Puny mortals tackle wormholes

One online entertainment magazine put its headline this way: “‘Thor’ collects $25.7 mil from puny mortals on Friday.” I was one of those puny mortals, egged by my nephews and niece to go see it.

Thor, like all other superheroes, had fantastic powers. This dude from Asgard, who did not look bad at all, had a gadget. He had some mighty hammer that must have had some kind of brain and some rocket booster because it “knew” who was worthy of it and flew in that direction. The hammer can also whip up the fiercest spiraling columns of wind that could rearrange a landscape here and in other “realms.” It can demolish anything and anyone of all imaginable sizes and forms. Most of all, it, along with Thor and his other friends from Asgard, can travel across the “nine realms.” These nine realms represent different parts of their universe that are so distant from each other that they are, for all intents and purposes, unreachable. But of course the movie found a way to solve that through “bridges” across these realms. These “bridges” are the artistic renderings of “wormholes.”

Wormholes are what Thor and his friends and his hammer passed through to go from one realm to another. In science talk, “wormholes” are just speculations given what they have observed in heavenly bodies. “Speculations” among scientists are like cocktail drinks — it keeps them busy as they figure out what is real. They nurse that cocktail thinking and hoping it could help them do actual experiments to turn it into science. So “wormholes” are not yet science. They have not yet been proven or observed.

You may ask, why then did Thor bother with speculations and not just use a spaceship? I think it was because Odin, the father of Thor, and King of Asgard read about NASA missions in the WideWormholeWeb and he was blown away by the costs. And since speculation is, in a sense, free, they decided to go with wormholes. (By the way, I have to say that Anthony Hopkins was so kingly in his portrayal as Odin that when he said “this hammer is a fitting companion for a king,” he could have said “this garlic crusher is a fitting companion for a king” and it would have been equally convincing!)

To understand “wormholes,” you cannot escape Einstein. When Einstein in 1915 theorized about gravity in his work called General Relativity, he said that gravity is not really a force but the result of space-time warping depending on the mass of objects. This means that gravity is not really pulling things toward each other but the mass of objects make “dents” in space which curves space-time. This “warp” is what we experience as gravity. This has been formally proven at least five times since then. In fact the last one, Gravity Probe B, which took over half a century to complete, was just recently published in the online Physical Review Letters. It proved that the Earth’s mass bends space-time and not only that, it even drags space-time with it as it rotates.

Because Einstein has redefined gravity, scientists then began speculating that since space-time is curved, wouldn’t it be cool if there were tunnels connecting two distant points which could make time travel a breeze? Thus, the idea of wormholes was born. It was called the Einstein-Rosen bridge then but another scientist gave it the name “wormhole,” as in a worm burrowing through an apple creating a tunnel to travel through instead of having to go around the apple. It was no contest between “Einstein-Rosen bridge” and “wormhole” in terms of which name the public preferred. Thor, his friends and his hammer went through their “bridges” with all their parts intact and alive (even the hammer). But according to scientists’ computations, if wormholes were real, they will not only suck you, they also promise to crush you. Thus, whoever will receive you on the other end would have to get their money back and no amount of insurance here will make financial sense.

So Einstein’s General Relativity is something that folks in Asgard would have been taught in kindergarten because they (young testosterone-laden dudes like Thor and his friends) are so nonchalant about wormholes. That stands in contrast with this realm where most earthlings think science is a worldview for only a few and that Einstein was a cute genius, who still had time to stick his tongue out for a photo.

As I wrote this, a physicist whose area is General Relativity, hit me on the shoulder with his newspaper and asked what I was doing. Thor has his hammer but this guy had a rolled newspaper and a really good scientific mind willing to teach someone like me. Thor, I think I will stick around puny mortals a while more. I have a few friends who are puny like me but foolish enough to think about really “large” things like wormholes. (But it’s another story if Odin invites me.)

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