Worm Holes Essay, Research Paper

Worm Holes and Time Travel

It is believed that our universe is curved like a U shape (see figure 1-1). For a while, it was only believed that you could travel back in time. It was never thought that you could travel into the future. Stephen Hawking had a theory that there are loops or shortcuts in the universe that could ?warp? you from one part of space to another. He called it a wormhole. Wormholes are also unstable. They can collapse at any time and pinch off into two separate singularities (see figure 1-3).

A wormhole is a thin tube of space-time that can connect two flat regions that are far apart. A wormhole is usually connected by two black holes. It takes a short cut in time and can make a trip that is 20 million million miles only a few million miles. It creates a little gateway in time, like a time warp. A person could travel back a million years and get in another wormhole and get back before he even left (see figure 1-2).

There really isn?t any way to find a wormhole and we have never have discovered one. Wormholes are a theory by Stephen Hawking. But to find a wormhole you would have to find the black hole it was connected to. A black hole gives off X-rays. So we would have to use a telescope that detects x-rays. We are still searching for wormholes in space. To travel through a wormhole, you would need to travel at the speed of light. We have not yet created a ship that can travel at that speed.

If you travel back in time through a wormhole you would not be able to change the past. In order to go back in time and change the past, history would have to prove that you already arrived there and didn?t do what you were going to do and you didn?t alter the future. This is the reason why we cannot go back and stop the Kennedy assassination or the Oklahoma City bombing. The history is not something that can be altered.

If time travel is invented in the future, the reason why future people haven?t come back to now and tell us how to time travel is because in order for them to get here in a reasonable amount of time, they would have to travel at the speed of light. At this time, we do not have the technology to travel at that speed. I normal ship would break up and disintegrate. Maybe in the future, they have the technology to travel at the speed of light.

As you can see, wormholes are a very interesting phenomenon in space. If we can someday find a wormhole, it could be the element to time travel. If this does not answer most of your questions on wormholes, you can research them at the library.