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Traversable Wormholes Can Exist, But They're Not Very Useful For Space Travel, Physicists Say (phys.org)
A new study from physicists at Harvard and Stanford says that wormholes can exist but they're not very useful for humans to travel through. "It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel," said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis. From the report: Despite his pessimism for pan-galactic travel, he said that finding a way to construct a wormhole through which light could travel was a boost in the quest to develop a theory of quantum gravity. The new theory was inspired when Jafferis began thinking about two black holes that were entangled on a quantum level, as formulated in the ER=EPR correspondence by Juan Maldacena from the Institute for Advanced Study and Lenny Susskind from Stanford. Although this means the direct connection between the black holes is shorter than the wormhole connection -- and therefore the wormhole travel is not a shortcut -- the theory gives new insights into quantum mechanics.
"From the outside perspective, travel through the wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation using entangled black holes," Jafferis said. Jafferis based his theory on a setup first devised by Einstein and Rosen in 1935, consisting of a connection between two black holes (the term wormhole was coined in 1957). Because the wormhole is traversable, Jafferis said, it was a special case in which information could be extracted from a black hole. "It gives a causal probe of regions that would otherwise have been behind a horizon, a window to the experience of an observer inside a spacetime, that is accessible from the outside," said Jafferis. The physicists presented their results at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver, Colorado.
"From the outside perspective, travel through the wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation using entangled black holes," Jafferis said. Jafferis based his theory on a setup first devised by Einstein and Rosen in 1935, consisting of a connection between two black holes (the term wormhole was coined in 1957). Because the wormhole is traversable, Jafferis said, it was a special case in which information could be extracted from a black hole. "It gives a causal probe of regions that would otherwise have been behind a horizon, a window to the experience of an observer inside a spacetime, that is accessible from the outside," said Jafferis. The physicists presented their results at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver, Colorado.
Ha, that doesn't surprise me.
I have my own "theory" of the universe, and I'm sure that some clever physicist has a proper name for it, thought of it 80 years ago, and can explain it in symbols and equations, but I'm happy to be embarrassed by y'all so here goes.
I suggest that not just time but spacetime and everything - every field, all matter, everything - is quantised. I think of the universe like a picture on a monitor, with the "tick" of the universe being the framerate of the monitor. The game cycle of the universe is MUCH faster, but that's handled by a processor and code that 'feeds' the universe. So all fields ARE calculated as waves, and in-between ticks there are many, many game cycles applying these calculations. But when it's time to "tick", everything in the universe gets written into reality as it is right there, like the beam on an old monitor writing a single graphic frame.
It explains how light can have the properties of both particles and waves, and if you think of the universe like graphics code, you can see how there would be some optimisations and short cuts - e.g. discounting the gravity of a single atom, instead taking a bunch of a billion or so atoms in one go past a certain distance and so on.
It also explains how matter can spontaneously emit particles and things like that, because a 'click' at the right point, and taking into account the optimisations, one particle could separate from another because it's close enough to be in one calculation, but far away enough to be optimised in another.
Think back to the 8-bit days and how some coders did crazy cool things, like changing the colour of an 8x8 block on the Spectrum at the exact right time so that you could actually display more than the 2-colour-per-8-by-8 block limit (I'm thinking of a game called Extreme BTW). Imagine what cool things the coders of the universe have done!
This is all probably absolutely bollocks, but I was thinking about it all morning and where better to invite trolling, criticism, embarrassment and condescending insults than New Slashdot?