Travel Through Wormholes is Possible, But Slow

[terrafamilia]

A Harvard physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible. 

But don’t pack your bags for a trip to other side of the galaxy yet; although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not useful for humans to travel through, said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University, written in collaboration with Ping Gao, also from Harvard and Aron Wall from Stanford University. 
“It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel,” Jafferis said. He will present his findings at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver.

https://www.newswise.com//articles/trave...e-but-slow

I can't tell whether this is supposed to apply to all wormholes or only those wormholes envisioned in the context of this particular study. Someone will need to hunt down the original paper.

Ciao,

Terrafamilia

[AstroChara]

...did they forgot to fold the space before poking the hole?

[Drashner1]

Looking at the article, its not clear whether its leaving a lot of information out on general principles or simply assuming that the audience will know a lot of background information that it's not talking about (in other words is is a popular publication (these often have issues with bad reporting of science) or is it a scientific publication that is assuming that its readership will all 'speak the language' sufficiently that some amount of explanation is not required). I'd also note that in the recent past we've received a couple of other papers that provide additional support for the type or wormholes used in OA.

The bit about not using exotic matter or energy also leads me to wonder if what is being described here is simply another type of wormhole rather than 'the' type of wormhole. The physics model that OA uses in this area actually allows for a huge number of possible types of wormholes, only a fraction of which are traversable.

Todd

[radtech497]

Looking at the article, its not clear whether its leaving a lot of information out on general principles or simply assuming that the audience will know a lot of background information that it's not talking about (in other words is is a popular publication (these often have issues with bad reporting of science) or is it a scientific publication that is assuming that its readership will all 'speak the language' sufficiently that some amount of explanation is not required). I'd also note that in the recent past we've received a couple of other papers that provide additional support for the type or wormholes used in OA.

The bit about not using exotic matter or energy also leads me to wonder if what is being described here is simply another type of wormhole rather than 'the' type of wormhole. The physics model that OA uses in this area actually allows for a huge number of possible types of wormholes, only a fraction of which are traversable.

Todd

A superficial skim of the paper seems to suggest the wormhole being described uses a MTK metric .... https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10...%29151.pdf

[Themandorian]

This is just a theory based on computer simulations, we should wait till peer review or a real wormhole.

[Drashner1]

This is just a theory based on computer simulations, we should wait till peer review or a real wormhole.

Hi There - Welome to OA!

This is quite true.

That said - we certainly have no intention of rewriting or eliminating wormholes in the OA setting based on a single paper in an area where multiple new theories around WHs may appear in any given year. Our general response to these situations is to take a 'wait and see' approach.

Todd

[Rynn]

Not sure if Adam will swing by soon but he posted an answer on this issue in the discord today, reposting here for those who weren't around

The Harvard paper [...] is based on something called an “Einstein-Rosen” bridge, which is a pair of quantum entangled black holes. These were previously thought to collapse too quickly to be traversable. Orion’s Arm wormholes are of another type. The recent paper by Horowitz and Marolf shows that it’s actually easy to convert that type to a true traversable one.

[it was asked if ER bridges could exist in OA]

They exist in Weylforges, which use the Horowitz and Marolf method to expand them into the usual type.
A qubit is a pair of quantum entangled particles. An ER bridge is a pair of quantum entangled black holes.
A general traversable wormhole doesn’t have to rely on quantum entanglement, there is a continuous world line from one mouth to the other, hence from one region to the other.
The literature has been fairly exploding with wormhole articles lately, there are a few more types of interest I haven’t gotten to.

[sandcastles]

It's still advantageous because you avoid interstellar debris, nasty space critters, hostile aliens, and Negative Space Wedgies...we hope.