Wormholes and Dimensions (Stretch...)

Wormholes and Dimensions

Pillar's Stretch program for July 15th

(MacKenzie Place, 4:00 to 6: PM)

will explore the meaning of

higher dimensions in our lives.
We will utilize the Morgan Freeman
narrated series, "Through the Wormhole"
as background for discussion. 

Through the Wormhole explores the deepest mysteries of existence – What are we made of? What was there before the beginning? Are we really alone? Is there a creator? These questions have been pondered by the most exquisite minds of the human race.

 Through the Wormhole brings together the brightest minds and best ideas from the very edges of science – Astrophysics, Astrobiology, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, and more – to reveal the extraordinary truth of our Universe.

Facilitator:  Charlie Coon

Imagine that you're a science-fiction writer on a tight schedule. You'd like to play in the vast expanses of the universe, but you have too much scientific integrity to conjure up a warp drive or a DeLorean out of thin air. You're also concerned that your audience would get bored in the thousands of years that it would take for a spaceship to realistically travel the distances between stars. What you really need is a wormhole — a shortcut through time and space. Best of all, unlike most science-fiction tropes, wormholes might very well be real.

Seventy-five years ago today, Albert Einstein and his collaborator, Nathan Rosen, submitted a paper to the Physical Review with the goal of unifying gravity and electromagnetism. Although they failed to discover a theory of everything, they did something arguably more much important: By creating the first theoretical model of a wormhole, Einstein and Rosen allowed science-fiction writers — including Arthur C. Clarke, Madeleine L'Engle and the writers of "Babylon 5" and "Doctor Who" — to explore vast stretches of space and time in the blink of an eye.

Stretch…with discoveries in Consciousness

(July 15^th, 2013)

Wormholes

The name wormhole was coined by American theoretical physicist John A. Wheeler in 1957, based on an analogy of how a worm could chew a hole from one end of an apple through the center to the other end, thus creating a "shortcut" through the intervening space. 

The most common concept of a wormhole is an Einstein-Rosen bridge, first formalized by Albert Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen in 1935. In 1962, John A. Wheeler and Robert W. Fuller were able to prove that such a wormhole would collapse instantly upon formation, so not even light would make it through. (A similar proposal was later resurrected by Robert Hjellming in 1971, when he presented a model in which a black hole would draw matter in while being connected to a white hole in a distant location, which expels this same matter.)

In a 1988 paper, physicists Kip Thorne and Mike Morris proposed since that such a wormhole could be made stable by containing some form of negative matter or energy (sometimes called exotic matter). Other types of traversible wormholes have also been proposed as valid solutions to the general relativity field equations.

(Please email Charlie Coon if you wish to be on his

emailing list:  charlesrcoon@hotmail.com.)