Wormholes on Life Support? (and Strings are next on the list!)

Hang in there wormhole, and if I were a theoretical string (and the last time I checked, I am not), I’d be vibrating in my Calabi-Yau manifold, too.

Wormholes are simply one of the greatest tools in a science fiction author’s toolbox to transport their characters between distant stars, across the street in a blink of an eye, or in some cases, between two points in time. Gone are the worries about long extended cyrosleeps and relativity for our wormhole travelers. But do wormholes have a realistic shot of existing in light of a recent simulations in cosmology?

No, thanks to Jan Amborn, Jerzy Jurkiewicz and Renate Loll, who recently resurrected the viability of wormholes using euclidean quantum gracity in their article in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American.

Renate Loll, Quantum Physicist and Cosmologist

Basic Wormhole Theory

The Lorentzian Wormhole

1. Take a piece of paper and write A on one end of the paper and B on the other, representing two places in the universe separated by thousands of light years.

2. Now slowly fold B towards A until you get a floppy u-shape.

3. Imagine a tube between A and B. Now imagine being able to travel in this tube from A to B or vice versa. The closer you smoosh A and B together, the shorter your tube, and shorter your travel time. The path along the tube is your wormhole, and your fastest route to lead your exploration team into the habitable worlds of the Tau Ceti star system and still have enough time to come back next week to watch the Big Game.

The Schwarzschild Wormhole

Same as the Lorentizan except you use two separate pieces of paper, which represent different universes.

Tracing the shape of the universe on the quantum level

Quantum physics explores the fundamental laws concerning atomic and subatomic particles. Quantum gravity tries to explain what happens between these small particles, and test those findings in how we see gravity work on large objects like the moon or galaxies. There are a few models used to define quantum gravity, such as string theory or loop quantum gravity. Stephen Hawking, famous for his contributions in quantum cosmology, and a colleague of his, Gary Gibbons, used superposition to explain the shape of spacetime as an average of all of its possible shapes, using what is known as Euclidean Quantum Gravity.

Wormholes didn’t work with previous Euclidean quantum gravity simulators

In a search for how the very small (quantum level) might affect the very large (the universe), EQG simulations treat the universe as a vast empty bag containing millions of tiny four dimensional particles representing spacetime, subject to the laws of quantum mechanics and gravity. The EQG model succeeds if these particles converge into something that resembles the universe.

Previous attempts have failed, producing tiny universes with infinite dimensions or a thin, vast sheet with only two dimensions. These results excluded the viability of wormholes, because if you added the wormhole to the simulator, the universe would never “grow beyond a small but highly interconnected neighborhood.”

EQC + Causality + Cosmological Constant = Dead Wormhole

Loll & Company took EQG and added causality and the cosmological constant into their model and voila: a spacetime that closely resembles our universe (de Sitter geometry, in the absence of matter.) Introducing causality forces space to keep its form as time advances, preventing it from splintering into other universes or creating wormholes.

Strings may be the next thing discounted if you accept the work of Loll & company, who plan to use smaller and smaller scales in their simulations, and guess the results will show that the smaller scale they use, the faster the universe will repeat its structure, like a fractal.

Thankfully for the wormhole, there is life support in the form of different theories, some of which attack the assumptions of causality and the cosmological constant. Furthermore, Loll admits that the ultimate test to their theory will occur when observable consequences can be predicted using her model. However, I haven’t seen another theory using quantum behavior to produce such a stunning resemblance to our universe. The debate on whether string theory can supply a superior result is reserved for the time being, of course.

Writers: back to the drawing board?

For those of us who like to add a little hard science into our science fiction musings (and these days, I think readers expect it), it might be safe to move past wormhole-based models (such as the fascinating proposal by the fictitious Dr. Sirion) and revisit other methods of space travel. One of my favorites was the Alcubierre Drive, elegant, but rife with energy problems. Stargates were fun to think about (using stabilized wormholes) but probably nixed as well. As an offshoot, EQG may end up killing Star Trek’s subspace or hyperspace drive, which theoretically traverses multiple dimensions vaguely justified by string theory.

I also turn your attention to a man I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and passing in the hallways during my own exploration of physics at the University of Wyoming: science fiction author and astrophysics professor Mike Brotherton. Behold his cheat sheet for space travel for those interested in writing Hard Sciifi: cheat sheet.

Then again, why give up something so cool just because some exceedingly brilliant European scientists have put forth some spine-chilling results against the viability of wormholes? Won’t most readers be oblivious to such developments in cosmology and happily indulge in the fiction of wormholes, hyperspace drives and stargates? Of course.

Nevertheless, I am impressed with Renate Loll’s work and have a feeling we have not seen the last of her potentially verifiable work related to cosmology.

Verdict: keep the life support machine plugged in for the wormhole for now. Like with Castro, the public won’t really know when he’s effectively dead. In the meantime, the wormhole’s followers can send fuzzy video footage of him flapping his arms and slowly walking around the room.

Recently:

• GENCON INDY 2008: “The Apartment”
• Reviewing 4th Edition D&D: Is it still D&D?
• Reviewing 4th Edition D&D: A Preface
• Wormholes on Life Support? (and Strings are next on the list!)
• You might be asking: “what is this place?”