Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?

[The Doctor]

Got this through a yahoo group. I found it quite interesting. Enjoy.

A long time ago, in a universe much larger than our own, a giant star collapsed. Its implosion crammed so much mass and energy together that it created a wormhole to another universe. And inside this wormhole, our own universe was born. It may seem fantastic, but a theoretical physicist claims that such a scenario could help answer some of the most perplexing questions in cosmology.

A number of facets about our universe don't make sense. One is gravity. Scientists can't construct a mathematical formula that unites gravity with the three other basic forces of nature: the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Another problem is dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that seems to be expanding our universe at an accelerating rate, even though gravity should be contracting it or at least slowing the expansion.

These conundrums may be a result of stopping the search for the riddle of the cosmos at the big bang, says Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington. The big bang theory holds that our universe began as a single pointâ€"or singularityâ€"about 13.7 billion years ago that has been expanding outward ever since. Perhaps, Poplawski argues, we need to consider that something existed before the big bang that gave rise to it.

Enter the wormhole. According to Poplawski's calculations, the collapse of a giant star in another universe could have created a wormhole, a space-time conduit to another universe. Between these two openings, conditions could have developed that were similar to those we associate with the big bang, and therefore our universe could have formed within the wormhole.

Such a scenario could address the quandaries about gravity and the expanding universe. If another universe existed before our own, gravity could be traced back to a point where it did unite with the nuclear forces and electromagnetism. And if our universe is now expanding toward the other end of the wormhole, this movementâ€"rather than the elusive dark energyâ€"could account for our expanding universe.

The calculations need further refinement, admits Poplawski, who will publish his findings on Monday in Physics Letters B. For one thing, they need to describe how the wormhole formed in the first place. And don't get any ideas about traveling between the universes, Poplawski adds. The physics of wormholes are similar to the physics of black holes. If you could ever pass through the event horizon of the wormhole to visit the universe on the other side, you could never return. "You will be stuck," he says.

Cosmologist Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, won't even go that far. He thinks the way the paper treats the gravitational collapse into a wormhole is a bit "contrived." It would be difficult to imagine the idea has applications "beyond pure theory," he says.

Nevertheless, theorist Eduardo Guendelman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, finds the paper's way of describing the junction of two universes "very instructive." The key question, Guendelman says, is whether the matter necessary to construct the wormhole exists.

-http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/does-our-universe-live-inside-a-.html?etoc

[Chewbie Chan]

That reminds me of something. Unfortunately the article is no longer open to view unless you are a subscriber, but New Scientist ran with an article related to the Holographic Principle, our Universe may be a giant hologram (possibly inside a giant blackhole).

Fascinating ideas, these. What I find most fascinating is the notion our universe, vast as it is, is a bubble inside something else, a subset of a much greater uni/multi-verse that is beyond our horizons.

[Faradaympp]

I suppose that this scenario is just as probable to be correct as any other. It's true that physicists have not been succesfull in the unification of gravity along with the other three forces but string theory is promising in that respect. As for dark matter, it is slightly strange that an invisible and undetectable force makes up 94%(I think) of the observable universe. Dark matter has not been proven to exist everyone supposes it exists because it was necessary to introduce a force to explain the inconsistencies in the theory of general relativity. It does a perfect job at explaining these inconsistencies and has no real downside(other than the slight inconvenience of not being provable). However a scientist living in Ontario, Canada has proposed a theory that could remove the necessity of dark matter. John W. Moffat proposed a universe where the speed of light was not a constant, this simple change completely eliminates the need for dark matter and describes all observable phenomenon as well as the dark matter assisted theory of relativity. This theory also has the added feature of eliminating the information paradox created by black holes.

The idea thet our universe burgeoned off another is not a new idea, inflation predicted that universes could constantly be breaking off other universes to create a virtually limitless multiverse. It's entirely possible that this theory is correct and it does merit further investigation but there are already theories in place that predict the effects of this one. Still thank you for biringing this to my attention.

P.S. For any who are interested John W. Moffat wrote a book detailing his theory, it's called Reinventing Gravity.

[kokaki1g]

Yahoo is unreliable and full of trolls. Wormholes can't house a universe because a wormhole is used for faster than light travel, not holding entire planes of reality. Carl Sagan said so in his "Pale Blue Dot video" [youtube:3sizx1dd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFMrNdj1yY[/youtube:3sizx1dd]

[SSY]

Yahoo is unreliable and full of trolls. Wormholes can't house a universe because a wormhole is used for faster than light travel, not holding entire planes of reality. Carl Sagan said so in his "Pale Blue Dot video" [youtube:23kgokn6]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnFMrNdj1yY[/youtube:23kgokn6]

Worm holes are purely speculative entities, no one knows for starters, if they exist, if they can exist (you need a really weird metric space tensor to make it work), and even if they did, what the hell they would be like.  TV is not the best place to learn physics, libraries are.

[justinadward]

I agree with SSY. I have read somewhere about the warmholes and it's as per that note it's possible warmholes can house a universe. Warmhole is a quantum with new class of energy but it doesn't meant that it can't hold universe.