In A New Study, Scientists Have Questioned Whether Travel Through Wormholes Is A Real Possibility
In a new study conducted by an employee of RUDN that was completed with the help of Brazilian researchers, scientists have concluded that travel through stable wormholes may not be a logical possibility should one wish to use these wormholes to journey to other distant ports in space-time.
As Phys.org reports, nearly everyone has heard of wormholes as they are a constant fixture in science fiction films and novels which can be seen connecting distant universes with one another, making things easy for travelers to jump from one distant point to another. In theory, the idea of wormholes seems rather grand, as voyagers wouldn’t need to traverse enormous distances in space to reach their destination, but could simply jump inside these tunnels and be transported to far-flung regions that would normally be impossible to reach.
However, new research conducted has attempted to demonstrate that traveling through stable wormholes may not truly work in practice, as RUDN physicist Roman Konoplya has asserted.
“Our hope for the existence of these exotic objects rests on the fact that Einstein’s equations allow for wormholes as their solution. However, for wormholes to be traversable and not to collapse because of gravitational effects, the repulsion force in the bottleneck of a wormhole should be extremely high.”
Scientists dismiss the idea of travel through wormholes @UniversityRudn @PhysRevD https://t.co/J5h1daXTuu
— PhysOrg Physics News (@physorg_physics) December 14, 2018
To get around this repulsion force, theoretical physicists normally explain that there are two different options which can be taken. The first option would be vacuum fluctuations of quantum fields, while the second would be a huge amount of dark energy, with both projected around the bottleneck.
German and Greek scientists attempted to demonstrate back in 2011 that the repulsion force is something quite easy to understand without the need for throwing strange states of matter or even new fields into the equation. After analyzing the idea of this repulsion force, they came to the conclusion that such a force could exist simply through some very simple corrections in the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory with dilaton.
Unfortunately, Konoplya has disputed these findings, noting that stability doesn’t appear to be a real possibility in his team’s latest study, at least not without making some extravagant assumptions.
“Some preliminary studies of foreign colleagues seemed to indicate the possibility of such stability. However, we confirmed that a wormhole according to Einstein’s theory with quantum corrections is critically unstable. Evidently, an unstable system cannot exist in nature as any reaction with the environment would cause it to disintegrate. Mathematically, it is expressed in unlimited growth of initially neglected minor system deviation from statistical balance. Unfortunately, these results mean that we still don’t have a theoretically consistent wormhole model without exotic assumptions.”
The new study which suggests that wormholes may not be a viable form of travel has been published in Physical Review D.
