![]() ![]() Such a tiny thing with so much more mass than a typical atom would sink into the Earth or fly off into outer space, unconstrained by the walls of a box or of a room. What CERN can actually do with its beams doesn’t even come close to what is needed.Īnd again, even if you could make a black hole this size, what next? You still couldn’t control it. It’s not squeezed, or squeezable, into an atom-sized box. While CERN’s proton beams do carry as much energy as a freight train, that energy is spread out around 15 miles (27 km) of the circular tubes that make up the Large Hadron Collider. Lots of energy would have to be focused all at once into an atom-sized region. Well, even to make a black hole the size of an atom, far too small for a pathogen, lies far beyond the capabilities of CERN, even in extremely optimistic scenarios. Micro-Portals?īut even if we can’t have big wormholes, what about a wormhole the size of, say, a virus? Maybe scientists could be making those? Hmm… perhaps dangerous pathogens could leak through to Earth from a distant planet’s bachelor’s refrigerator? And don’t go very close unless you know what you’re doing you could easily fall in and never return. A human-sized doorway to somewhere else would represent a risk to the entire planet’s present and future, so you’d have to store it far away in distant space. In reality, a wormhole’s far less polite, with no intention of staying put on the Earth’s spinning surface, and with no qualms about ruining your laboratory and a lot more all around it. In science fiction, portals sit on the ground and wait for you to walk through them. Moreover, were scientists to make one, they’d find it very hard to control. ![]() There’s no evidence that nature has ever made a wormhole that you could actually travel through, and it’s not at all clear how humans could make one even in principle. These challenges with black holes are bad enough, but at least we know that nature does make big black holes. There is, after all, the risk of kicking the Earth out of orbit and into the Sun. I suspect, also, that environmental agencies are going to insist on a lengthy permitting process if we want to bring something with so much mass into the Solar System. ![]() Be warned, though: a check of Amazon reveals that there are currently supply chain issues, and delivery is not free even with Amazon Prime. At least it shouldn’t be too hard to get the planet we know nowadays that the universe has lots of them out there, ripe for the taking. I’m not sure yet how we’ll obtain the technology or the energy required to crush something that large, but, hey, let’s write a grant proposal and maybe Elon Musk will fund it. Is there another approach? Sure! All we have to do is obtain a Saturn-sized planet and shrink it down to the size of a dinner table. Even if you magically converted the Earth’s entire rest mass, via E=mc 2, into the energy of two beams of particles, and funneled the two beams into a small place all at the same time, you still couldn’t even make a human-scale black hole. While CERN’s electricity budget is big, you’ll run through it in a hurry there’s not that much energy on Earth, or even in Earth. A doorway-sized black hole would have mass comparable to that of the planet Saturn, a hundred times larger than our own planet. For example, if we want to get a rough idea of what it might take to make a wormhole whose exit is the size of a doorway, let’s ask what it takes to make a black hole of that size. The amount of energy required to bend space into a new shape can be enormous. At the heart of all of them, there’s a basic and fundamental problem: bending and manipulating space isn’t easy. However, the concept comes with immensely daunting conceptual and practical challenges. It’s allowed by the math of Einstein’s theory of space and time and gravity. The notion of a “wormhole”, a sort of tunnel in space and time that might allow you to travel from one part of the universe to another without taking the most obvious route to get there, or perhaps to places for which there is no other route at all, isn’t itself entirely crazy. That obstacle is the rigidity of space itself. If we’re talking about a kind of tunnel that human beings and the like could move through, then there’s a big obstacle in the way. Is it possible that the particle physicists hard at work near Geneva, Switzerland, at the laboratory known as CERN that hosts the Large Hadron Collider, have opened a doorway or a tunnel, to, say, another dimension? Could they be accessing a far-off planet orbiting two stars in a distant galaxy populated by Jedi knights? Perhaps they have opened the doors of Europe to a fiery domain full of demons, or worse still, to central Texas in summer? Mortals and Portals
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