hammertime said:Hi. I have a few questions.
Is it theoretically possible to build a wormhole to a parallel or baby universe? Could a sufficiently advanced civilization do this? Could negative mass play a role in it? Could something else?
hammertime said:But wouldn't a parallel and/or a baby universe have different physical constants and vacuum energy from our universe? Thus, wouldn't we be destroyed once we entered the other universe?
The idea of imagining a universe with different constants is not new, but, in my opinion,
the early literature is very confusing. For example, Vol'berg [17] and Gamow [18] imagine a universe in which the velocity of light is different from ours, say by ten orders of magnitude, and describe all sorts of weird effects hat would result:
Gamow said:The initials of Mr. Tompkins originated from three fundamental physical constants: the velocity of light c; the gravitational constant G; and the quantum constant h, which have to be changed by immensely large factors in order to make their effect easily noticeable by the man on the street."
In this one sentence, Gamow manages to encapsulate everything I am objecting to!
First, he takes it as axiomatic that there are three fundamental constants. Second, he
assumes a change in these constants can be operationally defined, I for one am mystified
by such comparisons. After all, an inhabitant of such a universe (let us identify him with
Feynman's alien) is perfectly free to choose units in which c = 1, just as we are. To use
the equation
k = E/c
to argue that in his universe, for the same energy E, the photon emitted by an atom would have a momentum k that is ten orders of magnitude smaller than ours is, to my mind, meaningless. There is no experimental information that we and the alien could exchange that would allow us to draw any conclusion.
Wormholes are hypothetical tunnels or shortcuts through space-time that connect two distant points in the universe. They are predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity and are thought to be created by the warping of space-time caused by massive objects such as black holes. To travel through a wormhole, one would need to travel at speeds faster than the speed of light, which is currently not possible according to our current understanding of physics.
While the theory of general relativity allows for the existence of wormholes, it also suggests that time travel is not possible. This is because time travel would require traveling faster than the speed of light, which is not possible according to the theory. Additionally, the energy and matter required to keep a wormhole open for time travel would be immense and currently beyond our technological capabilities.
Parallel universes, also known as alternate or parallel realities, are hypothetical universes that exist alongside our own. Some theories suggest that wormholes could connect us to these parallel universes, allowing for travel between them. However, this is purely speculative and there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of parallel universes or their connection to wormholes.
Negative mass is a theoretical concept in physics where an object would have a mass with a negative value. It is not to be confused with antimatter, which has positive mass but opposite charge. Theoretically, negative mass would cause a repulsive gravitational force, which some scientists suggest could be used to stabilize wormholes and prevent them from collapsing. However, the existence of negative mass has not been proven and remains a topic of debate in the scientific community.
While wormholes are predicted by the laws of physics, they have not been observed or created in nature. Some scientists have proposed the idea of creating wormholes artificially, but this remains purely theoretical at this point. The amount of energy and knowledge required to create and stabilize a wormhole is currently beyond our capabilities, making it unlikely that we will be able to create them in the near future.