“TIME TRAVEL AND WORMHOLES”
Traveling through time or to distant places in the universe is a dream for many people. As of right now, there is no way to do this, but this may change in the future due to the possibilities of wormholes.
Wormholes are theoretical shortcuts through space and possibly time. A wormhole has two entrances which are situated in different places, and are connected by a tunnel in hyperspace. Wormholes make three-dimensional distances shorter by transporting matter or energy through the fourth dimension. For example, some matter sucked in a black whole near Pluto could be simply transferred to a white hole in Andromeda which is over 15 light years away from Earth. Wormholes can theoretically transport both matter and energy. Wormholes bend space just like if you fold a piece of paper. If you wanted to cross the folded piece of paper you wouldn’t have to cross through the whole paper because it is half the size. The matter or energy that would travel through a wormhole would work just like this, which means that it would never pass through the space between the entrance and the destination. It would take a shortcut through the fourth dimension.
Wormholes are believed to be built into the structure of space-time at the Planck length, (Gh/c^3)^(1/2)=1.6*10^(-35) meters. This length is twenty powers of ten smaller than the nucleus of an atom. On the other hand, the nascent quantum theory of gravity seems to predict that wormholes should be continually created and destroyed at the Planck length. That would mean that we would be surrounded by trillions of wormholes forming and collapsing trillions of times a second.
If you ignore the fact that a black hole originated from a collapsed star, it is mathematically possible to continue space and time past the black holes singularity. A mirror image of the space-time diagram of the black hole is a result. This mirror image is often called a white hole, for it is actually a time-reversed black hole! Instead of absorbing light and matter, it emits it.
Some scientists predict that in certain instances, traveling through a wormhole would be rare, but possible. In order for matter to travel through a wormhole formed from a non-rotating blackhole, it must have a velocity of greater than the speed of light. According to relativity, this is impossible. Travel through a wormhole formed from a rotating blackhole, however, is possible, for it is not necessary to exceed the speed of light. This is because the wormhole is so unstable that it pinches off before even a ray of light can pass through the connection.
Geoffrey A. Landis, a scientist at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland Ohio, had this to say about wormholes “A wormhole is a theoretical object permitted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, where distant regions of space are connected by a shortcut. Such wormholes could have been created in the distant past, in the time just following the ‘big bang’ that created the universe. What we discovered was that if wormholes did exist, they could be detected by the bending of light due to gravity, an effect known as the ‘gravitational lens.”
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