speed travel by the 2nd log. Suppose they were able to accelerate it much faster. Why then, there might be a 2 year difference between the two. While they could not travel back in time further than the creation of the wormhole, they could certainly travel back to the time it was created. Very please with themselves, they forgot all about the fire, and began eating the cheese plate because they were so hungry from all their hard thinking.
The group as a whole, with their fire finally lit, began talking about the possibility of wormholes which existed in space for hundreds of years. If such a stable wormhole already existed, why it was possible to travel to a fixed point in the past, whenever the other end of the wormhole was created, or any time between depending on the speed and trip the second portal may have taken since it's creation. Their small group gradually grew as more mice began coming to this small meeting, including Deutsch and Raychaudhuri, both mice from Harvard, who added their ideas to the masses.
Schwarzs' Child didn't come often after that. It was soon noticed that he had disappeared, and the club believed that he, getting tired of endless talk, went out and found a wormhole on his own and may be anywhere in the universe by now...
*squeak squeak*
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