But to them it was just a plausible-sounding phrase, not real physics. This was what the writers of "Star Trek" had in mind when they came up with the concept of a "warp drive" in the 1960s. The spaceship would still travel through the surrounding space at less than the speed of light, but the space itself would be moving faster than that. As Einstein explained, space itself can be distorted, so perhaps it's possible to manipulate the space around a ship in such a way as to subvert the speed limit. The result found its way into Sagan's novel " Contact" (Simon and Schuster: 1985) which was subsequently adapted into a film with Jodie Foster in the lead role.įortunately, there's a loophole in the cosmic speed limit: It only dictates the maximum speed we can travel through space. Thorne duly devised a way - possible in theory, but highly improbable in practice - that humans might achieve interstellar travel by traversing a wormhole unscathed. According to the BBC, Sagan encouraged fellow physicist Kip Thorne to come up with a feasible way to travel interstellar distances in a flash. The forces around a black hole would destroy anyone that came close to it, so the idea of actually traveling through a wormhole wasn't given serious consideration until the 1980s, when astrophysicist Carl Sagan decided he was going to write a sci-fi novel. In collaboration with physicist Nathan Rosen, Einstein theorized in 1935 that points of extremely strong gravity, such as black holes, could be directly connected with each other. It comes out of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which views gravity as a distortion of space-time caused by massive objects. But under its more formal name of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, the concept has existed as a serious theoretical concept long before sci-fi writers got hold of it. The idea of a wormhole -a shortcut through space that allows almost instantaneous travel between distant parts of the universe - sounds like it was created as a fictional story-driver. Traveling through a wormhole could be possible in certain gravity conditions.
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