午夜福利1000集合

AFTER months of social isolation, Zoom birthday parties and loved ones falling ill with the coronavirus, many of us here in the US are feeling exhausted and fearful about both the present and the future.

This is especially true for those of us who are Black/Afro-descended. We have faced not only disproportionate death rates from covid-19, but persistent, public and violent harassment from state authorities and vigilantes, making many of us afraid for ourselves and our communities.

As I have struggled to stay focused in the midst of what seems like never-ending public grief, I have caught myself wondering: could a wormhole help us get out of this mess?

In the popular imagination, a wormhole is a rip in space-time that provides a shortened pathway between distant locations in the universe. The lore goes that if you enter a wormhole, you could end up on the other side of the galaxy.

The idea of wormholes was popularised around the time that freeways were becoming an increasingly important feature of life in the US. For us, I think wormholes have always seemed something like 鈥渢he great cosmic highway鈥�. Of course, we know now that freeways are bad for the environment and were completely destructive to the communities that they broke up. What鈥檚 more, traffic on such roads has been a painful misery nearly everywhere that I have lived.

Yet there is still something exciting about linking parts of space-time together in a way that 鈥� at least in theory 鈥� facilitates quick travel between distant locations, providing a means for escape that defies the universal speed limit, the speed of light. A wormhole is conceptually more fun than a black hole because you can leave it. A black hole, on the other hand, is forever. Once you enter, you can鈥檛 escape because there is a point of no return 鈥� the event horizon.

In reality, scientists are fairly certain that black holes exist. We have extensive circumstantial evidence in the form of the behaviour of particles near galactic centres, which are moving so energetically that the best explanation for what we see is the presence of a black hole in the middle of it all.

Then, last year, the Event Horizon Telescope took an image that is most likely to be of the edge of a black hole. But while black holes almost certainly exist, wormholes aren鈥檛 so likely.

鈥淭he lore goes that if you enter a wormhole, you could end up on the other side of the galaxy鈥�

The first wormholes 鈥� also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, after Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen 鈥� were understood as a mathematical solution to one of Einstein鈥檚 equations, which connected black holes and a sort of hypothetical, mirror-image version of them called white holes.

Just as black holes can be entered but not exited, white holes can be exited but not entered. The idea that wormholes link black and white holes together is delightful, but it has the problem that the connections would be unstable.

Wormholes, if they are real, would collapse if anything traversed them at slower than the speed of light 鈥� that is to say, if anything with mass did. Plus, just like black holes, it would be hard to get close to one.

There is hope for wormholes, however. Early research about them focused on models that only accounted for gravity in an empty space-time. Once we added quantum mechanics into the equation, scientists including Stephen Hawking hypothesised that wormholes may live longer.

An alternative fix would be to introduce an exotic form of matter that exists everywhere, but it would have to be something different from dark matter or dark energy, and there is no evidence for something like that.

Research on these topics continues, but I don鈥檛 expect to be able to make use of a real wormhole any time soon, and I have little hope for observational evidence of one either.

That said, wormholes can still provide a useful escape. Regular readers of this column know that I am a big fan of Star Trek, and my favourite series in the franchise is Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (DS9), which imagines the diplomatic, militaristic and spiritual possibilities of the Federation鈥檚 management of a wormhole.

Early in the series, we learn that Commander Benjamin Sisko, the first Black lead of a Star Trek show, is known by and important to the Prophets, the space-time entities that live in the wormhole.

The story that unfolds over the next seven seasons sends a strong message: it is a Black person, in part through his relationship with the Prophets, who will help save the alpha quadrant from destruction. When I am feeling hopeless about our conditions on Earth, the story of DS9 and its wormhole provides a valuable escape 鈥� and an inspiring vision of the future.