Wormholes and time...

I recently watched the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster, and I have a question regarding wormholes.

***If you haven't seen the movie and don't want the ending spoiled for you, please leave the thread while you still can.***



Ok, Jodie Foster's character goes through a series of wormholes and eventually ends up in the Vega star system which is 18 light years away from earth (that is if I remember correctly). She was gone for 18 minutes by the time she returned to earth, while only a fraction of a second had passed for the earthlings.

Is that how a wormhole is theoretically supposed to work? Does it allow you to go anywhere, spend as much time as you want, and then return to earth only a second (earth time) after you left?

And does this mean that if she were to take frequent trips to Vega and back, that she would eventually look and feel much older than if she were to never travel through these wormholes?

This is odd, there are too many smart people on this board, someone must have some sort of answer. Anything that you might know might be of some help to me, so don't be afraid to answer.

reply to post by Impreza


i believe it was 19 hours gone by for "jodie" not 18 minutes.

reply to post by Impreza


Though I like to think about this kind of stuff - I've never taken it to the level of actually studying it. So, all you will get from me is a pure guess. (WAG)

I believe that the passage of time on earth could be both either shorter duration than the one traveling or longer duration depending on "cosmic polar direction" of travel (if there is such a concept - I apologize in advance for not knowing about such physics - thus muddying terminology).

Another words in one direction one would age greater then those she left behind as in the movie"Contact", but when traveling in the other direction it could very well be the opposite & those on the earth could age more than you. Would Jodi be older - Yes. I would think age is measured by the passage of time of ones self thus Jodi would be older because she experienced a greater passage of time even though it was encapsulated outside of our time.

Another question would be what would happen if you were to synchronize three watches and send one through the wormhole in one direction & one in the opposite. Would the watches resynchronize on there way back or would that depend on which way they came back? What would the times be? According to the movie you quoted "18-19 units of time measurement past as it set aside that much space for recording even though no data was captured - thus essentially the audio video recording device (digital camcorder) was demoted to watch or time keeping device that was no longer in sync with the devices it started with.

I think if we think of time as a current of water like a river one could be in the water and flow with it, on top of the water and manipulate our position with less force or completely dig a tunnel around it or over it to manipulate our position even further. Essentially the tunnels would be your worm holes - how they work I wont even try.

You could either time travel by leaving the steam and returning to your original x,y, z & t coordinates or as in Jodi's case you could leave the stream & then return back and catch up to where the water has traveled a moment further down the stream with slightly different coordinates. To time travel more radically such as in the past or future one would have to position themselves either further upstream or downstream in relation to the position of the constantly moving flow that they started amongst.

It seems the more I reread my post the the more flaws & possibilities I find thus I will quit as I don't have the Time to contemplate them, attempt to make them comprehensible, nor do I wish to speculate on old ground that someone else here might have a better grasp of.

Sorry, if I failed to answer your wormhole definition - if that's what you were looking for. Flawed as it may be, I'll leave it up for laughs if nothing else.




[edit on 21-2-2008 by verylowfrequency]

In theory, wormholes are possible... ( my daughter has begun her study into these things idk why...) All you would need is a spacecraft capable of moving faster than the speed of light, and a really powerful magnet on the top of it. the anti-protons would create a vortex of sorts and you would be able to shift through an area as if nothing happened, whereas hours would have passed.


--- Look up String Theory aka - M theory

or works by stephen Hawking if you are curious.

[edit on 20-2-2008 by Crimsonone6]

The new particle accelerator in europe may be able to create wormholes into the past. But they will be very very tiny wormholes and last a very short time.

the problme is making them big and keeping them open. Collosal amounts of energy would be needed

Only if wormhole is also time machine ( timehole ).

A wormhole could potentially allow time travel. This could be accomplished by accelerating one end of the wormhole relative to the other, and then sometime later bringing it back; relativistic time dilation would result in less time having passed for the accelerated wormhole mouth compared to the stationary one, meaning that anything which entered the stationary wormhole mouth would exit the accelerated one at a point in time prior to its entry. The path through such a wormhole is called a closed timelike curve, and a wormhole with this property is sometimes referred to as a "timehole."

source


Anyway - you can try with Kip Thorne's book 'Black Holes and Time Warps' - Sagan asked Thorne to help him with 'Contact;

reply to post by Impreza


Considering we aren't even sure wormholes exist.
How could we know one way or another?
Could not be anchored in time what-so-ever if they do actually exist.

All you can hope to get is a bunch of speculation cleverly disguised as facts. With this post but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have made it.
So cheers!

I read an article not long ago that discussed how space-time portals worked. I'm sorry I cannot provide a link, but I will try to explain the theory.

Space-time portals are two portals positioned at far distances from each other. As one object would travel into one portal it would come out the other almost instantly.

How it worked: (This is described to the best of my memory)
The article described that an anti-ion and an ion were discovered that if the two were collided at the speed of light a portal would be opened up. It was also stated that this created a small black hole. Also, if two sets of these fields were vibrating at the same frequency it would create a space-time portal. In addition, it was discovered that gravity would dissolve the field, so the scientists then proposed that anti-gravity machines were used to keep this field open. The article also mentioned that if these portals were stretched too big, it could swallow the surrounding environment--even the entire planet.

--------------------------------

Now for the time-travel theory--not space-time travel. This a short explanation and only used for traveling into the future.

I also read somewhere that the closer to the speed of light you travel the slower your atoms would move. Basically, since nothing travels faster than the speed of light, if somethings traveling at that speed the atoms couldn't go any faster thus the atoms have stopped moving. Therefore, your body has cheated time. In addition, astronauts that are traveling XXXX miles an hour--I actually have no clue how fast they go--as they orbit our planet they are traveling 1/XXXXX of a second into the future--again, IDK this number either. Sorry.

I remember watching a movie including a character playing Einstein and, he said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. According to this theory, he's correct.

PS. Sorry for the bad memory in some details. Maybe someone could help me out?

Interestingly, it is almost the opposite of Einsteins example(I think stemming from theory of reletivity) where the person travelling at/near speed of light sees only a short amount of time elapse but his friends on earth have aged many years.

Wormholes shwmormholes!

In theory lots of things are possible, like 10 and 11 dimensions. Is it reality? probably not.

It makes great sci-fi but it is purely conjecture. Yes theoretically wormholes are possible if you had almost infinite amounts of energy to keep the darn things open. So how do you get this energy? Oh yes, you need 'exotic matter' - ie some kind of undiscovered magical matter! Anyway, don't bet your house on anyone opening one any time soon unless it's in a movie.

reply to post by nobodyv2


I'm sure there are more ways than one to create, and keep open, a wormhole. Just like the invention of the motor engine--gas, electric, ion, plasma, etc.

Originally posted by verylowfrequency
reply to post by Impreza

 

I think if we think of time as a current of water like a river one could be in the water and flow with it, on top of the water and manipulate our position with less force or completely dig a tunnel around it or over it to manipulate our position even further. Essentially the tunnels would be your worm holes - how they work I wont even try.
[edit on 21-2-2008 by verylowfrequency]

I like this idea, and I'm going to run with it for a minute. (Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist ... I do enjoy contemplating things like this though).

So in your example, you have water, which allows you to move only so fast (we'll say x). By creating a tunnel of air in that water, you could now move (x + y) fast (in this example, we'll assume you're "floating" through the tunnel created). To accomplish this, you'd need two things: 1. a device powerful enough to create a tunnel and fill it with air and 2. a source of energy powerful enough to power this device.

Let's move to the worm hole theory now. The water is the void of space, which you can only move as fast as the speed of light through (with our current model). The tunnel would obviously be your worm hole. Same theory applies -- you'd need a machine that is capable of creating this "thinner matter" (that lets light travel faster), and an energy source powerful enough to power it.

So, with our current technology, we wouldn't be able to do this at all. At least not reliably or cost effectively.

My theory is, basically, that the next large leap in propulsion will not come from more powerful engines, at least in the classic sense. The next giant leap will, instead of propelling things through the reality that we know now, the engines of tomorrow will change the reality to propel themselves. Now I'm not talking about inter-dimensional travel. Not by any means. Think Futurama. As the professor's clone states, "The ship does not move through space. It simply moves the space around it."

There's always been something about that statement that got to me. Now I know, cartoons, and movies, and science fiction, blah blah blah. But think about it. You have a device that can alter the matter around it to move, instead of moving itself ... would theoretically be able to travel faster than the speed of light.

Ok, maybe I've gotten a bit derailed from my original thoughts... I honestly just have a hard time putting down what's in my head. =P BUT, with a breakthrough of this magnitude, our current measurements of time and distance would no longer apply. One would be able to traverse the galaxy in a matter of minutes, by simply moving their "reality" to that location. So at that point, the idea of aging differently would be moot.

Anyway... thanks for reading my ramblings, if you got this far. I've always just found this kind of topic very fascinating.

I know the movie and have it. I do not actually think that it is quite accurate, but lets say that according to the movie, the spacealiens who did not build the system (much like the Stargate series now) also do not quite understand it either. So yes, lately, there is the theory that by causing spacetime to bend around itself or what is called a closed-looped time curve, that you end up traveling in time but also in the movie she travelled way further in space than the Vega star system. The first stop was there, then another series of tunnels in spacetime took over and she ended really way far away on the other side of the galaxy. This is all related now to the book Cosmos and the book Contact written by the late Dr. Carl Sagan. Since that time they still theorize about wormholes and black holes and extreme gravitational sources bending spacetime as you normally know it. Perhaps a book to help written now a few years back by J. Richard Gott may help, as it is something entitled like "Time Travel, the Physical Realities of traveling in Einstein's Universe" where he covers such things as time travellling having to be self-consistent. The same equation that forms the bases for space travelling can also be used for time travelling but the result for time travelling is negative whereas for spacetravelling the results are positive. Same equation, different results, give which way you traveled in SpaceTime.

Since that time, I and maybe others but I do not know any professionals yet claiming anything perhaps that I just am dumb or something think that "Time" is the only dimension, and Space is just a distance in "Time" in the end. Figure out how to travel in time which may support the same thing as travelling throw a wormhole and you actually travelled also in space. Thus when the camera at the end of the movie has 18 hours of static on it, but seemed to be working and recording nothing but static, and the fact that she ended back on Earth only a few seconds later and the end of the movie, the recording on the tape verifies her story in the end then the coverup proceeds. So to me the movie is more about time travelling which also in the end involved space travelling because perhaps a theory out there somewhere in the physics can support that as a concept. I know that Thorne and others who also wrote books back then like mentioned in a post above also theorize about what may or may not happen or what is needed stated as some exotic matter. Now there is dark matter and still there may be other thoughts needed advancing the theories already out there that physicists theorize. Sometimes the books are interesting and reach out there and other times, other theorists are more conservative and only give what is still older theories. Never hurts to imagine though like Einstein did about spacetime and what it all involves. In the end, like Einstein stated it is all Relative and it depends on the frame of reference of what is his theories now proved.

Stargate is essentially the same type of thoughts although now called sub-space and newer theories of demolecularation and reconstruction at the other end stored in a kind of super computer like the newer theory out as of nowadays. That does mean that you would be destroyed and a copy of you would be made at the other end, which is in the end still you after all of that. What a way to travel though, but that is the newest theory so far (??).

So the wormhole is the bending of spacetime to put two distanced points closer together and not like travelling on the surface say of spacetime but tunneling through spacetime to cut the distance down.

I am not a scientist though so what i read I take that it is only thoughts from physicists that write the books like Dr. Michio Kaku and those other thinkers who went to Princeton, Yale, Harvard, or MIT or some such other college having reputations for advancing the thoughts of science, although there are other Universities now getting into the act like with quantum computing or nanotechnology also.