clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

74 surfing through hyperspace
other instantly via a real connection that joins them together with undiminished
strength no matter how far apart the particles travel. Alain Aspect and his
colleagues confirmed that the property is in fact an actual property of the real
world. However, the precise nature of this faster-than-light quantum connection
is still widely disputed.
Wormholes
Much of the recent research on wormholes has been conducted by Kip
Thome, a cosmologist, and Michael Morris, his graduate student. In a scientific
paper published in the American Journal of Physics (see Further Readings),
they developed a theoretical scheme for inter- and intra-universal travel via
wormholes bridging the universe. These cosmic gateways might be created
between regions of the universe trillions of miles apart and would allow nearly
instantaneous communication between these regions.
Appendix B lists numerous uses of the fourth dimension, hyperspace, and
wormholes in science fiction. For example, Carl Sagan in his novel Contact also
uses the Kip Thorne wormholes to traverse the universe. The television shows
Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
have all used wormholes to travel between faraway regions of space. In Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine, a station stands guard over one end of a stable wormhole.
Cosmic wormholes created from subatomic quantum foam were also discussed
by Kip Thorne and his colleagues in 1988. Not only did these researchers
claim that time travel is possible in their prestigious Physical Review Letters article,
but time travel is probable under certain conditions. In their paper, they
describe a wormhole connecting two regions that exist in different time periods.
Thus, the wormhole may connect the past to the present. Because travel
through the wormhole is nearly instantaneous, one could use the wormhole for
backward time travel. Unlike the time machine in H. G. Wells's The Time
Machine, the Thorne machine requires vast amounts of energy—energy that
our civilization cannot possibly produce for many years to come. Nevertheless,
Thorne optimistically writes in his paper: "From a single wormhole an arbitrarily
advanced civilization can construct a machine for backward time travel."
Note that the term "wormhole" is used in two different senses in the physics
literature. The first kind of wormhole is made of quantum foam. Because of
the foam-like structure of space, countless wormholes may connect different
parts of space, like little tubes. In fact, the theory of "superspace" suggests that