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A few thoughts:

1. The possibility of wormholes isn't new.

2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what they're talking about.

3. They're stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits: And because entanglement is a standard feature of quantum physics, it is relatively easy to create. “It’s really a beautiful theoretical idea,”




Every thing is easy relatively to impossible


communication through them should be possible, though, no?


If you haven't had any messages sent to you from Future fnord77, suffice it to say we won't have figured out how to do that in our lifetime.


If we'll figure this out, we'll (very) probably also have figured how out to calculate the effects of communicating with the past.

So, no. This doesn't tell us anything about the possibility, it merily tells us, even if it _was_ possible, we're collectively to stupid yet to deal with it without destroying our future which would've led to inventing such a device.


That sounds like something someone communicating from the future would say...


The physics of interacting with your previous self are undefined with many plausible solutions.

It is entirely plausible that the universe limits your interactions with your past causal self to a small range, allows arbitrary overlapping world lines, blocks all causal violations entirely, or has disastrous consequences for time loops.

My personal bet is that the universe has no reason to care that you've interacted with your past self given a consistent proper time worldline. This however removes conservation of energy and momentum in the universe, which General Relativity also does not preserve.

Of course this does allow for misuse of causal loops to generate arbitrarily large/infinite amounts of energy without any bounds on observability.


Your comment echoes the film 'Interstellar' and I now have a desire to watch it again.

Who says science can't fill the soul with wonder?


the older film Prince of Darkness deals with sending messages back in time, too...


In the abstract of the linked paper in the article, they mention that wormholes "can't violate causality" [1]. So, this wouldn't be possible even if we were able to invent wormholes in our lifetime.

[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP12(2017)151


It could be you can only communicate back to the point where it was built.


Which is precisely how it would work with wormholes.

Wormholes can be turned into time machine in the following way. Remember that time travel to the future is pretty trivial: Just accelerate a lot and enjoy the effects of time dilation. So in order to travel into the past, you create a wormhole pair and put one of the wormholes on a speedy two-way trip. If you now traverse the wormhole that was on the trip (and which has traveled into the future), you travel backwards in time. But not further than when the pair was created.


unrelated tangent but this reminded me a funny thing i read

inspirational quote: "Your future self is complaining about how much time you waste"

person: i'll show him! i'll ruin his f**ing life!


I'm betting if it's possible, it will happen within our lifetimes, possibly as soon as 20 years ago.


They're saying tunnels are possible. They didn't say people (or any organic life on Earth) would travel through them.

Honestly just encoding any communication through them successfully would turn our world upside down.

That said, wormholes are a bit of the pet crackpot theory of the scientific community right now. Black holes are definitely a thing. White holes are pure conjecture based on extrapolating math in very hand-wavey ways. And wormholes (i.e. the idea of black/white holes where information can travel between them) are even less plausible.


> stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits

I take it they mean "easier than supplying 1000 galaxies-worth of energy" or similar


Right. It's 'easy' relative to the utterly impossible. But it's 'utterly impossible' relative to anything any reasonable human might consider easy.


Then they are using the term right. They said relatively easy, not absolutely easy.


It’s not helpful to the reader, though.


The last link in the article is to a paper called "Humanly Traversable Wormholes". Here is an excerpt from its conclusion "In fact, it allows for solutions where the wormholes are big enough that a person could traverse them and survive. From the outside they resemble intermediate mass charged black holes. Their big size comes from demanding that a human traveller can survive the tidal forces.", from [PDF] https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.066007


> You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what they're talking about.

Uh, so no stargates anytime soon? That's disappointing.


Sending matter probably isn't important. Data, though. That's valuable.


I really want to think that was a pun. Relatively easy, just quantumly hard.


> 2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti

I understand this is some form of hyperbole, but would what they propose be sufficient to transport masses of some raw elements around? Let's say some advanced civilization sent out mining expeditions, and desired a way to transport back that material FTL for example


I’d be more interested in sticking one end into the sun’s corona and getting an infinite rocket engine


I wouldn't expect an exhaust plume passing through a wormhole to move the wormhole itself (or the heavily curved "portals" at its ends) any more than a plume would move "flat"/"normal" spacetime.

Separately, Kurzgesagt did a video on stellar engines (which can be much less exotic than wormholes); sounds like what you're describing: https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU


Please use somebody else's sun




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