There are many similarities between lawyers and theoretical physicists. Both of them spend a lot of time searching for rules’ flaws and contradictions that could be used against them in some way.
Pavel Krtou from Charles University in Prague and Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada probably couldn’t prevent you from receiving a traffic ticket, but they might have found a way to circumvent the laws of physics and send you back in time to prevent you from speeding through that school zone in the first place.
Wormholes aren’t known aspects of the cosmos, yet they are spacetime shortcuts. But for more than a century, researchers have pondered whether the weft and warp dictated by relativity specify means for quantum ripples, or even entire particles, to escape their locality.
At their most fanciful, such changes to the structure of the universe would enable masses the size of humans to travel over light-years, cross galaxies in the space of a heartbeat, or even travel through time at the speed of a person walking through their kitchen.
Exercises that examine the more esoteric aspects of spacetime behavior at the very least could serve as a guide for speculating on the mysterious intersection of quantum physics and the general theory of relativity.
In reality, wormholes are nothing more than forms. In daily life, we are accustomed to working with one-dimensional lines, two-dimensional images, and three-dimensional things. Some of them are easy for us to fold, shape, and puncture.
In cases when we can’t study them intuitively, physics enables us to investigate these shifts. Quantum effects allow for some flexibility in distance and time at the most fundamental levels.
Spacetime can contract and expand in respect to gravity on far bigger scales in ways that are impossible to understand without a huge number of guiding equations. Spacetime will bend in ways that give something two outer surfaces, for instance, if enough mass is concentrated in one location (conveniently ignoring any charge it may have or if it spins around). Who or what links them? Of course, a wormhole.
Although some suspicious things on either side that happen to be entangled would remain connected, matter would not be able to travel over this mathematical framework.
Throughout the years, researchers have looked for scenarios, both real and simply theoretical, that would permit quantum effects and perhaps complete particles to pass through unusual configurations of spacetime unharmed.
The time warp hypothesis put forth by Frolov, Krtou, and Zelnikov makes use of a ring wormhole, which was first introduced in 2016 by theoretical physicists Gary Gibbons of the University of Cambridge and Mikhail Volkov of the University of Tours.
The ring wormhole hypothesized by Gibbons and Volkov connects portions of the Universe (or distinct universes, for that matter) that are what we call flat, as opposed to the spherical distortions of spacetime we could attribute to black holes.
Ring-shaped masses could produce some fascinating distortions in what would otherwise be flat spacetime by taking into account interactions of electrical and magnetic fields known as duality rotations and using a few well-chosen transformations.
And presto! a gap in space that links you to, well, someplace far away.
This hole was used by Frolov, Krtou, and Zelnikov to test several hypotheses. What impact, for instance, may a different, immobile mass have on the ring? What if both the entering ring and the exit ring are located in the same universe?
They found solutions that featured a so-called closed timelike curve. It refers to an object or ray of light that moves down a line before returning to the original location. not just in time, but also in space.
Before you prepare for a paradoxical journey into the future and back, consider the several barriers that could easily thwart this loop. Stephen Hawking, a late physicist, undoubtedly agreed.
But who can say? We just might be able to challenge our sentence of a one-way trip into the future with a little assistance from a big pair of rings and the appropriate kind of cosmic attorney.
This study is now accessible on the preprint server arXiv and has been accepted for publication in Physical Review D.
