Can traversable wormholes be created, allowing us to achieve our wildest dreams of traveling between the stars? Mohammad Mansouryar says yes, and in a paper titled “On a macroscopic traversable spacewarp in practice,” the young Iranian theorist lays out his argument. Mansouryar bases his thinking on a needed prerequisite: the violation of the Averaged Null Energy Condition. He writes up its parameters in a 41 page document stuffed with conjectures, eight boxes of figures and 127 footnotes.

Mansouryar’s analysis is intractable to Centauri Dreams, demanding an examination from those far more competent in theoretical physics than myself. Especially given his startling conclusion: “In this paper, I have tried to review the literature, in the spirit of whether the TWs [traversable wormholes] in practice are far reaching or constructible by present knowledge & technology. The conclusion is they are quite possible to manufacture provided a sufficient determination of investment on improving computation tools & necessary materials.”

The goal, of course, is all but magical. A workable wormhole using Mansouryar’s methods would allow a spacecraft to take a cosmic bypass, riding a subluminal warp drive through the wormhole shortcut so that distances through space are radically altered while maintaining spacetime stability for passengers. The result is a hybrid of warp drive thinking a la Alcubierre and the classic wormhole as, more or less, conceived by science fiction.

On a Web site devoted to his work, the author notes that while increasing velocity in space is a desirable goal, the final goal is not the speed of light. For one thing, even c is too limiting when compared to cosmic distances, and the technical problems of accelerating closer and closer to c still stand. Mansouryar is also well aware of control problems at superluminal speeds, impacts from interstellar dust at high velocity, and the intractable issue of propulsion systems. His goal is to create a system in which local movement is much less than c but, as he says on his Web site “…the considered distance changes so that consequently would be less devoted time, finally in compared to a situation if a light pulse would be supposed to pass the same distance.”

A traversable wormhole is a solution if we can find a way to produce the negative energy needed to create and stabilize it. The paper discusses methods for producing exotic matter and muses on techniques to verify Mansouryar’s wormhole theories experimentally. Abstract and full text are available on the arXiv site, where the paper will doubtless produce controversy and discussion — particularly as to his experimental ideas — more illuminating than Centauri Dreams can provide.