-=DoAvl=- said:
This string theory business sounds interesting... gotta read up on it!
Does anyone wanna explain wormhole theory? I still don't understand how it works. I mean, if two black holes are connected to each other to form a tunnel (or a fold in space or woteva), then how would you escape through the other side? What I mean is, both portals are entrances, not exits.
wait... there *is* such a thing as wormhole theory right? and i'm not just mixing my reality/non reality up again...argh!
Yes there is a wormhole theory - though we're getting into more speculative quantum mechanics than there are equations to cleanly describe.
The Einstein-Rosen Bridge
But this also revives an ongoing controversy surrounding black holes. The best description of a spinning black hole was given in 1963 by the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, using Einstein's equations of gravity. But there is a quirky feature to his solution. It predicts that if one fell into a black hole, one might be sucked down a tunnel (called the Einstein-Rosen bridge) and shot out a white hole in a parallel universe! Kerr showed that a spinning black hole would collapse not into a point, but to a ring of fire. Because the ring was spinning rapidly, centrifugal forces would keep it from collapsing. Remarkably, a space probe fired directly through the ring would not be crushed into oblivion, but might actually emerge unscratched on the other side of the Einstein-Rosen bridge, in a parallel universe. This wormhole may connect two parallel universes, or even distant parts of the same universe.
So let me start down a longer deeper discussion of what is 'is'. We think of the universe as a general 3 dimensional surface that is filled with nothing. This causes two wrinkes in common observation.
1) Light is a wave always... and it travels through space... which means it must interact with SOMETHING in it and this something is a thing that we can't yet describe but is actually encapsulated in string theory. Back in the day some postulated that there was something is space that light interacted with and called it aether, however scientifically we have proven that there is no substance in the dead of space so that can't be it.
2) Light bends as it crosses space which also means that as its travelling through space its interacting with SOMETHING. This is described as our universe being warped by a force of another dimension. Now don't think of half life and alien zombies when you think of another dimension. Think of dimensions the same way you do a cartesian coordinate system from geometry - x, y, and z. This is how we perceive the universe and locate things in it.
What's being said is that there is some other dimension w that is also a part of the equation which is not the same as the temporal dimension (time) usually referred to as t.
With that in mind you can think of our third dimensional universe as the surface of an apple being bent around some dimension(s) w. On the surface you can see and perceive everything in 3 dimensions. Suppose you were a worm on the apple - its all good - life is normal on the surface of the universe. Now suppose you could eat through the apple and come out at another point on the apple. This 'worm hole' would therefore be a shortcut through the apple (our universe) to some other location on the other side that could be achieved by passing through this dimension(s) w.
It will be interesting to see if (as some point likely 10 thousand years from now when we have enough energy and knowledge to take this trip) the dimension t has any impact on things passing through dimensions(s) w. If they don't then it is possible for time to not pass while going through the wormhole in the universe allowing 'instantaneous' trips if you created the wormhole. It would also follow that if the time dimension has no impact on travel through the wormhole, the wormhole (if connecting back to our own universe) could spit you out at a different point in the temporal dimension.
All of that is to say - superstring theory (the more accepted name) is
COOL AS SHIT and the more we understnad the universe, the closer we get to being able to prove that this is more than likely the way the universe works. Get excited, study math, and go be a physicist damnit!
Now, all of this stuff isn't just 'pull it out of your ass' science. Basically this is all the unification of quantum physics (the study of really small shit at the sub atomic level) and regular physics (the study of really large shit like planets and people). To merge these two together into an equation that would express them both simultaneously (and you need to do this at some point because neither follow the rules of the other) you would have described a universe that contains 10 dimensions. As we understand more and more about the universe - indeed science does start to look a whole lot like science fiction.
