Monday, September 07, 2015

Wormholes without the need for the pesky black hole

I read this interesting article about a magnetic field passing through a wormhole in the lab.

Significant, as I think (tho I could be wrong) that this is the first time evidence for a wormhole has actually been seen. The concept has been around for decades. Use of wormholes to take a shortcut and jump from one part of the universe to another without having to pass through the intervening space has been the subject of science fiction. I'm remembering the book "A Wrinkle In Time" where the concept of "tesseract" was used to travel around in the universe. This may not be quite that exciting, but the concept seems somewhat related.

Up until now, most talk that I hear about wormholes has been associated with black holes. If the wormhole exists, it's hiding behind the event horizon of a black hole and the event horizon is hiding inside the accretion disk where matter and energy are swirling down into the black hole. Certainly a daunting, if not impossible prospect to peer through all of this and tell just what's there. No one can really see into the black hole so seeing something akin to a wormhole without having to deal with the black hole is significant.

No comments: