
wormhole
I saw Star Trek last night, and was generally impressed with the movie. Obviously, its meant for blockbuster entertainment, but still there’s more than a little science involved.
I recently met a new neighbor, actor Robert Foxwoth, who worked with Gene Roddenberry when he starred in the Questor Tapes, a precursor to Star Trek. I asked him where the technology for Star Trek came from, and he recalled visiting Cal Tech to get first-hand understanding of the science they were talking about. (I’ll leave some of my theories about Star Trek-style science being current but military secrets for another entry).
Sorting out what’s Hollywood fantasy and what’s hard core science is of course a dilemma, but here’s my take on it. (Caution: plot spoilers follow)
Time Travel: Spock appears as both his younger and older self in the movie, having to do with an encounter with a black hole and/or wormhole. This is pretty standard sci/fi stuff, and makes for great follow on movies, as they can now do whatever time loops they want without having to worry about prequel/sequel limitations. I’ve been doing a lot of research into the physics of time, and attended the 2007 International Society for the Study of Time meeting in Asilomar, Ca, and even created a wormhole in Second Life. I also attended part of the June 2006 AAAS meeting Frontiers of Time: Retrocausation: Experiment and Theory at University of San Diego, and did an interview with Princeton physicist York Dobbins on Wormholes, retrocausality, and stuff like that.
The notion of sending a whole human being, memory and all systems intact through a wormhole is a pretty fanciful notion. It would be far easier to putting someone through a blender, send the goo through a garden hose, and then reconstruct them on the other end of the hose. If we relax things to consider just bits of information from the future to their own past (what I am calling retroinformation), then things aren’t quite so challenging. In fact, the mathematics of laws of physics permit this to happen, despite how crazy and counterintuitive this might seem, the math allows it.
So, rather than expecting little green men with clipboards from the future to materialize, we might find that the future affects us in different ways. Perhaps this backward-flowing information appears to us in our consciousness or dreams, perhaps it affects the epigenetic behavior of our DNA.
This is a huge topic, and not one to be ignored because it sounds crazy. Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture seems to me to be a bizzare scientific enterprise, declaring a priori that the universe doesn’t work a certain way. Maybe the universe isn’t safe for historians, after all.
Transformational Optics: there was a scene in which the older Spock meets the younger Scottie; Spock types in the equations that Scottie later discovered which then allows them to transport to the Enterprise travelling at warp speed. There was a quick line thrown in about “we didn’t know about the physics of moving space back then” or something to that effect. Apparently the Star Trek folks have been following the science of Transformational Optics and the work of Ulf Leonhardt at St. Andrews University in Scotland. It’s a little ironic that a Scottish Character talks about research at a Scottish University, even if Dr. Leonhardt is German. This work looks (cloaking devices, singularities, metamaterials) looks like a Star Trek writers dream kit, but its real physics.
Time Traveller Paradox: I got a little confused about how the older Spock managed to talk to the younger Spock without violating the time traveller’s paradox… for a future event to go back and cancel itself out is a paradoxical situation. (i.e. going back and keeping your grandmother from meeting your grandfather). But going back to create a positive event is not necessarily paradoxical. Going back to make your grandmother meet your grandfather, might be weird, but not paradoxical. If we flip the question around from “preventing the time traveller paradox” to “creating a self-consistent future” things change considerably.
’nuff on this topic now. I’ll be revisiting this topic in the future to modify it, I’m sure. Maybe even use it to create a self-consistent future.