Sending data-rich broadband signals between the stars is no easy matter. Interstellar gas has the effect of disrupting such signals, the result varying depending upon the frequency. Narrow-band signals are easy, broadband hard. But Seth Shostak reports on galactic Wi-Fi, looking at Swedish work that exploits orbital angular momentum, a ‘twisting of the wave’s electric and magnetic fields,’ that may allow much more information to be encoded in the same signal without the disruption that distances in the hundreds of light years invariably impose. One signal becomes a cipher for another, with obvious SETI implications.
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New Scientist (behind its firewall, alas) looks at the work of Alexander Shatskiy (Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow) on how to detect a wormhole. Shatskiy’s paper “Passage of Photons Through Wormholes and the Influence of Rotation on the Amount of Phantom Matter around Them” (abstract) makes the pitch that something called ‘phantom matter’ could hold the mouth of a wormhole open. Possessed of negative energy and negative mass, such matter might be detectable because it would create optical effects opposite to those of gravitational lensing.
A wormhole signature? Light moving through the wormhole from where/whenever should emerge as a bright ring, while stars behind the wormhole would shine through the middle. All of which reminds me of the classic paper by John Cramer et al. (“Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses,” Physical Review D March 15, 1995. pp. 3124-27), which likewise speculates on wormhole signatures, though with a different result. The paper argues that when the wormhole moves directly in front of a light source, a halo would form around it. What you get when a wormhole occults a star is first the spike, then the halo, then a second spike, a characteristic signature indeed for astronomers lucky enough to spot it.
The difference between the two descriptions is a reminder that we have no idea whether ‘phantom matter’ or a negative mass cosmic string of the sort the Cramer paper discusses even exist. Astrophysicist Geoffrey Landis, a co-author of the Cramer paper, told me several years back that the attempt to identify a wormhole is purely speculative, but surely worthwhile:
“We published our paper on this because people are actively hunting for gravitational lenses with spectrophotometers that can track these effects. We wanted to say, keep your eyes open for this particular signature. You probably won’t find it, but if you do, it would be our first evidence that wormholes actually exist.”
And if they do exist, wormholes open startling possibilities for moving through space and, conceivably, time. Once the excitement of such a detection wore off, the tricky realities for those thinking in terms of fast transit would emerge: If we were to prove a wormhole existed, how would we get to it in the first place? How would we know where or when it led? Even so, a demonstration that at least a few wormholes (created, presumably, in the Big Bang) had somehow managed to stabilize themselves through some exotic mechanism and might still offer gateways to elsewhere would be one of the great results of science.
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The 39th Carnival of Space is available at Visual Astronomy, where Sean Welton has harvested recent space-related materials. Of particular interest to Centauri Dreams readers is Phil Plait’s entry on asteroid 2007 TU24, with a useful and obviously necessary (judging from the bogus information that has floated around the Internet about this object) video explanation of why it poses no current threat. The frustration for those of us who worry about long-term dangers from Earth-crossing objects is that the public reaction is all too easily polarized between disinterest and panic. Isn’t prudent planning a better response?
Hi Folks;
I can imagine a number of other possible ways in which doors in space or spacetime might be opened and/or which the limiting value of C might be avioded. I posted some of these comments with differently worded explanations before but I thought that the reader might enjoy a summary of some of the relavant concepts.
1) The first method might involve effecting the electrodynamic properties of space such as its magnetic permeability and electrical permittivity. Since space is defined electromagnetically at least in part by these two constants, perhaps somehow changing them could alter the structure of the local space time continuum. Perhaps tampering with zero point electromagnetic virtual particle fluctuations could do the job. Such might be accomplished by judiciously arranged superconducting plates in various configuration consistent with filtering out standing electromagnetic waves of wavelengths greater than the seperation of the plates. The filtering out of such wavelengths was first accomplished in the casimar experiment around the mid-20th century but the respective expeimental results were contoversial until several decades latter when more precise measurment apparatus allowed confirmation of the effect.
If sharp discontinuities could be produced within the magnetic permeability and electrical permittivity of a region of space, the possibility of opening a door to a universe with differnent values of the magnetic permeability and electrical permittivity might be accomplished.
2 The second concept involves perhaps minipulation of the Higgs Field in such a manner for opening a door in space because the Higgs Field is theoretically intimately related to the zero point vacuum energy state of free space. Perhaps the magnetic permeability and electrical permittivity of a region of space could be altered by tampering with the local Higgs Field strength as a result of feed back mechanism between the Higgs Field and the four known forces as a result of unified field theories such as the Theory of Everything unifying the four known forces, etc.
3) Yet another way of looking at wormholes is to approach them from an electromagnetic perspective instead of a gravitational based general relativistic perspective. Since gravity is a force of long range, in theory infinite, given enough time for its effects to propagate, it is simmilar to the electromagnetic force. Could there exist a way to warp space time in the form of a wormhole that is based on an electromagnetic field? Perhaps.
4) Another method of effectively producing a short cut in spacetime simply involves changing the quantum wavefunction of a spacecraft by judicious placement of barrier of matter and/or energy in the way of the space craft such that the spacecraft’s forward componet of the wavepacket defining it is squeezed and stretched out and then made to balloon up at a remote location thus greatly increasing the odds that it will suddenly appear at the new location.
Perhaps the spacecraft can be made to tunnel through higher dimensional space such as any of the higher dimensions of string theory and the theory of branes which are highly compactified according to these theories: by some estimates rolled up or folded up to a scale on the dimensions of the Planck Length.
Perhaps any of the methods described above can be made to produce a discreet multiple connectedness of spacetime regions effect thus removing the need for wormholes altogether wherein a person or craft would simply cross over a boundary of essentially zero thickness and end up at a remote location in space time.
5) Another way to induce effectively instantaneous transport would be to somehow cause a space craft to travel to just over the speed of light by tunneling through the speed of light barrier. Such might allow the space craft to travel back in time very slowly as it travels cross huge distances effectively traveling faster than instantaneously because it would reach its destination slightly before it left. If the craft could reach its destination within the rough order of a Planck Time unit before it left, it might effectively travel quicker than instantaneously without ever having effectively traveled back in time thus avoiding some of the time travel paradoxes and risks of time travel just in case there is no form of temporal causuality censorship preventing the effect of time travel into the past from changing the present or the future.
6) Yet another manner for performing spacetime door like travel might simply be to somehow enter a parallel history such as those conjectured to exist along side ours in the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory wherein it is held in at least some versions that every act of even a microscopic wavefucntion collapse produces a brand new branch of history that somehow coexists along side the history from whence the act of quantum decoherence occurred. It has been suggested that some forms of quantum computers might be able to utilize this effect, abiet on a tiny microscopic scale, to perform parallel computations with unheard of results. The craft might re-enter the history that it departed from previously at a different location by bridging the boundaries between the histories. Alternatively, the craft might travel through several distinct histories before making its way back to the one it initially departed from.
7) Yet another potential method of circumventing the light speed barrier might be to use some sort of reaction to convert the craft into tachyon directly and setting it on its time traveling course into the past wherein it would then be reconverted back into normal mattergy and then be accellerated to very high gamma factors to arrive at remote destinations effectively instantaneously. Perhaps the tachyon material could be very weakly interacting with normal matter so that its is not disrupted by superluminal speed collision with normal matter. Perhaps future particle experiments will provide us a way of doing this through any relavent physics we might learn.
Thanks;
Your Friend Jim
Shatskiy’s paper “Passage of Photons Through Wormholes and the Influence of Rotation on the Amount of Phantom Matter around Them” is also available at arXiv:0712.2572v1 [astro-ph].
Hollow I’m Geoffrey Thomas a first session TV fan of the science fiction TV series the sliders
I did a google email alert on wormholes and I found this entry. Since I’d seen the TV series I was inspired I to learnt all I could about wormholes and parallel universe theory jotting down my own notes.
Apparently we can reach parallel worlds sliding wormholes. As a fan of the series I have a passion for how Quinn Mallory’s antigravity experiment managed to create an artificial wormhole in his basement on earth that linked parallel worlds to Quninn Mallary’s.
My research first indicated wormholes could only exist created by the gravitational collapse of supernovae creating a singularity in the centre of the black remains of the black hole left behind not in a basement on earth.
I’d created a google blogger called riding the Einstein Rosenberg Bridge (“http://ridingtheeinsteinrosenbergbridge.blogspot.com/) about the pilot. The star of the story is Quinn Mallory his antigravity experiment showing off a gapping entrance roaring away in his basement. Behind it was a slide to parallel worlds.
The pilot is a story about riding the holly grail of cosmos physics the Einstein Rosenberg Bridge visiting alternive realities
In relation to the TV series I created a web site called the Clipboard.net that has up to 80 files on time travel and Parallel universes. Theses are all my notes
One file in particular I created call information technology is about the possibility of transporting data as a way to create Quinn Mallory’s antigravity experiment as we send our computer files from pillar to post in our computer systems as an alternative to creating a wormhole or sending singles in the universe.
Would you like me to send you some of my files from my site to look at? Or you can viwe them when you visit Theclipboard.net the folder Time travel and parallel universes.
Hopping to here from your Kind regards
First session Slider Fan
Geoffrey Thomas
Shostack’s writing is so accessible that the depth behind it is often missed: he’s a giant in the field and a terrific advocate. Thanks for the link.
Hi Folks,
It occurred to me the fantastic results which can result from sub C experiments such as inertial kinetic energy experiments with particle accellerators and so I make some brief comments here because I am not sure where else to make them.
I think the LHC upgrade at CERN is going to yeild incredible experimental confirmation of some of the theories advanced over the past decades and a whole lot of unexpected new physics. The Higgs Bosons, Supersymmetric matter which would help validate string theory including the 11 -D spacetime proposed by string theorists, miniblackholes, and perhaps even finer structures and compositions of and to electrons, quarks, etc., will probably be experimentally varified with potentially outstanding applications for manned interstellar travel. Other phenomenon and knowledge will be gained with ever more powerful machines.
We went from 0.001 TeV energies per nucleon in the 50s, to TeV energies at the Fermilab, and are now about to go to 10 to 14 TeV per nucleon with the LHC. What will we find when we go to 100 TeV, 10,000 TeV,…, 10 EXP 18 TeV or the Planck energy, and even beyond in the comming centuries as ever new accellerator technology is developed? I see the astounding potential and I just have to say the phrase over and over in my mind of “What Dreams May Come!” “What Dreams May Come!” “What Dreams May Come!”.
I am so inspired by the efforts of the researchers who will use this machine, the fine scientists and engineers who designed the machine, the greatful service and talents of the technicians who will physically operate the machine and maintain it, the construction workers who make it all possible, as well as those efforts of all of us here at Tau Zero that I will intentionally leave this message much shorter than my usual postings and in simple form, for the LHC and the LHC research teams and the machine operators efforts as well as all of those here at Tau Zero will speak for themslves.
Many thanks to you Paul for providing this venue of expression. I have made several friends with like minded interests because of the opportuinity that Tau Zero provides.
Thanks;
Your Friend Jim
Large Hadron Collider Could Create Wormholes: a Gateway
for Time Travelers?
Written by Ian O’Neill
As we get closer to the grand opening of the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, it seems the
predictions as to what we might get from the high energy
particle accelerator are becoming more complex and outlandish.
Not only could the LHC generate enough energy to create
particles that exist in other dimensions, it may also produce
“unparticles”, a possible source for dark matter.
Now, the energy may be so focused that even the fabric of
space-time may be pulled apart to create a wormhole, not
to a different place, but a different time. Also, if there are
any time travellers out there, we are most likely to see them
in a few weeks…
If you could travel back in time, where would you go? Actually
it’s a trick question: you couldn’t travel back in time unless
there was a time “machine” already built in the past. The
universe’s very first time traveller would therefore only be
able to travel back to when the machine he/she was using
was built. This is one restriction that puts pay to those romantic
ideas that we could travel back in time to see the dinosaurs;
there were no time machines back then (that we know of), so
nothing to travel back to. And until we create a time machine,
we won’t be seeing any travelers any time soon.
However, Prof Irina Aref’eva and Dr Igor Volovich,
mathematical physicists at the Steklov Mathematical Institute
in Moscow believe the energies generated by the subatomic
collisions in the LHC may be powerful enough to rip space-time
itself, spawning wormholes. A wormhole not only has the ability
to take a shortcut between two positions in space, it can also
take a shortcut between two positions in time. So, the LHC
could be the first ever “time machine”, providing future time
travelers with a documented time and place where a wormhole
“opened up” into our time-line. This year could therefore be
“Year Zero”, the base year by which time travel is limited to.
Relativity doesn’t dispute this idea, but the likelihood of a
person passing through time is slim-to-impossible when the
dimensions of a possible wormhole will be at the sub-atomic
level at best and it would only be open for a brief moment.
Testing for the presence of a man-made wormhole would be
difficult even if we knew what we were looking for (perhaps a
small loss in energy during collision, as energy escapes through
the wormhole?).
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/02/07/large-hadron-collider-could-create-wormholes-a-gateway-for-time-travelers/
In related matters, note this item from Universe Today:
Are we sending a bit too much information into the cosmos?
Written by Ian O’Neill
On Monday (February 4, 7 pm EST) NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) sent a
transmission toward the North Star, Polaris. The transmission sent was the
song “Across the Universe” by the Beatles intended for any sufficiently
advanced extra terrestrial life to listen to. Although this is a nice
gesture and may nurture Beatles fans beyond our solar system, some
scientists have expressed concerns for advertising our planet’s location to
the universe, just in case the aliens listening in aren’t that friendly
after all…
Scientists attending the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
“Sound of Silence” meeting at Arizona State University in Tempe this week
are worried. Their concern focuses on some aspects of the scientific
community who want to advertise and educate sufficiently advanced lifeforms
beyond Earth about our presence and location in the cosmos. Previous efforts
have included information about our biology on the Voyager and Pioneer
probes, and a broadcast by the Arecibo observatory in 1974. These attempts
at communication plus accidental “leakage” of TV and radio signals can all
travel vast distances through space and perhaps be received by aliens.
Full article here:
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/02/07/are-we-sending-a-bit-too-much-information-into-the-cosmos/
Scientists Urge Broadening Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Scientists from around the world are discussing how to
improve the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
program after 50 years of “The Great Silence” at The
Sound of Silence conference, being held at Arizona State
University
“Have we been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time,
in the wrong way?” ASU astrophysicist Paul Davies told the
New Scientist. “SETI’s big mistake is that it’s relying on ET to
do all the heavy lifting,” Princeton University astrophysicist
Richard Gott said. According to Gott, if the aliens have the
same attitude as us, “we’ll all just be sitting round listening”.
Australian astrophysicist Paul Davies said the approach
currently being undertaken by SETI researchers is too
narrow, assuming aliens communicate the same way we
do here on Earth. “We’re making a lot of assumptions about
aliens based on human 20th century western society,” he
told New Scientist.
Full article here:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/02/scientists-at-s.html
Space Scientists Fear ET May be Stones Fans!
Will the arrival of the Beatles hit “Across the Universe” to
inhabitants near the North Star trigger a violent attack on
Earth by alien Mick Jagger fans?
Scientists at the Sound of Science Conference on the
search for extraterrestrial life at Arizona State University
challenged the wisdom of broadcasting the Beatles “Across
the Universe” to Polaris, the North Star.
Douglas Vakoch, a researcher with SETI (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence), said in an interview with
New Science: “Before sending out even symbolic messages,
we need an open discussion about the potential risks.
It’s very charitable to send out our encyclopaedia, but
that may short-change future generations.”
Vakoch has been very vocal on the subject since NASA
announced their decision to shuffle the universe. He said
in the Daily Telegraph:
“I have no fear that NASA’s latest transmission exposes
Earth to any danger from aliens. However, I do believe
that even symbolic transmissions from Earth deserve
broad-based discussion before hitting “send.” Although
one-time transmissions to distant stars stand little chance
of being intercepted, they do set a precedent for intentionally
making ourselves known to other civilizations. I think the
more important question is what we would want to say
about ourselves to other worlds, and that’s something
deserving of global input.”
Full article here:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/02/space-scientist.html
Finding Them, Finding Us
Really large transmitting antennas can bridge any distance.
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/080228-seti-finding-them.html