Hello scientists!
Today we are going to look at an object of science that may not even exist. As you can probably guess from the title, this hypothetical thing is a wormhole.
First of all, it is debatable whether wormholes are real. The theory of general relativity allows them to exist, but they don't necessarily do. So, don't get your hopes up.
There are two types of wormholes we're going to talk about. The Schwarzschild wormhole is the first kind that humans have hypothesized. In short, this wormhole connects two points in spacetime that can be entered through a black hole that doesn't spin and not electrically charged. Somewhere else in spacetime, the particles are expelled from a white hole, the exit of the wormhole. Think of black holes and white holes as polar opposites. You can only enter through a black hole and come out a white hole, not the other way around.
This sounds a little complicated (because it is) and I may have lost you. This may not even be correct, and this is just a summarization. However, the good news is that you don't have to understand this because it is impossible (kind of). If the two points in spacetime are in the same universe (and yes, there is more than one universe, we may revisit this in another blog entry) the wormhole will collapse too quickly for light or anything slower than light to travel through it.
The other kind of wormhole is called a traversable wormhole. As the name suggests, this wormhole is a lot more useful for faster-than-light travel. Firstly, you can travel through this wormhole in both directions. Also, you can travel to either the same universe or a different universe. The problem is, you either need exotic matter or negative mass cosmic strings.
If you're confused about the last two terms I mentioned, you're not alone. Scientists, as of now, don't know how to create either. However, quantum effects may support a traversable wormhole, something that we know more about.
If you are absolutely lost, it's basically because I'm using terms that no one except scientists use. It doesn't help that we are talking about something that doesn't exist. If I got you confused, my main point is that there are two types of wormholes, and one actually may be able to be created by humans.
Let's talk about if you were to travel through one of these wormholes. First of all, a wormhole from a park to a beach would look something like this:
Pretty strange, huh?
You wouldn't be traveling faster than light. Say you traveling from Point A to Point B. If you took a wormhole, you would beat a beam of light that didn't go through the wormhole. However, if that beam of light came through the wormhole with you, the beam of light would get to Point B first.
Time travel is also possible. All you have to do is force one wormhole to move at high speeds. If you then entered through the moving wormhole and came out the still one, you would have just traveled into the past. There is a problem, though. There are many time paradoxes out there. What if you killed your grandparent before your parent was born? Would you exist? If you didn't, then you couldn't have killed your grandparent.
One way to avoid these paradoxes is that if you travel through time, you also travel to a parallel universe. After being studied by scientists, this is, in fact possible. In conclusion, this means that wormholes are possible, and it comes with cool stuff like teleportation and time travel!
This is really kind of confusing, and definitely not the best blog I'm going to post. In fact, yesterday's was probably better. So post comments if you have corrections, questions, suggestions for topics, or just want to say something. Anyway, next time we're going to visit life science, so tune in tomorrow!
Until next time,
Ben's jamin'
Benjamin
P.S. Make sure you check out John's math blog at http://johncooksmathblog.blogspot.com.
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