Gene Roddenberry spins in whatever conveyance they used to bury him.

Wormhole wanderers face a deadly dilemma

Again, "What you don't know can hurt you a whole lot".


Would-be wormhole travellers may have to choose between danger and unpredictability for their journeys through space-time, a new study suggests. The research may spell doom for time machines, but it suggests the universe will survive to a ripe old age instead of being ripped apart by a particularly repulsive form of dark energy.

As fans of science fiction know, wormholes provide short-cuts through space and time, sucking in objects at one end and spitting them out at the other. The distance from one point to the other would be much shorter than conventional travel across the universe.

A useful analogy in helping to visualise the wormhole phenomenon is to imagine a sheet of paper - which represents the universe - which is then folded neatly in half. Next, near the edge furthest from the fold, a pin is pushed through the paper. This creates a “wormhole” connecting two distant points in the universe.

But for this trick to work in space-time, the hypothetical tunnels are suggested to be coated with an unknown form of matter. This "exotic" matter exerts negative pressure - if a balloon were being filled with the stuff, it would deflate.

Now, physicists Roman Buniy and Stephen Hsu at the University of Oregon in Eugene, US, have studied the properties of such matter in two theoretical wormhole types. The first type mainly obeys the laws of classical physics and does not fluctuate in time, while the second follows quantum mechanical rules and therefore carries with it inherent uncertainties.

These uncertainties mean someone is not guaranteed to come out at a given location in space or time after every use of the quantum wormhole. "The danger is the endpoint of the wormhole which, if it is fluctuating around unpredictably, might be in a wall or under the Pacific Ocean," Hsu says. "Alternatively, you might exit a year before or after you thought you would."