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Other universes may already be out there. The brave souls who study quantum mechanics talk blithely of alternate universes. They suggest that every time any person or thing does something, a new universe springs into being. There is the familiar one in which the event happened, and a new one in which it did not. Theoretical physicists speak of an infinite number of parallel universes stacked like sheets of paper in a ream, separate worlds in which the very laws of physics themselves could be different. (Another analogy is a huge conglomeration of soap bubbles floating in the air, with each bubble a separate universe. By some strange coincidence, this is the way galaxies appear to be spaced in our universe.) For a long time, the theorists have wondered if it might be possible to use "wormholes" to travel quickly from one part of our universe to another part, or from our universe to another universe (Smithsonian, November 1977). The idea has become familiar from science fiction, especially in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which the plot centers around a space station positioned at one entrance to a wormhole.
Kip S. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at CalTech, has been thinking about wormholes for a long time. The subtitle of his latest book, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, captures the reaction of most physicists — and ordinary readers--to such ideas. In one chapter, he asks whether a sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to construct wormholes from one part of our universe to another to facilitate rapid interstellar travel. He answers that it possibly could be done by taking advantage of gravitational vacuum fluctuations. These are defined as "random, probabilistic fluctuations in the curvature of space caused by a tug-of-war in which adjacent regions of space are continually stealing energy from each other and then giving it back."
In 1955 John Archibald Wheeler, then at Princeton (Smithsonian, August 1981), had worked out that in a space that is 20 factors of 10 smaller than an atomic nucleus, the vacuum fluctuations are so overpowering that, in Thorne's words, "space as we know it 'boils' and becomes a froth of quantum foam." Because quantum foam is everywhere, Thorne continues, we can imagine a highly advanced civilization reaching into it, pulling out a wormhole the size of a Wheeler space and enlarging it so it could be used by macrocreatures the size of ourselves.
Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City College of the City University of New York, goes even further in his recent book Hyperspace. Kaku tries to make us at least a little comfortable with the idea of space having more than three dimensions. He recalls that as a child, he watched carp swimming in a shallow pool and realized they had no conception of the world above the surface of the pond. Later he goes on to the classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by a Square, a book written in 1884 by a clergyman named Edwin Abbot. In the book, two-dimensional beings live on a flat surface. They have no concept of height. Just so, Kaku writes, we have trouble with the idea of more than three spatial dimensions. But that does not mean they do not exist.
"Hyperspace," according to Kaku, merely means space with more than three spatial dimensions. Once this is allowed, he says, a lot of problems in physics clear up immediately. The incompatibilities between relativistic and quantum physics disappear, he continues. If hyperspace turns out to be real, then travel through hyperspace may turn out to be realizable, too.
OK, let's talk about practical benefits. We'll consider only one, the biggest potential payoff of all. Both science fiction writers and serious scientists have thought for a long time that the day will come, if we survive long enough, when we will have to leave Earth and even the Solar System. Now we have something new to think about: leaving this universe when it becomes uninhabitable. If the Universe expands forever, it will eventually end cold and dead, the Cosmic Whimper. If it stops expanding and collapses back in on itself in the Big Crunch, it will end in explosive fury. To the best of my knowledge, neither is expected to happen for tens of billions of years, but Hey! it's good to be prepared. By the time it happens, Harrison, Thorne and Kaku appear to be telling us, we should have learned how to step lightly from this universe into another one. Or make a new one.
In Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, a Wall Street bond trader who seemed to have the world by the tail thought of himself as the "master of the Universe." Just one universe? Small potatoes, I say. It looks more and more as though there are lots of universes, perhaps uncountable universes. And my joke and Professor Harrison's conjecture may turn out to be true: you won't be able to get your PhD until you've created a universe.
By John P. Wiley jr
Comments
iwould like to help me in this topic: macro-creatures which live in the soil.
Posted by omar on March 21,2008 | 08:46AM