Visible Light Through a Wormhole

[bzcle316]

TL;DR

Is it possible to use a wormhole like an advanced telescope to explore space and time?

In the Stephen Baxter novel "The Light of Other Days," scientists develop a technology which allows information to be sent and received through a wormhole, first gamma-ray bursts then visible light. This technology develops into a near-omniscient camera system which allows a viewer to observe any point in space and any point in the past. Researchers and scholars use this technology to get real-time information about points in the universe which cannot be observed through telescopes, as well as explore Earth's history (both human and geologic).

I've read a great deal about the question of whether or not physical matter could ever safely pass through a wormhole, but does anyone know of any hypotheses about whether it might be possible to use a wormhole in such a manner? Not as a means of physical space travel, but instead as a means of remotely gathering information from across space and time? Might it be possible to one day create a wormhole that would allow us to look back and see the meteor that killed dinosaurs, or the precise cause of the Bronze Age collapse?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Probably not.

1. Wormholes may not exist at all
2. Wormholes might not be able to be positioned at an arbitrary location in spacetime
3. Without adding some new and unknown physics, wormholes collapse before they can be traversed.

 

[Ibix]

It's fairly simple to write down a wormhole solution to Einstein's field equations, even a traversable one. Describing one in a universe where there's anything else except the wormhole is not so simple, and I don't know of a solution that is turn on and off-able let alone directable. And the solutions that are known have nasty caveats like gross large scale violations of the energy conditions, which is a high falutin' way of saying you need matter with negative energy density, which we've never seen and which doesn't exist as far as we know.