The prospect that wormholes could one day enable time travel isn’t new. In fact, the use of wormholes to transport yourself across vast distances of space and time has been used in science fiction for decades. But what if it wasn’t just science fiction? What if wormholes could actually allow us to time travel?
According to new research published on the pre-print server arXiv, theoretical physicists believe that when enough matter is put into one place, a wormhole may be created and that this wormhole could link certain things within each connecting point. Would it be possible to travel across that connection, though?
That’s the deeper question that some are looking to answer, and a couple of theoretical physicists may have found some useful loopholes to explain why this might be possible. The researchers deduced that because wormholes are little more than just shapes, they can be more intuitively folded, and holes can be poked through them more easily.
As such, this allows the wormholes to act as a bridge, of sorts, between each space it connects to. And for decades, scientists have tried to figure out how it might be possible and theoretical to allow for quantum effects and possibly even entire particles to move through the shapes of spacetime without being harmed in any way.
The researchers used different scenarios to discover if a ring wormhole, like that proposed by Gary Gibbons and Mikhail Volkov in previous research, was to be real if it would possibly allow for a closed timelike curve, which would allow an object or a ray of light to travel along the path, perhaps crossing spacetime.
But the researchers aren’t sure that such a paradoxical round trip would even be possible, as there are a lot of obstacles that could play a part in hampering it. Perhaps they can find ways to make wormholes to test these theories out. Either way, the new research has been accepted into Physical Review D and is intriguing to think about, even if we’re probably years from ever discovering any facts about such things.
