Time Travel and New Universes

It is known that for a long time well before Albert Einstein scientists were studying the ideas that seemed strange. Consider a few of such ideas now accepted by the scientific community: clocks that tick slower than when they are on rockets in outer space, black holes with the mass of a million stars compressed into a volume smaller than that of atom and subatomic particles whose behaviour depends on whether they are being watched.

But of all strange ideas in physics, perhaps, the strangest one is the hole in the structure of space and time, a tunnel to a distant part of the universe. American researchers have determined that it will apparently be possible in principle for mankind to create an entirely new universe by using the idea of wormhole connection. Such a universe will automatically create its own wormhole, squeeze through it, and then close the hole after it.

Although to many people such an idea may seem useless and fantastic, it can help scientists to develop their imagination and explore how flexible the laws of physics are. It is such an idea that could give answers to some of the fundamental questions of cosmology: how the universe began, how it works and how it will end.

The idea of wormhole comes directly from the accepted concepts of general relativity. In that theory A. Einstein proved that very massive and dense objects distort space and time around them. One possible distortion is in the form of a tube that can lead anywhere in the universe – even to a place billions of light years away. The name “wormhole” comes about by analogy: imagine a fly on an apple. The only way the fly can reach the apple’s other side is the long way over the fruit’s surface. But worm could make a tunnel through the apple and thus shorten the way considerably. A wormhole in space is the same kind of tunnel; it is a shortcut from one part of the universe to another that reduces the travel time to about zero.

In fact, instantaneous travel leads to the idea of wormhole as time machine. If it were possible to move one end of a wormhole at nearly the speed of light, then, according to general relativity, time at that end would slow down and that part of the tunnel would be younger than the other end. Anything moving from the faster-aging end of the wormhole to the slower one would essentially go backward on time. The type of travel, however, could be nothing like the mechanical time machine described by H. Wells. It is difficult to imagine how a human being could move through a wormhole, since it would theoretically be narrower than an atom and it would tend to disappear the instant it formed.

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