Tuesday, May 4, 2010

There are tiny crevices, wrinkles in time

In The Daily Mail, Stephen Hawking writes that time travel may be possible.
Since time and space are “wrinkled”, people might use these wrinkles as shortcuts in time:
 
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it’s easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it’s also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.
Which reminds me of 'A Wrinkle in Time' (1962) by Madeleine L'Engle , one of the first science- fiction books I ever read.

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