Not Science Fiction: German Physicists Say Traversable Wormholes Possible
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Not Science Fiction: German Physicists Say Traversable Wormholes Possible:
Wormholes play a key role in many science fiction films - often as a shortcut between two distant points in space. In physics, however, these tunnels in spacetime have remained purely hypothetical. An international team led by Dr. Jose Luis Blazquez-Salcedo of the University of Oldenburg has now presented a new theoretical model in the science journal Physical Review Letters that makes microscopic wormholes seem less far-fetched than in previous theories.
[...] Moreover, such a wormhole would be unstable. If for example, a spaceship were to fly into one, it would instantly collapse into a black hole - an object in which matter disappears, never to be seen again. The connection it provided to other places in the universe would be cut off. Previous models suggest that the only way to keep the wormhole open is with an exotic form of matter that has a negative mass, or in other words weighs less than nothing, and which only exists in theory.
However, Blazquez-Salcedo and his colleagues Dr. Christian Knoll from the University of Oldenburg and Eugen Radu from the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal demonstrate in their model that wormholes could also be traversable without such matter.
[...] As the physicists report in their study, it is the inclusion of the Dirac field into their model that permits the existence of a wormhole traversable by matter, provided that the ratio between the electric charge and the mass of the wormhole exceeds a certain limit. In addition to matter, signals - for example electromagnetic waves - could also traverse the tiny tunnels in spacetime. The microscopic wormholes postulated by the team would probably not be suitable for interstellar travel. Moreover, the model would have to be further refined to find out whether such unusual structures could actually exist. "We think that wormholes can also exist in a complete model," says Blazquez-Salcedo.
Journal Reference:
Jose Luis Blazquez-Salcedo, Christian Knoll, Eugen Radu. Traversable Wormholes in Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell Theory, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.101102)
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