The idea of instantaneous travel to other galaxies, times and dimensions has been bandied about by science fiction lovers hundreds of years before the Stargate was a twinkle in film writer Dean Devlin’s eye.
But is it really possible? GateWorld asked Bill Nye the Science Guy this very question in a recent interview, and here’s what he had to tell us.
“This idea that you could fall into a black hole, a place with so much gravity that you end up in another part of the universe at another time is quite charming, but so far from what we know about black holes you would die.
“But maybe it’s not a black hole. Maybe it’s [something else].”
“And you get into, if I may, the interstices, the places between the nodes of the network of mathematics, and who knows? This is another case where science leads us to this fabulous science fiction.”
Nye guest-starred with real-life astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in the recent Stargate Atlantis episode “Brain Storm.” He didn’t get to travel through a wormhole himself, but he is obviously acquainted with the idea.
“What goes on with relativity is sort of stranger than you could imagine from scratch,” he told us. “It’s so counter-intuitive, so outside of our everyday experience and yet obviously, so obviously true, that who knows what’s possible with black holes and space time and multiple universes and travel between them by just pushing the right button. It’s wonderful to think about.”
A noted environmentalist, Nye was thrilled with the idea of Atlantis, a series not even set in this galaxy, dealing with a real-world issue he is passionate about.
“The thing that I love about science fiction is it’s so hopeful,” he said. “Not all of it, but when you’ve got people flying around galaxies it shows you that humans will make it to the next level, and that’s what everybody wants.”
Stay with GateWorld for a lengthy audio interview with Bill Nye in the coming weeks, in which we discuss his appearance in “Brain Storm,” more on the phenomenon of science fiction, and a serious look into humanity’s impact on the planet.
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The stargate is technically a transverable wormhole. Matter as we know it can not survive a blackhole.
Transverable wormholes are closely related to the tunnels Enstien Rosen postilate, so called Einstien Rosen bridges.
perhaps the primier researcher in the area of transversable wormholes is Kip thorne. Although the verdict is still out on the possibility of these passages and is likely to be for some time until we have a better understanding of the processes involved. The basic premise as far as a star gate device is concerned, is to find one of these small primordial wormholes left over from the early universe, inject some kind of exotic matter into it to prop open the throat of the wormhole and somehow navigate through it before it collapses. there is nothing in general reality to prevent this. However some opposing views say that there would be a build up of virtual particle pairs which would make the hole very unstable and collapse it before any ship could transverse it. Again only a really good understanding of the nature of the universe is going to answer that question.
Thorne , garivation and warped space time is a good read, another good book that takes a different approach using brane geometries is warped passages by Lisa Randel. Also a nice explanation of m-thoery.
Stargate takes a novel approach is that a physical entitiy doesn’t really enter the wormhole but the physical person or ship is converted to energy and tranported through the passage startrek transporter style.
This form of teleportation is unlikely but no longer impossible. A few years ago it was thought that any form of teleporation violated what is called the conservation of baryons, I won’t go into detail on this, just understand that this was considered to be a fundumental law that prevented any form of teleportation along with the heisenberg uncertainty priniciple which says simply you cannot measure both the momentum and position of a particle. Changing one or the other upset the system. Quantum entanglement changed that. Now it is likely in the next hundred years humans will be able to sucessfully teleport something the size of a virus. Anything larger remains an insurmountable engineering problem. But the concept has moved from being a physical law violation to an “engineering problem” in less than 100 years.
So who to say a civilization with the capacity of the ancients, probably an emergent type III civilization (we are about a type .5) couldn’t figure out a way to capture and enlarge a primordial wormhole, and send an entangled object through the open gate.
The chance of humanity developing this type of tech in less than a million years is small, however there is always the possibility somewhere out in the solar system is the remnants of someone elses efforts.
michelle2 | January 5 @ 7:02 pm