Roland Michel Tremblay

Sci-Fi Helper

This report on the Net: www.themarginal.com/paralleluniverses.htm

Download a doc version: www.themarginal.com/paralleluniverses.doc

 rm@themarginal.com     www.themarginal.com

            Star Trek The Next Generation: Parallels (season 7, episode 163)

            Original Star Trek: Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 39)

            Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Crossover (season 2, episode 443)

            Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Shattered Mirror (season 4, episode 492)

            Star Trek Voyager: Deadlock (season 2, episode 137)

            Stargate SG-1: There But For the Grace of God (season 1, episode 119)

            Stargate SG-1: Point Of View (season 3, episode 306)

I have watched almost every Sliders’ episodes up to the moment where they changed all their characters. It was not the same after that and I could not follow it anymore. Unfortunately I did not record the first ever episode where they would talk about the remote control but I have seen it. To my knowledge, they have not explained scientifically how the remote control works. That is what I would like to verify by watching it again, but I don’t believe they gave us much information. There was one other episode where the Professor tried to explain the parallel universes and get the credit for the technology, I recently saw that episode and I still don’t think they explained it. Here is all I found about it on the net:

“Quinn Mallory, while working on an anti-gravity machine (device), accidentally creates a portal to a parallel universe.”

“While researching anti-gravity, brilliant grad student Quinn Mallory accidentally opens an inter-dimensional portal, which sends him and three companions on a cosmic roller-coaster ride to alternate Earths.”

Now, how would an anti-gravity device open an Einstein-Rosen Bridge (a wormhole) to a parallel universe, your guess is as good as mine. It is not like the Antimatter propulsion system of the Enterprise, it cannot really produce the energy you need in order to open a wormhole. The only thing that could happen if you could really invent an anti-gravity device, is that magnetic fields would be distorted. Well, a lot of strange things could happen as a consequence. Usually time runs faster or slower, and space could be warped and distorted. Ultimately I suppose you could warp space to an extent that a wormhole would open and I suppose that this is how they explain it in Sliders. Or perhaps they meant an antimatter device to justify the energy needed in order to open the wormhole, like on the Enterprise. The annihilation of the matter with the antimatter produces the huge amount of energy needed to warp space.

One thing though, every story about UFOs we hear these days, about their possible way of propulsion and all the side effects of their engine, appear to be related to high magnetic fields and antigravity devices. People report time slowing down, time going faster, space being distorted, ships moving in odd directions, no noise, and ships being multiplied when moving because they would be going faster than the speed of light. If these ships really go from one solar system to another, whatever how they do it, they appear to be using antigravity devices and high magnetic fields. Ultimately that could also be the technology we need in order to open a wormhole or to warp space.

You would need negative energy forces (still theoretical), exotic matter (still theoretical), incredible amount of energy we cannot produce today, and the wormhole itself would need to be artificially maintained. They cannot be a natural phenomenon. Unless of course you dissociate yourself from the wormholes of the movie Contact (Kip Thorne wormholes). They invented the concept and this is how wormholes can exist from their definition. You could always invent your own type of wormhole and explain it differently. There are still a lot of mystery in this world and many phenomena that we have not yet identified. Whenever we discover something in science today, we are always completely surprised by what we find. Things we thought impossible are suddenly happening, things we could not even have imagined happen. Ultimately you can find other ways than wormholes to reach your parallel universes.

Well, this is Science Fiction and your audience is not gullible. They will question everything. This does not mean you cannot use a remote control to open a wormhole like in Sliders, but it means that you have to justify it very well. Now, I sincerely believe that new science will not come from those high energy power stations they have built, but from simple ideas and simple experiments. Because it is all down to discovering how the universe and the laws of physics work. Think of a different way to explain everything, and a remote control is all you will need to create a huge amount of energy, open a wormhole, distort reality or go to a parallel universe. How you explain it is crucial and needs to be groundbreaking. Even, just having your character saying that most great discoveries in science are made of small things and little equipment, will add credibility. What is difficult is how you picture the universe, the physics that explain the world you live in. Once you understand it, you can manipulate it quite easily.

If you are still concerned, your remote control could also just be the tip of the iceberg. It could be the mean to activate a powerful machine somewhere else or even a powerful satellite in orbit. Then you have a laser beam striking someone from space or an energy field of some sort sending someone into a parallel universe.

There is also the concept of Mind over Matter. You could easily have a device over your heads and the remote control or hand device could help focus your mind in order to create a shift into another universe (I mean help you switch universe). In this case you could be talking about psychological problems that parallel universes appear to be able to explain, like multiple personality syndrome and schizophrenia (where you would obviously see real people but in parallel universes). There is interesting information about parallel universes on this webpage:

-An alternate reality, another possible outcome of our reality. There could be many parallel universes super-imposed in our space and time.

-Because of the weird phenomena observed in Quantum Physics where one particle can be at many different places at the same time. Also because many equations and theories only make sense if parallel universes exist. This is the case of the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

-Particles appear to vanish and appear out of the nothingness of space which suggests that they might be going and coming to and from parallel universes.

-The most likely candidate to explain everything in science: the unifying theory for the very large and the very small (TOE - theory of everything), is Superstring theory which accounts for at least 10-11 dimensions. This also works better if a multiverse exists.

-Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormholes, vortex) (a lot of energy)

-Opening a rift (or a window) in the spacetime continuum (a lot of energy)

-Playing with electromagnetic fields (strong magnetic fields) distorting space and time

-Getting out of phase with reality (see the solution 2 of my Invisibility report)

-Mind over matter in order to make your body vibrate at another frequency (see the solution 7 of my Invisibility report)

NOTE: Though this report is about invisibility, you could quite easily replace being invisible as if you were in a parallel universe. Many of the solutions and ideas could help you to justify being in a parallel universe (especially solution 1, 2 and 7).

Has there ever been any occurrence of someone going into a parallel universe?

-Not to my knowledge. But what about ghosts, people finding themselves in different time period, people becoming invisible and déjà-vu phenomenon? You could add schizophrenic people hearing voices and seeing people that others cannot see.

Yes, there are a lot in mathematics and physics. It seems to pop up all the time in theory. Quantum computers are also a proof. At the moment quantum computers are using the weird phenomena observe in the Quantum World in order to process information, they are basically using computers in parallel universes. At the moment they are using up to 64 computers in parallel universes and prove that parallel universes exist. Soon it will be a huge amount of computers in parallel universes that these quantum computers will be using to make complex calculations in seconds instead of years. All the info at this URL:

-If you are not satisfied with your own life, if you made mistakes you cannot correct, if you lost someone that you loved, if you wish to change anything in your life, you might want to go to a parallel universe hoping that the grass will be greener. But as the expression says, it is seldom the case and you could find yourself in a worse situation.

-Often it is because the problem is yourself. Your attitude towards life, your actions that have terrible consequences. And unless you change your nature or your attitude towards life, no other parallel universe could change anything to your life. It could in theory give you a second chance if you do intend to change, but wouldn’t it be preferable to change in your own universe first? And what about the ethic of stealing the life of someone else, even if this someone is your counterpart in a parallel universe? Unless you replace your twin when he or she is just about to die…

Star Trek The Next Generation: Parallels (season 7, episode 163)

Original Star Trek: Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 39)

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Crossover (season 2, episode 443)

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Shattered Mirror (season 4, episode 492)

Star Trek Voyager: Deadlock (season 2, episode 137)

Stargate SG-1: There But For the Grace of God (season 1, episode 119)

Stargate SG-1: Point Of View (season 3, episode 306)

www.startrek.com/library/tng_episodes/episodes_tng_detail_68632.asp

Worf returns victorious from the Bat'leth competition and walks straight into his surprise birthday party. He begins to feel dizzy and disoriented, and is confused when his cake seems to change from chocolate to yellow and an absent Picard seems to appear out of nowhere. Worf is later summoned to Engineering, where Data and Geordi show him how the Argus Array has been reprogrammed to spy on the Federation. Worf spots a Cardassian ship in the Array's imaging logs and prepares to scan the area, but suddenly feels dizzy again, and recovers to see Data and Geordi working on the opposite side of the room. Spooked, he goes to Sickbay to visit Beverly, and she states he is probably reacting to the concussion that cost him the Bat'leth tournament. Shocked, Worf tells her he received no concussion and hurries to his quarters to retrieve his trophy to prove he won the contest. When he gets there, he finds a trophy that reads "Ninth Place."

Beverly tries to ease Worf's worries by assuring him that his memory will return if he slowly settles back into his routine. He gets back to work, and is on the Bridge when he is alerted to an approaching Cardassian ship. Picard speaks with the Captain, Gul Nador, and explains that the Enterprise is in the area to repair the Array. Worf tells Picard that Nador's ship is the same one they saw in the Array's imaging logs, but Picard and the crew are confused — they never suspected the Cardassians of tampering with the Array. Frustrated, Worf fills Troi in on the bizarre turn of events when Geordi arrives and says that the Array's problem was a simple malfunction. Worf starts to protest, but feels dizzy again and notices a painting on his wall has moved and changed appearance. He experiences a wave of dizziness in which Troi's clothing changes, then another that leaves him on the Bridge with the ship at Red Alert and a Cardassian warship on the viewscreen.

Picard orders Worf to raise the shields, but he is too confused to do so before the warship fires. Riker takes over and retaliates, and while the Enterprise escapes, the Cardassians destroy the Array. A disappointed Picard confronts Worf about his failure, and when Worf mentions memory loss, no one knows what he is talking about. Afraid he is losing his mind, he returns to his quarters, and is surprised when Troi arrives and tells him that she is his wife! Telling her he has no recollection of their marriage, he explains what he has been going through and is gratified that at least Troi seems willing to try to help him. Later, in Engineering, Worf explains his experiences to Data, who points out that Geordi was present every time things went awry. They eagerly hurry to talk to Geordi, and are shocked to learn he is dead.

Still looking for clues, Data hooks Geordi's VISOR up to the diagnostic array, and Worf has another dizzy spell. He wakes up to find himself in a commander's uniform, and Data tells Worf that he has detected a quantum flux in his RNA. They report to Riker, who is now Captain, to explain this problem. Data says Worf's RNA indicates that he does not belong in their universe. Data and Wesley Crusher, who is now a part of the crew, discover that a quantum fissure in the space-time continuum is causing this. Hoping to find where Worf belongs, the crew scans the fissure with a subspace differential pulse. While they search, the Enterprise is attacked by a Bajoran ship, and the fissure begins to destabilize. Realities begin to merge into one another, and hundreds of Enterprises appear.

Data realizes the only way to stop this phenomenon is to find Worf's Enterprise and send him back through the fissure to seal it. They manage to locate the right ship, and Worf boards his original shuttlecraft, re-modulated to seal the fissure. Worf soon arrives aboard his Enterprise, happy to finally be home.

www.startrek.com/library/tos_episodes/episodes_tos_detail_68738.asp

Caught in the beginnings of an ion storm, Kirk, McCoy and Uhura interrupt their negotiations with the Halkans for dilithium crystals, to return to the U.S.S. Enterprise. Scotty beams the landing party aboard as a burst from the storm hits the starship. The transporter malfunctions, sending Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura into an alternate universe. In this world, they soon discover the "Galactic Empire" is maintained by fear and assassination. Now, aboard the Imperial Starship Enterprise, the four must find a way to remain undetected until they can return to their own universe.

Meanwhile, the parallel versions of Kirk, Scott, McCoy and Uhura have been beamed on board the positive U.S.S. Enterprise. Their behavior is so different from their counterparts that Spock immediately realizes something is wrong. He had the four imprisoned until the transporter could be checked and repaired.

On the I.S.S. Enterprise, the parallel Chekov is foiled in an attempt to assassinate Kirk. When Kirk refuses to give an order to destroy the Halkans, who have refused to give up their dilithium crystals, the parallel Spock becomes suspicious.

The Imperial Fleet sends a secret message to the parallel Spock, telling him to kill Captain Kirk and assume command of the starship. Finding an unexpected ally in the parallel Spock, Kirk continues to stall while his three comrades gather the information needed to send them back to their own universe.

Parallel Spock has no desire to become captain, and therefore a mark for assassination. Along with Lieutenant Marlena Moreau, who wants the parallel Kirk back because she is "the Captain's woman," they help return the four U.S.S. Enterprise officers to their own world. Before he goes, Kirk talks to the bearded Spock, telling him the advantages of a Federation-like system over the anarchy of this universe. Spock seems almost convinced that he should in fact get rid of his Kirk, seize control of the I.S.S. Enterprise, and manipulate the Imperial Starfleet into working toward a more civilized universe.

www.startrek.com/library/episodes_ds9.asp

After experiencing operational difficulties while traveling through the wormhole, Kira and Bashir find themselves in an alternate universe where the space station is populated by exact doubles of Garak and Odo, and is run by Kira's counterpart, Kira II. In this universe, they have no knowledge of the wormhole, and humans have no rights whatsoever. Because of this, Bashir is sentenced to manual labor, working under the sadistic, human-hating Odo II. Later, Kira II tells Kira about the last crossover, which occurred with Captain Kirk a century ago. That incident led to the formation of a powerful alliance between the Klingon and Cardassian empires in which Bajor is also a major player. Kira II tells Kira that she cannot allow Kira and Bashir to live, but Kira convinces her counterpart to spare them and let her try to find a way back.

Kira steals a moment with Bashir and tells him what she knows. Since a transporter accident caused the last crossover, he thinks they might be able to escape using another one, and tries to talk O'Brien's counterpart into helping him. Unfortunately, the beaten, put-upon Terran has little interest in risking the wrath of his superiors. Meanwhile, Kira almost succeeds in securing Quark II's help, but he is arrested by Garak, Kira II's aide, for helping Terrans escape the station.

Kira then meets Sisko's counterpart, who receives better treatment than the other Terrans because he runs missions for Kira II. Afterwards, Kira II reassures Kira that she has nothing to fear, and suggests they should become closer. Later, Garak II tells Kira that he intends to dispose of Kira II, and that he will let Kira and Bashir escape if she pretends to be Kira II, then resign and allow Garak II to take over. Garak II then reveals Bashir will be killed if she does not comply.

Kira hurries to Bashir and tells him they must find a way back to the Runabout and make their escape through the wormhole. She fills Sisko II in on Garak II's plan, hoping he will help out of loyalty to Kira II, but he is unmoved. That night, Garak II prepares to put his plan into effect at a lavish party thrown for Kira by Kira II. Meanwhile, Bashir is able to take advantage of an accident at the ore-processing plant where he labors, killing Odo II and escaping.

News of Bashir's escape soon reaches the party, while Bashir manages to locate O'Brien's counterpart, who decides to help this time. However, the two are caught and brought to the party to face Kira II. Despite Kira's pleas, Kira II sentences Bashir to death. When she turns to O'Brien II, he makes an impassioned speech, telling the assembled crowd what Bashir has revealed about a universe where Terrans have respect and dignity. His words move Sisko, who turns on Kira II and helps Kira and Bashir to escape. The two return to their universe, leaving Sisko and O'Brien's counterparts to fight for their rights in their own world.

www.startrek.com/library/ds9_episodes/episodes_ds9_detail_68902.asp

Jake can hardly believe his eyes when his father introduces him to a woman who looks, talks and acts exactly like his late mother, Jennifer. She and Sisko reveal that this is Jennifer — at least, her double from a mirror universe which Sisko once visited, where she was married to his now-dead counterpart. Sisko leaves the two of them alone for awhile. But when he returns, Jennifer and Jake are nowhere to be found. All that remains is a small device, which Sisko realizes is used for transport to the mirror universe. He activates it and appears on Terok Nor, the other universe's Deep Space 9, where he meets O'Brien's rebel counterpart and announces he is taking Jake home. Pointing weapons at Sisko, O'Brien replies that neither he nor Jake is going anywhere.

O'Brien tells Sisko they need his help in their fight against the tyrannical Alliance forces. The rebel group built its own Defiant, but is having trouble making the powerful warship operational, and the Alliance is due to attack Terok Nor in four days. Sisko asks to see Jake, who tells his father he came to be with Jennifer. Angry, Sisko takes Jennifer to task for using his son, but still agrees to help. Elsewhere, leading a fleet of Klingon and Cardassian ships, the Alliance Regent, Worf's counterpart, lashes out at Garak's counterpart for losing Terok Nor to the rebels. Garak swears his loyalty as they prepare to take back the station.

Sisko meets up with the counterpart for Kira, once Terok Nor's leader but now a prisoner of the rebels. Meanwhile, Worf learns about the Defiant's construction and increases the fleet's speed to the station. Back on Terok Nor, Jake grows more fond of Jennifer, despite Sisko's concerns, and Jennifer reveals to Sisko that she can't stop thinking of Jake as the son she'll never have. Their moment is interrupted by news that the Alliance fleet is less than eight hours away.

Needing another plan, Sisko asks Kira for help, reminding her that Worf and the Alliance probably blame her for the loss of Terok Nor. Kira tells Sisko that Alliance ships have targeting systems that are easily fooled, information he uses to create a diversion while finishing work on the Defiant. Jennifer assists him and talks about her deepening bond with Jake, then decides to return the child to Deep Space 9 and out of harm's way. The Defiant now ready, Sisko volunteers to lead its rebel crew in battle. Meanwhile, Jennifer prepares to send Jake home. But the pair encounters the evil Kira, who has now escaped and trains her weapon on them.

Kira plans to take Jennifer as a hostage in order to get back into the Regent's good graces — then prepares to fire on Jake. But Jennifer jumps into the line of fire, struck to the ground by the blast. Learning the truth about Jake and Jennifer's connection, Kira spares his life — but promises to collect on this debt later. Back on the Defiant, Sisko, O'Brien and the rebel crew force Worf and the Alliance to retreat after a fierce battle. Sisko returns to Terok Nor, but arrives to find Jake at Jennifer's deathbed. She summons the strength to wish him goodbye, then dies, leaving father and son to deal with her loss a second painful time.

www.startrek.com/library/voy_episodes/episodes_voy_detail_68892.asp

As Voyager enters a plasma cloud to evade approaching Vidiian ships, Ensign Wildman goes into labor and delivers a baby girl. But as the crew emerges from the cloud, a series of astounding events occur: the warp engines stall, the antimatter supplies drain, and proton bursts cause a hull breach. What's more, Kim is sucked out into space, Kes vanishes in a mysterious void, and Wildman's baby dies.

As the hull breach widens, the ship is forced to run on emergency power. Another proton burst hits and Chakotay orders everyone off the bridge. To her surprise, Janeway sees herself walk across the bridge, which she assumes is a spatial fluctuation caused by their passage through the plasma cloud. Janeway visits Wildman in Sickbay and admires her newborn baby, who appears to be fine. The crew also beams aboard an unconscious patient who's identical to Kes.

This Kes "double" reports the same series of astounding occurrences, which leads Janeway to speculate that there's another Voyager nearby. Apparently, a divergence field has caused all sensor readings to double and every particle on the ship to duplicate. Unfortunately, there isn't enough antimatter to sustain both vessels. Janeway alerts the other Voyager crew, led by a duplicate Janeway. After a merger of the ships fails, Janeway decides to go over to the other ship through the void Kes disappeared into.

The two Janeways meet and strategize their options. The captain of the more heavily damaged Voyager proposes to self-destruct her ship and crew to save the other Voyager. With the Vidiians closing in, the two captains know they must act quickly or both ships and crews will be destroyed. Meanwhile, the Vidiians board one of the Voyagers.

Desperate to steal healthy organs to help battle a plague known as the Phage, the Vidiians begin attacking crewmembers. One of the Janeway captains decides to act. She sets her ship on self-destruct and orders the duplicate Kim to take Wildman's baby through the void. The Vidiians are destroyed when the duplicate Voyager explodes, while Kim, the baby and the other Voyager crew are saved.

www.stargate-sg1.com/home/episodes/s1.html

Synopsis: While exploring an alien Stargate complex on P3R233, a world that appears to have been destroyed by the Goa'uld, Daniel Jackson discovers a slab that, when activated, turns into a shimmering mirror. He touches the mirror and gets a mild jolt but thinks nothing of it until he returns through the Stargate. Then, he finds himself in an alternate reality, a place that looks like Earth but where nothing is quite as it was. The most distressing difference is that this world is under attack by the Goa'ulds, who have wiped out half-a-billion people and are about to capture the Stargate Command. O'Neill faces-off against Teal'c, who in this reality is still loyal to the Goa'uld, and Daniel tries to escape through the Stargate with information that may save his world from the fate of this alternate reality.

www.stargate-sg1.com/home/episodes/s3.html

Synopsis : SGC is taken aback when an alternate reality version of Samantha Carter and the deceased Major Kawalsky are found in a secured building in top secret Area 51. To transport themselves to our present day Earth, they used the Quantum Mirror (previously seen in "There But For The Grace of God"). When the alternate Carter and Kawalsky are taken to SGC for debriefing, they can't believe how different everything is in this reality. Here Colonel Jack O'Neill is alive, whereas in their alternate reality he was married to Dr. Carter before his recent death at the hands of the Goa'uld. Teal'c is an ally rather than the enemy, Major Kawalsky has been dead for several months, and their Samantha Carter is a Major who is identical in appearance with the exception of her short hair.

Dr. Carter begins to suffer from temporal distortion, a side effect caused by travel through the quantum mirror. Major Carter determines that Dr. Carter and Major Kawalsky will die unless they are returned to their alternate reality. Unfortunately in their reality, the Goa'uld are swarming the SGC and returning means certain death. SG-1 must use their present day resources and knowledge to return with their new acquaintances and overthrow the Goa'uld.

(Note: before jumping on these ideas, keep in mind that they might be used in a movie coming out next year. Please contact me to find out if these ideas have been used or rejected for other options. I can always invent something else if you wish to do things differently.)

Yes, there is such a thing as almost infinite amount of energy contained in the vacuum of space, anywhere. And most likely we will be able to tap into this energy pretty soon. You could use this as the energy you need to open a rift to another world. It is called Zero-Point Energy (ZPE) and you can read all about it here:

You could also talk about cold fusion, which is a nuclear reaction produced in a test tube without any heat. But it was in the movie The Saint and the science to explain it at the moment is at an all time low. Nobody believes in it. Apparently people were able to do it but never to reproduce it. Nanotechnology could not be of help. It is basically very small robots that could in theory build something or rebuild something, from bio matter to industrial construction. I cannot really see this as helping you to open a rift to another universe.

Here is how you justify everything: your device will use the Zero-Point Energy produced by virtual particle fluctuations in the vacuum of space in order to create a multitude of microscopic wormholes by which matter can travel to a parallel universe. This is so great because the energy we are talking about concerns the energy of virtual particles in space that we cannot see and that flicker in and out of existence into perhaps a parallel universe. Isn’t this wonderful? Your character could have invented a way to use this energy in order to open a multitude of microscopic wormholes capable of shifting someone into a parallel universe, particle by particle. What is interesting is that where the energy comes from is where the micro-wormholes will be created, in the vacuum of space. It is a match made in heaven.

I don’t believe now that an antigravity device would be your best solution. Right now you would be tapping into the energy from the virtual particles contained in the vacuum of space (quantum fluctuations) in order to open a multitude of micro-wormholes. You are basically sending all the particles of someone into these micro-wormholes into a parallel universe. You found a way with a device contained in a suitcase to create those micro-wormholes that are a rift or window to a parallel universe. It could be a very nice high-tech suitcase like in the movie Deadzone when the President pushes a button to send the missiles to Russia.

There could be some buttons in the metallic suitcase and some sort of price gun (code bar reader) like the ones we see in grocery stores when they read the code bar. This gun could be attached to the suitcase by a twisted phone cord. What is needed to start the machine: set the frequency at which matter should vibrate or you could say the frequency at which the parallel universe is vibrating (this is in order to make sure they go to the right parallel universe) and sort of scan the person with the code bar reader in order to open the micro-wormholes that will disintegrate the person and send him or her into the parallel universe. I guess he should also scan the suitcase and anyone else he wishes to bring along in order to get everyone and everything he wants with him. Of course, all this is only limited by your imagination and your special effects department. You could use a laser gun if you wish and vaporize the persons and things you wish to send to the other universe.

 Zero-Point Energy Important Facts

Zero point energy has been called "the ultimate quantum free lunch" (Science, Vol. 275, 1/10/97). During the early years of quantum mechanics, Paul Dirac theorized that the vacuum was actually filled with particles in negative energy states (Proc. R. Soc. London A, 126, 360, 1930) thus giving rise to the concept of the "physical vacuum" which is not empty at all. Quantum mechanics also predicted that invisible particles could become materialized for a short time and that these virtual particle appearances should exert a force that is measurable.

Recently, ZPE was mentioned in Science (Vol. 282, Dec. 18, 1998, p. 2157) in an article called the "Breakthrough of the Year." Two teams of astronomers have confirmed that distant galaxies are accelerating apart. Furthermore, 2/3 of all astronomers now acknowledge the data as valid. Thus the cosmological constant envisioned by Einstein is being reconsidered and an antigravity force being postulated. Physicists have also interpreted the force as "the evanescent particles that flicker in and out of existence in ‘empty’ space that gives space its springiness, shoving it apart." Scientific American seems to agree ("Cosmological Antigravity", January, 1999, p. 53): "The aggregate energy represented by these ‘virtual’ particles, like other forms of energy, could exert a gravitational force, which could be either attractive or repulsive depending on physical principles that are not yet understood." The cosmological constant represents energy inherent in space itself and coincidentally is almost exactly equal to the average density of ordinary matter in the universe (10^-29 gm/cc), at this particular time in its evolution.

Dr. Forward subscribes to the classical notion that there is no known limit to the electromagnetic wavelength or frequency in the vacuum. What we see from Dr. Puthoff's approach to this is that he supports the majority view of a cutoff, which is based on Sakharov's work. The cutoff frequency (perhaps considering hf=mc²) is called the Planck frequency which is around 10⁴³ Hertz. This opposes what we see as far as Moray King (in the book, Tapping the Zero Point Energy) and Dr. Forward saying that there is an infinite amount of energy available. In a later section we will see that Dr. Puthoff's theory derives gravity, inertia, heat, and also electricity directly from ZPE considerations. In Dr. Forward's paper, he suggests using micro-fabricated sandwiches of ultrafine metal dielectric layers. He also points out that ZPE seems to have a definite potential as an energy source.

History was made on 12-31-96 when for the first time ever, ZPE was the subject of a U. S. patent (#5,590,031). Dr. Frank Mead, from Edwards AFB, has designed receivers to be spherical collectors of zero point radiation with hemisphere reflectors of beat frequencies. He states that

"zero point electromagnetic radiation energy which may potentially be used to power interplanetary craft as well as provide for society’s other needs has remained unharnessed."

Proposing to convert zero point electromagnetic radiation to electrical energy, […]

This is what I found in a book called “Achilles in the Quantum Universe” by Richard Morris in order to justify these microscopic wormholes you can use to justify how we can travel to a parallel universe:

Page 200:

          Don't forget, there is no such thing as "empty" space. Virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed everywhere. The vacuum is filled with the quantum fields associated with these particles. Further­more, energy, which can be calculated, is associated with all this activity. When this calculation is performed, the self-energy of the vacuum turns out to be enormous. Since mass and energy are equivalent, this energy should give rise to huge gravitational forces. These forces would not vary with distance; on the contrary, they would be the same everywhere. In other words, there would be a cosmological constant.

          When Einstein conceived of the cosmological constant, he associated it with repulsive forces. The constant can be either positive or negative, however, and the forces associated with it can be either attractive or re­pulsive. The forces associated with quantum fluctuations in the vacuum should be so great that the universe should never have been able to ex­pand beyond microscopic dimensions. One could say that accepted sci­entific theory predicts that the dimensions of the universe should be much smaller than those of an atomic nucleus.

          In 1988, the Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman published a paper en­titled "Why There Is Nothing Rather than Something" in which he pointed out that if microscopic wormholes connected our universe with an infinite number of other universes, then particles could presumably pass through the wormholes during their brief existence. Coleman calcu­lated that this would have the effect of exactly canceling out the cosmo­logical constant in our universe.

          Coleman's results created a great deal of excitement within the theo­retical physics community. He had found the first real evidence that other universes might exist. He had certainly not established their real­ity beyond any doubt. After all, his evidence was highly theoretical in na­ture. But he had shown that the assumption that other universes were real could lead to a solution to one of the most baffling problems of theoreti­cal physics.

Page 201-202:

[…]

          Stephen Hawking says that particles may acquire certain properties because they are constantly traveling to other universes through wormholes. Hawking points out that if particles are able to disappear into and emerge from wormholes, their masses will be greater than if the particles always remained within the same universe. Further­more, there would be similar effects on the particles' charge. If microscopic wormholes exist, they cannot be seen. Thus if an elec­tron traveled through a wormhole to another universe, it would seem to suddenly disappear. Again, this is something that is not observed. Elec­trons just don't suddenly vanish. But this does not contradict Hawking's theory, which is a theory of particle exchange. According to Hawking when an electron leaves our universe, a second electron emerges from the wormhole. Neither universe gains or loses an electron; they simply exchange particles with one another.

          Every electron is identical to every other electron. They all have the same charge and the same mass. Thus wormhole exchange is a process that cannot be directly observed. As far as we are concerned, an electron was there a moment ago, and it is still there now. There is no way of knowing whether it is the same electron or a different one. However, if calculations were performed that gave the correct values for the elec­tron's properties, such as mass and charge, we would have real evidence that wormholes and other universes existed.

          As I write this, such calculations have not been successfully carried out. All I can say is that it is possible to conjecture that particles might acquire charges and masses in this way. Naturally, there are other possi­bilities. For example, if the laws of physics vary from universe to uni­verse, particle charge and mass might be matters of chance. It could be that in some universes the proton weighs 1,836 times as much as an elec­tron, and in others it weighs five times as much. On the other hand, it could turn out that quantum mechanics and yet-to-be-developed particle theories will tell us that some values of charge and mass are more prob­able than others. As I write this, speculation about such matters has hardly begun. As a result, it is possible to do little more than cite the dif­ferent possibilities.

Not so very long ago, the concept of alternate realities was encountered only in science fiction. Today, the idea of the existence of an infinity of other universes, some of which may be very different from our own, is an ingredient of respectable scientific thought. As we have seen, no one knows whether such universes really exist, but the assumption they do allows us to deal with problems that would otherwise seem intractable. If there are other universes, the fact that the existence of life seems to de­pend on so many improbable coincidences seems less puzzling. If there are other universes, it may explain why the cosmological constant is so small. And if there are other universes, we may eventually discover why subatomic particles have certain properties. Scientists may even find out why the physical laws they have been studying for many centuries have the particular character they do.

You could explain the alternate universe as an antimatter universe which is the reflection of the universe made of normal matter, but at the moment in Quantum Physics everybody is talking about an infinite amount of parallel universes. This is what can be deducted from the fact that a particle can be at many places at once. And you never know, if there is a sequel to your movie or TV series, you might want to involve many parallel universes. Better keep your doors open.

As well, you would limit yourself a lot by saying that if a character from one universe meets his counterpart in another universe then they will annihilate each other. You could always say I suppose that the balance of matter in each parallel universe is important otherwise the whole universe could collapse. But to my knowledge there is nothing in science that could support that. There is always the possible cosmological constant of Einstein that is near zero and could change the laws of physics as we know it if more matter suddenly goes from one universe to the other, but I would not venture to say that. The whole purpose of the movie or the episode is to be able to go from one parallel universe to the other. Why would you want to impose limitations on yourself that could prevent you to do things in future scripts? As well, I think one human could not make a big difference considering all the matter there is in the universe.

Of course all the sci-fi stuff and the technology can be secondary, only a mean to tell a good story. Like Star Trek The Next Generation. It is as much about love, friendship, humanity, acceptance, rites of passage and sociology than science fiction. It has been said that Star Trek was a soap set in space. Get rid of the ship and technology and you still pretty much have the same stories and feelings. I suppose this is a positive thing, it is very important to have a good story and a good script. Let me say one thing though. Parallels from The Next Generation was 10 times better than the episodes Crossover and Shattered Mirror from Deep Space Nine because in TNG we could feel the science, it was explained to us. The science was more than a mean to tell a story, science was the story. That makes great sci-fi.

If you are looking for ways to oblige your character to go back to its own universe, I suppose you could still use my previous ideas and say that having opened a rift between two worlds renders those two worlds unstable. Also someone who goes into micro-wormholes might not be in perfect health once in a parallel universe. Strange things could happen to him.

Other possibilities, our micro-wormholes could only stay open for a certain amount of time and then you would lose your chance to ever go back to the original universe. If you were to use the device again, there is no way you could end up in the parallel universe of your choice. You could end up in a totally different universe instead (like if choosing where you go would be out of your control). So in that case you would not necessarily need the device again in order to get back to the original universe, the doorway or rift could still be open for 72 hours for example. You could still need the device I suppose to get the person to go through the micro-wormholes. But if the micro-wormholes shut for good, activating the machine again would bring you into a totally different parallel universe.

You could still talk about compromising the two realities, micro-wormholes could join together and create a bigger wormhole exerting strong gravitational or electromagnetic fields.

Or even the micro-wormholes could join together to form a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth of one parallel universe and spit it back into the other parallel universe via a white hole. Or both parallel universes could have a huge black hole linked together by a wormhole with a singularity in the middle crushing everything from both universes (or part of the universe anyway). Or strong gravitational and electromagnetic fields coming out of the micro-wormholes could affect the planet, the magnetic poles and the weather system. Both worlds could also annihilate each other like a particle and an anti-particle canceling each other out, but I don’t like this idea too much as, like I said before, we do not have here a universe made of matter and another one made of antimatter. We have many parallel universes existing on their own rights and they are made of the same stuff.

You could still talk about compromising the two realities, micro-wormholes could join together and create a bigger wormhole exerting strong gravitational and electromagnetic fields and eventually develop into the beginning of a black hole on each side of the wormhole. So it would be small at the beginning and could develop into swallowing the whole planet and solar system if not closed in time with the device. So both parallel universes will have the beginning of a black hole linked together by a wormhole with a singularity in the middle crushing everything that is sucked in there.

Of course there is a way to send everyone back in the black hole/wormhole as you can read below in the excerpt from the book HyperSpace from Michio Kaku. In the movie, I guess that going right in the middle of where the whole reversed tornado is happening could be the solution. In the movie The Philadelphia Experiment they use this heavy truck, almost a tank, in order to stay on land in order to reach the center of the funnel while the wormhole is sucking everything. Then they get out of this heavy truck and get sucked right in the middle, so they end up not being crushed by the singularity.

I would also have the effect of the black hole localized to where the rift has been open. Remember that we are talking about a baby black hole otherwise the planet would not stand a chance, it would be sucked in in no time. I would not make it global but I would say that if it continues like that, the whole planet will be sucked in and crushed at the singularity inside the black hole.

The effect of the micro-wormholes and having all the atoms of someone vanish into those micro-wormholes should be interesting enough as it should not be like in Sliders. When the micro-wormholes collapse together to form a bigger wormhole, you would then have something like a funnel, small at the beginning, that brings any small object inside with the wind. Then it would grow bigger like a huge funnel and then I think it should be from above your head and you could see wonderful images like a reversed tornado in which many things would be sucked into. At this point I believe you should go and rent or buy the movie Philadelphia Experiment (the first movie) because I believe this is the best image of a wormhole we have seen. The whole place is like a tornado, deserted as many things are already gone in the wormhole. Houses, buildings, etc. Even the images on the computer in Philadelphia Experiment are wonderful and you could get inspiration from that. Here is an image of how the two universes would be linked together and could be represented on a computerized image in the movie (it is from the book of Michio Kaku called HyperSpace):

This morning on the British television there was an episode of Stargate SG-1 that, if you get the chance to rent or buy, might be useful to your script.

If you decided to have a black hole near the Earth, then this episode shows you great images (better than the Philadelphia Experiment) and might give you some ideas.

Note that this episode is not about parallel universes, neither is Stargate SG-1 as a whole, but they do use wormholes and wormholes are a convenient way of going to parallel universes. Wormholes are not the only way in order to go to a parallel universe, you could just as easily have a window like a mirror in a frame. That is what they did in the episode Point of View of Stargate SG-1, they use an alien technology that opens a Quantum Mirror (as mentioned before). I do not believe that they explain how this Quantum Mirror works, but the use of the word Quantum is often thrown at us to justify the existence of parallel universes because it is at the quantum level (atomic world) that we have the only proof that parallel universes might exist.

www.stargate-sg1.com/home/episodes/s2.html

Synopsis: While attempting to save the members of SG-10 from a black hole on planet P3X 451, the SG-1 team activates the Stargate and exposes themselves to the hole's gravitational pull. Trying to break free, the team shuts down the gate's power and in the ensuing explosions Teal'c and Daniel are badly injured. Even without power the black hole's gravity continues to draw the SGC closer to the swirling wormhole. With the intense gravity field warping the space/time continuum, the SGC loses contact with the outside world and the Pentagon sends O'Neill's former mate Colonel Cromwell to investigate. Cromwell is tormented with guilt for deserting O'Neill during a Soviet mission and volunteers to partner him in the attempt to save the SGC. Time slows to a near stand-still inside the SGC, where only O'Neill and Cromwell are left. Carter scrambles for a solution before the SGC and then the Earth are torn apart by the black hole's gravitational tides.

At the very beginning, when Samantha explains to Colonel O’Neill what is a wormhole, she tells him about inter-dimensional travel (isn’t that annoying when O’Neill stops Samantha from telling us about the science?). I noticed as well in the book of Michio Kaku (HyperSpace) that he talks about two things: wormhole and dimensional gateway/dimensional windows. I still think that it is wrong to talk about inter-dimensional travel because you are not going from one dimension to another. The world basically might have 10 or 11 or 26 dimensions altogether and the other dimensions have all curled up at a scale smaller than a subatomic particle. We live in a world where quantum mechanics and relativity can be linked together in higher dimensions, because of those other dimensions, but we are already living in all of these dimensions even though we cannot see them. Going anywhere else using a wormhole or a window brings us in the same universe or a parallel universe with the same number of dimensions, not to another dimension.

Why Michio Kaku speaks of dimensional gateway is because the curvature of space - due to the fact that there are many dimensions - could open up a window (not a wormhole) in which you could see another parallel universe like if it was in a frame on the wall. He calls such windows “dimensional” because the superstrings theory is a theory of many dimensions in order to unite the grand theories of this world. So I supposed you could still say inter-dimensional travel, even though it is not exactly correct because you are not going from one dimension to another, you are using the many dimensions way of looking at the universe to make it possible to travel to a parallel universe. As well, I would not say at any time: going to another dimension, because this is incorrect.

The theory of relativity states that while in a strong gravitational field time goes slower. In the episode A Matter of Time the people on the other side of the Stargate are going in slow motion compared to us because they are in a strong gravity field caused by a newly formed black hole. The signals they send are playing in slow motion and need to be speed up to be understood here on Earth where time is normal. And the robot camera they sent in the gateway is transmitting what it films image by image. They cannot close the stargate and eventually the relativistic effects are extended to this side of the wormhole. The whole area on Earth where the stargate is - is running slower than the rest of the planet even though the strong gravity field is not being felt that strongly outside of the command control area. If the time dilation process was already so pronounced, then they would have been pulled apart by then, and Samantha Carter mentions this in the episode, she says that it is not possible.

Relativity is not a problem you should be worried about, though it is true that near a black hole suddenly time would be running at a slower rate. The whole planet could suffer the same fate, as well as the planet on the other side of the wormhole. So in theory everybody would be on the same time rate, so it would not go slower from our point of view, it would be like if everything was normal even though, compared with places like other planets, our time on Earth would be running slower. BUT!!! If like in the Stargate episode there is a black hole forming only on one side of the wormhole, then yes, there could be a time difference that could be quite important between both universes. I suggest you have beginnings of black holes (or black holes in formation, not established ones otherwise we could not survive for long) at both ends of the wormhole. If you really want to play with relativity, you could say that nearer the black hole in formation everything is going slower, or that suddenly time is running slower outside the area where the black hole is in formation. It would be like in the episode of Stargate though, and it might be heavy for your story.

Of course you can also just ignore it by taking into account that the time rate slowing down is a planet wide effect on both parallel universes, or decide to think that the time difference is not that big anyway and does not need to be talked about in the movie (it would only be big near the singularity). Your choice.

Can someone come from another dimension? This is the vocabulary from old sci-fi movie, when it was believed that our world had 5 dimensions instead of 4. It does not mean much today and it is even confusing. There are perhaps 11 dimensions now and most of the other dimensions are curled up into such a tiny ball that it is at the Planck length that these dimensions reside. If you were living in another dimension, where would you be? The other dimensions are smaller than the nucleus of an atom. I think it would be best if you talk about parallel universes, alternate reality, other universe, other reality, parallel worlds, alternate worlds, multiverse, crossover to another reality, etc.

One thing that is very important is to not talk about “another dimension” or “inter-dimensional travel” or anything to do with dimensions. This is past date and no longer relevant in the actual state of science. We are not talking about dimensions, we are talking about parallel universes, alternate universes, alternate realities, quantum realities, other universes.

I just finished reading some relevant sections of about a dozen science books and I realized that it would be simpler to scan the most relevant information and put it here. I know that this is long, you do not have to read it all. I just thought that if you are to write a script about parallel universes, it might be important to have all the facts about it before presenting your script. The only solution is to read this and you will have a clearer picture. For copyright reasons I tried to keep it short and I therefore invite you to buy those books as they are very interesting, accessible to a large public (since they are classified as popular science), and would certainly help you with your future sci-fi stories.

The three first excerpts are all about the episode Parallels of Star Trek The Next Generation. I know it sounds weird that I am bringing you a lot of information about this episode but in trying to explain that episode I feel that Andre Bormanis and Lawrence M. Krauss resumed perfectly everything the other books were saying. These three excerpts are essentially saying the same thing in different ways.

Starship Enterprise Science Log, Stardate 47393.5. Second Officer Data recording.

The Enterprise has unwittingly discovered what appears to be stunning confirmation of the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.

En route to the Enterprise after a short leave of absence, Lieutenant Worf's shuttle collided with a quantum fissure. The encounter only minimally damaged the shuttle. Mister Worf however, entered a state of quantum flux. For Worf, the dimen­sional barriers among the infinite number of alternate univers­es predicted by the many-worlds theory had broken down. All that was needed to propel him into an alternate universe was the proximity of a narrow-band energy emission. The emissions from Lieutenant Commander La Forge's VISOR provided the required energy trigger.

Once the conundrum of Mister Worf's interdimensional translocations was understood, the Enterprise of each parallel universe proceeded to the location of the quantum fissure. As Worf traveled through the fissure on a reverse trajectory, his state of quantum flux stabilized. Then each Enterprise used its primary drive system to generate a broad-spectrum warp field that effectively sealed the fissure.

Physics at the turn of the twentieth century-what we today '- call "classical" physics-conceived the universe to be a comfortable, predictable sort of place. The laws of physics could readily forecast the motions of the stars and planets as well as a falling stone. The universe seemed to run like an elegant clock, and everything in nature behaved according to a set of straightforward rules. Many physicists believed that there wasn't much work left to do in basic physics except fill in a few minor details.

When the theory of quantum mechanics was developed to explain the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it produced much excitement and no small degree of agitation in the world of physics. Experimental predictions based on the theory were remarkably accurate. But the foundation of the theory rested on principles that scientists who came of age in the late nineteenth century found extremely hard to accept. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle can sometimes be in two places at the same time; electrons can "tunnel" through otherwise insur­mountable energy barriers; two particles separated by light-years of space can somehow recognize each other's quantum states without communicating. Neils Bohr, one of the pioneers of quantum theory, once said, "Anyone who isn't shocked by quantum mechanics doesn't understand it."

Quantum mechanics upset the classical order by asserting that the fundamental particles that make up all matter obeyed a set of rules that were essentially statistical in nature. Quantum theory makes mathematically precise predictions, but they are predications about probabilities. For example, quantum theory can predict with great precision the probability that an electron will carom off in some particular direction after a collision with another particle, but it cannot predict which direction the electron will actually move after the colli­sion. Albert Einstein was particularly disturbed by the proba­bilistic nature of quantum theory. He summed up his objectives to the theory in his oft-repeated phrase, "God does not play dice with the universe."

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was an attempt to restore strict determinism to the world of physics. For simplicity, let's say there is a fifty-fifty chance of an electron having one of two distinct energy values (let's call them A and B), and we measure the electron's energy and discover it is B. Then, according to the many-worlds theory, there is another universe where the energy of the electron is mea­sured as A. This universe is in fact created when we measure the energy of the electron. It might look like God has simply tossed a coin and it came up A, but in this parallel universe he also tossed the coin and it came up B.

This is a pretty strange assertion, but it does remove the probability aspect of quantum theory, because all possible outcomes for a measurement or experiment do in fact occur. They just occur in other universes.

Critics of Star Trek like to point out that quantum-mechanical effects can almost never be observed in the world of "macroscopic," or human-scale, objects, and therefore Worf's universe-hopping odyssey could never happen. But this criticism misses the point. In a wonderful book written in the 1940s, Mister Tompkins in Wonderland, pioneering nuclear physicist George Gamow describes the strange adventures of a hapless character named C.G.H. Tompkins. Tompkins finds himself in all manner of strange "alternate universes," where fundamental constants of nature, like Planck's constant, have values substantially different from their values in our universe. The point of these stories was to introduce the reader to basic ideas in quantum physics. Gamow knew that, taken literally, the settings of the stories were impossible; if Planck's constant really were a very large number, the universe as we know it sim­ply wouldn't exist. But by granting himself a little dramatic license, Gamow was able to give his readers, in a charming and entertaining way, some sense of the meaning of these new and exciting ideas in physics. "Parallels" and several other Star Trek stories were written in much the same spirit.

Starship Enterprise Science Log, Stardate 3848.6. Science Officer Spock recording

A landing party beaming up from the surface of the Halkan homeworld during an intense ion storm was transported into a parallel universe remarkably similar to our own universe in terms of individuals and technology, but ethically ruthless. The landing-party counterparts from the alternate universe simulta­neously appeared in our transporter room.

Fortunately, Chief Engineer Scott, a member of the landing party, was able to re-create the parameters of the transporter accident using power from the alternate Enterprise's warp engines. The landing party returned safely to the ship, as their counterparts beamed back to theirs 

One of the problems with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is, how could this idea ever be tested? No one has yet devised an experiment that could prove or disprove the validity of the many-worlds concept. Many physicists (myself included) question whether a theory is meaningful if it can't be tested. The idea that parallel universes are con­stantly spinning off from our universe at every quantum turn is interesting, but until we can find a way to "access" those other universes, or convincingly show that they don't exist, the many-worlds idea will remain little more than interesting speculation. Most scientists today have come to accept the statistical aspects of quantum theory, despite Einstein's lament about God not playing dice. Chaos theory, a theory that examines the behavior of complex phenomena such as whirlpools in rivers, suggests that the apparent randomness one often encounters in nature may in fact belie an underlying order. And as the mathe­matician Ian Stewart notes in his book, Does God Play Dice?, if God did play dice, he'd win.

p.150

QUANTUM MEASUREMENTS: There was a wonderful episode in the final season of The Next Generation, called "Parallels," in which Worf begins to jump between different "quantum realities." The episode touches, albeit incorrectly, on one of the most fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics-quantum measurement theory.

Since we live on a scale at which quantum mechanical phenomena are not directly observed, our entire intuitive physical picture of the universe is classical in character. When we discuss quantum mechanics, we generally use a classical language, so as to try and explain the quan­tum mechanical world in terms we understand. This approach, which is usually referred to as "the interpretation of quantum mechanics" and so fascinates some philosophers of science, is benighted; what we really should be discussing is "the interpretation of classical mechanics" that is, how can the classical word we see-which is only an approx­imation of the underlying reality, which in turn is quantum mechanical in nature-be understood in terms of the proper quantum mechanical variables?

If we insist on interpreting quantum mechanical phenomena in terms of classical concepts, we will inevitably encounter phenomena that seem paradoxical, or impossible. This is as it should be. Classical mechanics cannot account properly for quantum mechanical phe­nomena, and so there is no reason that classical descriptions should make sense.

Having issued this caveat, I will describe the relevant issues in clas­sical mechanics terms, because these are the only tools of language I have. While I have the proper mathematical terms to describe quan­tum mechanics, like all other physicists I have recourse only to a clas­sical mental picture, because all my direct experience is classical.

As I alluded to in chapter 5, one of the most remarkable features of quantum mechanics is that objects observed to have some property cannot be said to have had that property the instant before the obser­vation. The observation process can change the character of the phys­ical system under consideration. The quantum mechanical wavefunc­tion of a system describes completely the configuration of this system at any one time, and this wavefunction evolves according to deter­ministic laws of physics. However, what makes things seem so screwy is that this wavefunction can encompass two or more mutually exclu­sive configurations at the same time.

For example, if a particle is spinning clockwise, we say that its spin is "up." If it is spinning counterclockwise, we say that its spin is "down." Now, the quantum mechanical wavefunction of this particle can incor­porate a sum with equal probabilities: spin up and spin down. If you measure the direction of the spin, you will measure either spin up or spin down. Once you have made the measurement, the wavefunction of the particle will from then on include only the component you mea­sured the particle to have; if you measured spin up, you will go on measuring this same value for this particle.

This picture presents problems. How, you may ask, can the particle have had both spin up and spin down before the measurement? The correct answer is that it had neither. The configuration of its spin was indeterminate before the measurement.

The fact that the quantum mechanical wavefunction that describes objects does not correspond to unique values for observables is espe­cially disturbing when one begins to think of living objects. There is a famous paradox called "Schrödinger's cat." (Erwin Schrödinger was one of the young Turks in their twenties who, early in this century, helped uncover the laws of quantum mechanics. The equation describing the time evolution of the quantum mechanical wavefunction is known as Schrödinger's equation.) Imagine a box, inside of which is a cat. Inside the box, aimed at the cat, is a gun, which is hooked up to a radioactive source. The radioactive source has a certain quantum mechanical probability of decaying at any given time. When the source decays, the gun will fire and kill the cat. Is the wavefunction describing the cat, before I open the box, a linear superposition of a live cat and a dead cat? This seems absurd. 

Similarly, our consciousness is always unique, never indeterminate. Is the act of consciousness a measurement? If so, then it could be said that at any instant there is a nonzero quantum mechanical probabil­ity for a number of different outcomes to occur, and our act of con­sciousness determines which outcome we experience. Reality then has an infinite number of branches. At every instant our consciousness determines which branch we inhabit, but an infinite number of other possibilities exist a priori.

This "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics-which says that in some other branch of the quantum mechanical wavefunction Stephen Hawking is writing this book and I am writing the foreword-is apparently the basis for poor Worf's misery. Indeed, Data says as much during the episode. When Worf's ship traverses a "quan­tum fissure in spacetime," while simultaneously emitting a "subspace pulse," the barriers between quantum realities "break down," and Worf begins to jump from one branch of the wavefunction to another at ran­dom times, experiencing numerous alternative quantum realities. This can never happen, of course, because once a measurement has been made, the system, including the measuring apparatus (Worf, in this case), has changed. Once Worf has an experience, there is no going back ... or perhaps I should say sideways. The experience itself is enough to fix reality. The very nature of quantum mechanics demands this.

There is one other feature of quantum mechanics touched upon in the same episode. The Enterprise crew are able to verify that Worf is from another "quantum reality" at one point by arguing that his "quantum signature at the atomic level" differs from anything in their world. According to Data, this signature is unique and cannot change due to any physical process. This is technobabble, of course; however, it does relate to something interesting about quantum mechanics. The entire set of all possible states of a system is called a Hilbert space, after David Hilbert, the famous German mathematician who, among other things, came very close to developing general relativity before Einstein. It sometimes happens that the Hilbert space breaks up into separate sectors, called "superselection sectors." In this case, no local physical process can move a system from one sector to another. Each sector is labeled by some quantity-for instance, the total electric charge of the system. If one wished to be poetic, one could say that this quantity provided a unique "quantum signature" for this sector, since all local quantum operations preserve the same sector, and the behavior of the operations and the observables they are associated with is determined by this quantity.

However, the different branches of the quantum mechanical wave­function of a system must be in a single superselection sector, because any one of them is physically accessible in principle. So, unfortunately for Worf, even if he did violate the basic tenets of quantum mechan­ics by jumping from one branch to another, no external observable would be likely to exist to validate his story.

The whole point of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (or any other interpretation of quantum mechanics, for that matter) is that you can never experience more than one world at a time. And thankfully there are other laws of physics that would pre­vent the appearance of millions of Enterprises from different realities, as happens at the end of the episode. Simple conservation of energy-a purely classical concept-is enough to forbid it.

p. 155

There is a common theme woven into much of our pop culture and mythology. It is this: that the world of our experience is a carefully concealed fiction, contrived to make us believe that things are what they're not. Underneath a mundane exterior, the protagonists of this world change their identity at will. They slip through walls, disappear and reappear again, affect events at vast distances instantaneously, split into many copies of themselves and recombine. The world of our perceptions is an elaborate show, put on for our benefit.

The X-Files? Men in Black? The Republican and Democratic Parties? No. I am referring to the Quantum Universe. This is the real final frontier, which must be explored if we are to one day comprehend the beginning and the end of time and the objective reality of the universe of our experience. The wildest dreams of science fiction writers aren't a patch on the peculiarity of the Quantum Universe.

Albert Einstein disliked the quantum theory he helped invent because of its "spooky action at a distance." As I noted in chapter 1 I, he had similar misgivings about ESP. Needless to say, this connection has not been lost on various ESP proponents, so that quantum mechanics has been invoked in this context many times. The important issue here is one that sounds like it might be more appropriate for prime-time television than for physics. It is called entanglement.

Whenever the wavefunction of a system of particles is made up of a coherent sum of different states, then within each state the configuration of one particle is correlated to another's (if one particle is spin up, the other is spin down, for example), and the particles are not independent: measurements of one particle will then determine what the properties of the other particle must be. This circumstance leads to what looks like a method of "spooky" instantaneous communication, even across large macroscopic distances-a communication that thus appears to move faster than the speed of light.

An example of such apparently untenable quantum behavior was proposed as a mischievous thought experiment in 1935 by Einstein and two of his Princeton colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. The best way to illustrate it is by imagining the creation of a two-particle system whose total spin is zero, so that the spins of the particles will point in opposite directions when they are measured. The wavefunction describing this system will contain a state in which particle A has spin up and particle B has spin down, and also a state in which the opposite obtains, with equal coefficients, so that the probability of measuring either case is the same. This wavefunction will persist as the particles move apart, as long as they are not disturbed.

What does this imply for a measurement of the system? Let's say that I measure particle A, which has a 50-50 chance of being spin up in advance of my measurement. When I do, I find that it is in the spin-up state. Since the combined spin of the two parti­cles has to be zero, that must mean that when the spin of particle B is measured, it will be spin down. If I had measured particle B before I measured particle A, there would have been only a 50-50 chance that particle B was in a spin-down state, so by measuring particle A first, I have changed the probability for par­ticle B's spin-from a 50-50 chance that it will be down, to a 100 percent probability that it will be down. Now for the kicker. What if particle B, which has been moving away from particle A all the while, is passing by Alpha Centauri, 4 light-years away, when I measure particle A? By choosing to measure particle A here, I can instantaneously influence what an observer near Alpha Centauri must measure!

A recent experiment done in Geneva tested this idea by mea­suring two "entangled" photons after they had separated by 10 kilometers. Sure enough, they remained correlated, with a mea­surement of one particle instantaneously influencing the configuration of the other.

How can this be? Doesn't it violate the rules of causality, about which I made such a big deal earlier in this book? Well, no. Since I do not have control over which spin configuration particle A will have until I measure it, there is no way I can use the spin to send any message which would influence a person measuring par­ticle B at Alpha Centauri.

Still, if you feel there is something bothersome in all this, join the crowd. Our classical intuition suggests that it should be impossible for the two particles to communicate faster than light, even if we can't use these particles to send superluminal mes­sages. However, from a purely quantum-mechanical perspective, the two particles were never really in individual states. We like to think of them as separate particles, but that's just our quaint clas­sicism coming to the fore. They are not separate entities; they are part of a quantum whole. Moreover, until I made my initial mea­surement, neither particle had either spin up or spin down; they were merely part of a combination that had total spin zero. My measurement of particle A is said to have "collapsed" the sys­tem's wavefunction, so that only one of the two initial combina­tions remains after the measurement. Up to and including this measurement, particle A and particle B and their mutually exclu­sive spins are entangled-that is, their joint configuration is described by a single wavefunction.

Now, if the universe is, at a fundamental level, quantum mechanical, are we not all part of some cosmic wavefunction? Every time I blink an eye, do I influence the state of everything else? This is a logical extrapolation from the phenomenon just discussed, and if it is true, then I may be a fool for making fun of astrologers.

Well, I may be a fool, but not for this reason. In fact, we know that the nonsense happening at a microscopic scale cannot effec­tively be the case at macroscopic scales-we know this just by looking around us. Each of the two particles in the system described above can be thought of, before measurement, as hav­ing both spin up and spin down, whereas the world of our expe­rience is nothing like this. My computer screen keeps sitting in one place staring me in the face, until sometimes I would just like to throw it out the window. It never, however, in all the years I have been writing, has appeared simultaneously in two places, at least while I was awake.

The classical world is classical. And that's what makes quan­tum mechanics so weird. How do we pass from the quantum world of elementary particles to the classical world of people? How, in fact, do we make measurements? When I expose a Geiger counter to a radioactive particle, the particle may exist in a sum (or, in the jargon of the field, a superposition) of different quantum states before the measurement, but my measuring appa­ratus never seems to. It either clicks, or it doesn't click. It never does both at the same time.

The prototypical example of the problem of measurement in quantum mechanics is somewhat hackneyed, but enlightening nevertheless. It is almost as old as quantum mechanics itself. The classical paradoxes of the theory were not lost on its creators. They refused to let paradox stall them, because the theory kept providing new predictions that explained the results of otherwise inexplicable experiments. In 1935, one of the quantum theory's inventors, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, composed what he described as a "burlesque," involving the untimely demise of a cat, which illustrates how ridiculous the quantum universe is if we entangle macroscopic objects with microscopic ones. Schrödinger's cat is in a closed steel box containing a vial of prussic acid mounted underneath a hammer, and also containing a tube in which is a tiny amount of a radioactive substance-enough so that within an hour's time there is a 50-50 chance that one atom of this substance will decay, thus freeing an electron, which will produce a response in a detector, which will relay a signal to the hammer, which will descend and crush the vial, releasing the poison and killing the cat. If the wavefunction of each radioactive atom is allowed to include a coherent sum of decay and no-decay states before we "measure" the system by opening the box an hour later, and if the health of the cat is clearly correlated to these states, must we not consider the cat to be in a superposition of alive and dead states?

Of course not. Except perhaps on The X-Files, no one has ever seen a superposition. Cats are either alive or dead, never both. There is a fundamental difference between a cat and an atomic ­size object. But what is it?

One answer has been the fodder for science fiction, because it suggests that our universe is infinitely (literally!) more complex than we perceive it to be. What better inspiration for fiction could one have? This answer, which goes under the name of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, suggests that the fundamental difference between a cat and a particle is that we can see the cat. Treating ourselves and our consciousness as quantum-mechanical objects, we can imagine that we, too, are entangled with the cat and the poison apparatus and the box. Before we observe (or "measure") the state of the cat, there are two coupled configurations that make up the wavefunction describing the apparatus, the cat, and us-no decay, live cat, a nice surprise for us when we open the box; or particle decay, dead cat, a sad sight for us when we open the box. When we observe the cat, we are collapsing the wavefunction to one of these two possibilities. Each time our consciousness acts, we fol­low one track out of what may be an infinite number of possible "branches" of the quantum wavefunction of the universe. We perceive a single universe, but that's because we are condemned to live in the universe of our perception. Our quantum partner lives in the universe of the alternative perception, where, if our cat lives, the alternative cat dies-and vice versa. A physicist friend of mine likes to say not altogether in jest that he finds solace in this view, because whenever he makes a mistake or misses a great discovery, there's some branch of the wavefunction in which his quantum partner hasn't.

If this conviction isn't sufficient solace, you might want, every now and then, to jump into one of these parallel universes, where things might be going better for you. This, of course, is the situa­tion Worf encounters in the Next Generation episode "Paral­lels," in which he finds himself alternately married to Deanna and single. As far as I can tell, it is also the context of a television series called Sliders, in which an intrepid group of adventurers gets to jump around from universe to universe; in these episodes, the characters are the same, but certain essential details are unnervingly different from week to week.

It is also, amusingly enough, a solution proposed by at least one professional physicist (and a lot of amateur ones) to the grandmother paradox, that plague of backward time travel. If you go back in time, but into a parallel quantum universe, then there is no problem with killing your grandmother, since your grandmother remains alive in the universe in which you origi­nated and to which you will presumably return. (In this case, one might be tempted to ask, What is the point of bothering to go back in time to kill your grandmother, since there will always be some universe in which she is hit by a truck?) 

The idea of many parallel universes is interesting, but the idea of jumping around between them probably doesn't hold up. The central tenet of quantum mechanics is that once the wavefunction has collapsed and one choice out of several has been made, there is no going back. Even in the "many worlds" picture, once you perceive reality you are stuck with that reality. This idea is directly related to a powerful constraint in physics called the Conservation of Probability, a principle that states something very simple: The sum of the probabilities for all different possible outcomes of some measurement must be 1 -that is, something must happen. Moreover, only a single result can be obtained for any measurement. Generally, any model that allows you to jump between branches of the wavefunction will violate this principle.

One of the reasons I don't pursue notions of parallel uni­verses and possible travel between them is that I think they're ill ­conceived, in the sense that Sidney Coleman suggested: They seem to be trying to explain quantum mechanics in classical terms, by making it consistent with our perceptions-rather than vice versa. What seems to me to be a more reasonable approach, in which an attempt is made to understand the classical world as an approximation of the underlying quantum world, purely in the context of the quantum theory itself, has taken some time to develop.

Some of the important insights have been arrived at only recently, 60 years or so after Schrödinger posed his paradox. Moreover, only the general framework of this picture has been worked out; it goes by the name of "decoherence" (not to be confused with what the reader may be feeling at this point). The basic idea is simple: The macroscopic world doesn't behave like the quantum universe; therefore, classical objects-the objects at macroscopic scales-don't involve superpositions of mutually exclusive possibilities.

How can this be, if macroscopic objects are made up of quantum objects? Well, it's a matter of large numbers and also of the constant interactions between all the constituents of these macroscopic objects. Let's reconsider the simple two-particle system with total spin equal to zero. The wavefunction is made up of two mutually exclusive possibilities: A up, B down plus A down, B up. But this entanglement persists only as long as nothing else interacts with the system. If particle B collides with particle C, in a process in which the spin of particles B and C can be exchanged (for example), then the correlation of particle A with particle B is reduced. If B has a million such collisions, with a million other particles, the original correlation with A will quickly be washed out. The system, and hence the wavefunction describing the system, will then evolve as if A and B are now independent. In mod­ern parlance, A and B will decohere. One can envision a coherent superposition of A and B reappearing momentarily because of a later interaction, but if there are lots of particles around, and lots of interactions, this possibility becomes increasingly remote.

While the details of the operations of decoherence on macro­scopic aggregations of many particles have not yet been fully worked out, the idea of decoherence seems eminently sensible. Not as much fun, perhaps, as having many parallel universes (with the number of independent universes increasing each time someone has a perception!), but infinitely simpler. And decoherence suggests that quantum mechanics solves its own problems­ that is, the classical limit is just the limit at which there are no coherent superpositions of mutually exclusive states for systems composed of large numbers of particles. The individual quantum states of the many individual particles making up the classical macroscopic system quickly decohere, and the wavefunction of the system evolves into a sum of many different states, but the states that describe mutually exclusive macroscopic configurations (for example, live plus dead cat) have random plus and minus signs and end up canceling out the sum. Moreover, decoherence resolves the question that began this discourse: Am I correlated in some quantum superposition with the cosmos-so that when the Moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, Peace will guide the planets and Love will rule the stars? No, I'm not. Decoherence assures that there are likely to be no coherent macroscopic superpositions of my state and Jupiter's in the wave­function of the universe.

 _________________

p.217

BLACK holes have recently seized the public's imagination. Books and documentaries have been devoted to exploring this strange prediction of Einstein's equations, the final stage in the death of a collapsed star. Ironically, the public remains largely unaware of perhaps the most peculiar feature of black holes, that they may be gateways to an alternative universe. Furthermore, there is also intense speculation in the scientific community that a black hole may open up a tunnel in time.

p.223

The density of a black hole is so large that light, like a rocket launched from the earth, will be forced to orbit around it. Since no light can escape from the enormous gravitational field, the collapsed star becomes black in color. In fact, that is the usual definition of a black hole, a collapsed star from which no light can escape.

p.224

The relativistic description of the black hole comes from the work of Karl Schwarzschild. In 1916, barely a few months after Einstein wrote down his celebrated equations, Schwarzschild was able to solve Einstein's equations exactly and calculate the gravitational field of a massive, sta­tionary star.

Schwarzschild's solution has several interesting features. First, a "point of no return" surrounds the black hole. Any object that comes closer than this radius will inevitably be sucked into the black hole, with no possibility of escape. Inexorably, any person unfortunate enough to come within the Schwarzschild radius would be captured by the black hole and crushed to death. Today, this distance from the black hole is called the Schwarzschild radius, or the horizon (the farthest visible point).

Second, anyone who fell within the Schwarzschild radius would be aware of a "mirror universe" on the "other side" of space-time (Figure 10.2). Einstein was not worried about the existence of this bizarre mirror universe because communication with it was impossible. Any space probe sent into the center of a black hole would encounter infinite curvature; that is, the gravitational field would be infinite, and any material object would be crushed. The electrons would be ripped off atoms, and even the protons and neutrons within the nuclei themselves would be torn apart. Also, to penetrate through to the alternative universe, the probe would have to go faster than the speed of light, which is not possible. Thus although this mirror universe is mathematically necessary to make sense of the Schwarzschild solution, it could never be observed physically.

Consequently, the celebrated Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting these two universes (named after Einstein and his collaborator, Nathan Rosen) was considered a mathematical quirk. The bridge was necessary to have a mathematically consistent theory of the black hole, but it was impossible to reach the mirror universe by traveling through the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Einstein-Rosen bridges were soon found in other solutions of the gravitational equations, such as the Reissner-Nordstrom solution describing an electrically charged black hole. However, the Einstein-Rosen bridge remained a curious but forgotten footnote in the lore of relativity.

Things began to change with the work of New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, who in 1963 found another exact solution to Einstein's equations. Kerr assumed that any collapsing star would be rotating. Like a spinning skater who speeds up when bringing in his or her hands, a rotating star would necessarily accelerate as it began to collapse. Thus the stationary Schwarzschild solution for a black hole was not the most physically relevant solution of Einstein's equations.

Kerr found, however, that a massive rotating star does not collapse into a point. Instead, the spinning star flattens until it eventually is compressed into a ring, which has interesting properties. If a probe were shot into the black hole from the side, it would hit the ring and be totally demolished. The curvature of space-time is still infinite when approaching the ring from the side. There is still a "ring of death," so to speak, surrounding the center. However, if a space probe were shot into the ring from the top or bottom, it would experience a large but finite curvature; that is, the gravitational force would not be infinite.

This rather surprising conclusion from Kerr's solution means that any space probe shot through a spinning black hole along its axis of rotation might, in principle, survive the enormous but finite gravitational fields at the center, and go right on through to the mirror universe without being destroyed by infinite curvature. The Einstein-Rosen bridge acts like a tunnel connecting two regions of space-time; it is a wormhole. Thus the Kerr black hole is a gateway to another universe.

Now imagine that your rocket has entered the Einstein-Rosen bridge. As your rocket approaches the spinning black hole, it sees a ring-shaped spinning star. At first, it appears that the rocket is headed for a disastrous crash landing as it descends toward the black hole from the north pole. However, as we get closer to the ring, light from the mirror universe reaches our sensors. Since all electromagnetic radiation, including radar, orbits the black hole, our radar screens are detecting signals that have been circulating around the black hole a number of times. This effect resembles a hall of mirrors, in which we are fooled by the multiple images that surround us. Light goes ricocheting across numerous mirrors, creating the illusion that there are numerous copies of ourselves in the hall.

The same effect occurs as we pass through the Kerr black hole. Because the same light beam orbits the black hole numerous times, our rocket's radar detects images that have gone spinning around the black hole, creating the illusion of objects that aren't really there.

Does this mean that black holes can be used for travel throughout the galaxy, as in Star Trek and other science-fiction movies?

As we saw earlier, the curvature in a certain space is determined by the amount of matter-energy contained in that space (Mach's principle). Einstein's famous equation gives us the precise degree of space­time bending caused by the presence of matter-energy.

When Captain Kirk takes us soaring through hyperspace at "warp factor 5," the "dilithium crystals" that power the Enterprise must perform miraculous feats of warping space and time. This means that the dilithium crystals have the magical power of bending the space-time continuum into pretzels; that is, they are tremendous storehouses of matter and energy.

If the Enterprise travels from the earth to the nearest star, it does not physically move to Alpha Centauri-rather, Alpha Centauri comes to the Enterprise. Imagine sitting on a rug and lassoing a table several feet away. If we are strong enough and the floor is slick enough, we can pull the lasso until the carpet begins to fold underneath us. If we pull hard enough, the table comes to us, and the "distance" between the table and us disappears into a mass of crumpled carpeting. Then we simply hop across this "carpet warp." In other words, we have hardly moved; the space between us and the table has contracted, and we just step across this contracted distance. Similarly, the Enterprise does not really cross the entire space to Alpha Centauri; it simply moves across the crumpled space-time-through a wormhole. To better understand what hap­pens when one falls down the Einstein-Rosen bridge, let us now discuss the topology of wormholes.

To visualize these multiply connected spaces, imagine that we are strolling down New York's Fifth Avenue one bright afternoon, minding our own business, when a strange floating window opens up in front of us, much like Alice's looking glass. (Never mind for the moment that the energy necessary to open this window might be enough to shatter the earth. This is a purely hypothetical example.)

We step up to the hovering window to take a closer look, and are horrified to find ourselves staring at the head of a nasty-looking Tyran­nosaurus rex. We are about to run for our lives, when we notice that the tyrannosaur has no body. He can't hurt us because his entire body is clearly on the other side of the window. When we look below the window to find the dinosaur's body, we can see all the way down the street, as though the dinosaur and the window weren't there at all. Puzzled, we slowly circle the window and are relieved to find that the tyrannosaur is nowhere to be found. However, when we peer into the window from the back side, we see the head of a brontosaur staring us in the face (Figure 10.3)!

Figure 10.3. In this purely hypothetical example, a "window" or wormhole has opened up in our universe. If we look into the window from one direction, we see one dinosaur. If we look into the other side of the window, we see another dinosaur. As seen from the other universe, a window has opened up between the two dino­saurs. Inside the window, the dinosaurs see a strange small animal (us).

Frightened, we walk around the window once more, staring at the window sideways. Much to our surprise, all traces of the window, the tyrannosaur, and the brontosaur are gone. We now take a few more turns around the floating window. From one direction, we see the head of the tyrannosaur. From the other direction, we see the head of the bronto­saur. And when we look from the side, we find that both the mirror and the dinosaurs have disappeared.

What's happening?

In some faraway universe, the tyrannosaur and the brontosaur have squared off in a life-and-death confrontation. As they face each other, a floating window suddenly appears between them. When the tyrannosaur peers into the floating mirror, he is startled to see the head of a puny, skinny-looking mammal, with frizzy hair and a tiny face: a human. The head is clearly visible, but it has no body. However, when the brontosaur stares into the same window from the other direction, he sees Fifth Ave­nue, with its shops and traffic. Then the tyrannosaur finds that this human creature in the window has disappeared, only to appear on the side of the window facing the brontosaur.

Now let us say that suddenly the wind blows our hat into the window. We see the hat sailing into the sky of the other universe, but it is nowhere to be seen along Fifth Avenue. We take one long gulp, and then, in desperation, we stick our hand into the window to retrieve the hat. As seen by the tyrannosaur, a hat blows out the window, appearing from nowhere. Then he sees a disembodied hand reaching out the window, desperately groping for the hat.

The wind now changes direction, and the hat is carried in the other direction. We stick our other hand into the window, but from the other side. We are now in an awkward position. Both our hands are sticking into the window, but from different sides. But we can't see our fingers. Instead, it appears to us that both hands have disappeared.

How does this appear to the dinosaurs? They see two wiggling, tiny hands dangling from the window, from either side. But there is no body (Figure 10.4).

Figure 10.4. If we insert our hands into the window from two different directions, then it appears as though our hands have disappeared. We have a body, but no hands. In the alternative universe, two hands have emerged from either side of the window but they are not attached to a body.

This example illustrates some of the delicious distortions of space and time that one can invent with multiply connected spaces.

Closing the Wormhole

It seems remarkable that such a simple idea-that higher dimensions can unify space with time, and that a "force" can be explained by the warping of that space-time-would lead to such a rich diversity of phys­ical consequences. However, with the wormhole and multiply connected spaces, we are probing the very limits of Einstein's theory of general relativity. In fact, the amount of matter-energy necessary to create a wormhole or dimensional gateway is so large that we expect quantum effects to dominate. Quantum corrections, in turn, may actually close the opening of the wormhole, making travel through the gateway impossible.

Since neither quantum theory nor relativity is powerful enough to settle this question, we will have to wait until the ten-dimensional theory is completed to decide whether these wormholes are physically relevant or just another crazy idea. However, before we discuss the question of quantum corrections and the ten-dimensional theory, let us now pause and consider perhaps the most bizarre consequence of wormholes. Just as physicists can show that wormholes allow for multiply connected spaces, we can also show that they allow for time travel as well.

Let us now consider perhaps the most fascinating, and speculative, consequence of multiply connected universes: building a time machine.

There you are, you have now a complete report about Parallel Universes. As I said before, I encourage you to buy the books from which the information came from.

So far parallel universes can exist or not depending on your interpretation of the Quantum Universe. Any day now we might prove that they don’t exist or that they do (until of course another revolution in Physics occurs and challenges our interpretation of all that).

What do I think about Parallel Universes? All the theories are fascinating and certainly make great sci-fi. For that alone I want to believe in the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It is certainly more exciting than the probabilities of an event (wavefunction universe) collapsing whenever my decision is made and all other possible outcomes of that event will never exist.

In résumé, the main theory to explain Parallel Universes is based on the observations in Quantum Mechanics that:

1) A particle can be at many places at the same time and that the same particle can go through doors A and B when going across a box when it should only go through one door.

2) As well, parallel universes are helped by the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle that states that it is impossible to specify simultaneously the position and momentum of a particle, such as an electron, with precision. And to observe its speed and motion or its position destroys what we observe. Until it is observed, that particle exists in all its possible states, and perhaps there are parallel universes in which all these possible states actually exist. (The Schrödinger’s cat in its box is either alive, dead, or in between. In this universe you would open the box and find the cat dead, but in parallel universes you would open the box and the cat would be alive or in between.)

3) There is also this fact that particles flicker in and out of existence in the vacuum of space. Could those particles be exchanged via micro-wormholes between parallel universes?

Now, if you are not familiar with these concepts, I have to let you know that what follows are my pet theories and that probably no one in the scientific world would confirm any of this. I believe that these particles, like I explain at this URL below, are going faster than the speed of light:

This would explain why a particle can go through doors A and B to go across a box, in fact that particle had the time to go everywhere in that box before leaving it. We are just not aware of it. When a particle flicker in or out of existence, it is only going faster than the speed of light (we cannot see it) or slower (we can see it). It is when that particle reaches the threshold of the speed of light that it disappears, but it is still there. That accounts for the missing mass in the universe that is not missing, it is just invisible from our limited perceptions.

We are unable to observe the fact that this particle is going faster than the speed of light because the measuring instruments we use are using light which travels (from our perspective) at a constant speed of C (300,000 km per second), though that particle can go faster. This speed of light, still according to myself, is also relative and changes according to our own speed in space and the gravity surrounding us.

Why are we calculating that this particle is not going faster than the speed of light? Because we are using Einstein’s equations to calculate it and we need to take into account that the speed of light is relative. Therefore C in all of these equations needs to reflect its relative speed. For more information about the modifications of Einstein’s equations, please read my correspondence with William Taggart at this URL:

So, when comes the time to measure where that particle is, we register as many particles as the times that this particle crosses the speed of light. If that particle goes at five times the speed of light, then we will measure 5 particles for one particular moment with our limited instruments. So, it is not like saying that this particle exists at many places at the same time, or that as a consequence there can be Many-Worlds in this universe. One day we might be able to measure the real speed of that particle and its exact positions at any given time, or exact position at any given relative adjusted time.

Therefore it is hard from my point of view to keep the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but don’t worry, I cannot keep the other way of interpreting it either. The universe does not exist in all its possible states, a particle is only at one place at any given time, it is going faster than the speed of light and us, observing it using limited instruments that use light, see double, triple, quadruple, etc.

This said, I still believe that certain parallel worlds could exist, which could explain the Déjà-vu phenomenon. Simply because I believe we are living in a fluctuating reality. Our particles are going faster than the speed of light and they are not going at a constant speed because of the surrounding gravitational and magnetic fields. So we could in fact be living in many different realities at the same time, and we could be living as much in the past as in the future. This because time, distance, speed, mass, etc., all this is relative to our speed in space, to the speed of our particles and the changing gravity exerted upon us. Whether this gravity comes from a celestial body or a power line or from a crack in the crust of the Earth.

To help you visualize this, take only one timeline that could be your life. Now, time and space are relative, which means sometimes one minute is like 60 seconds, and some other times one minute could be 1 second, sometimes perhaps 1 minute could even be 300 years, and I would even venture to say that sometimes 1 minute could be -300 years. Same thing for space, at this very moment you are here, the next minute you could be on the Moon (of course the Earth would be at the position of the Moon in space and the Moon would be somewhere else in orbit), and sometimes you could even be outside of the solar system, light years away from here. This means that your life is not as linear as you might have thought and that your status in life is changing all the time within the same timeline.

Well, there are two ways to look at this. Either time is running slower and faster but ultimately it does not change anything to your life apart from taking longer or shorter from someone else point’s of view outside of the solar system, or the whole reality is always in movement and you live as much in the past as in the future. Which means that actions you do in the future could affect the past because you would know about something that might influence the way you will act in the past. In a way the past, the present and the future are always in movement, they are never fixed. Which means that, since time is relative, you could be making the decision of becoming a teacher now and in some years realize what a mistake that was, and when comes the time to choose to be a teacher (now), you could feel that you have already done that before, you have a premonition that it is the wrong decision, and you decide instead to become a nuclear physicist. Now you could always feel again that it was the wrong decision (after helping destroy the whole planet) and decide at that point in the past that your guts tell you to commit suicide instead. All three lives exist at the same time even though it is the same life, you can be a teacher, a nuclear physicist and dead. Time being relative, it can bring you back to a time before you made those decisions and you can change your decisions. If you have a good memory of the future, déjà-vu, so-called signs that help you remember, premonitions, feelings, then you can make your life better, a bit like switching to other parallel universes even though the other realities don’t exist but could if you change your decisions in the past. So now I am a writer, but there is also this other reality where I am an engineer, and because time is relative, I could find myself in the past at the point where I made my decision to not study engineering, and decide instead to become an engineer. At that point, me being a writer does not really exist anymore, but could, and in a way, it does. This way of looking at the universe could also explain how mediums know about the future and a lot of other paranormal phenomena.

So, someone could invent a technology to influence the future by modifying the past, that would be a time machine. We do not need time machines to influence our life at the moment, by concentrating (perhaps meditating) about our life might transmit a message to our own past in which it would influence our actual future, changing it in order to find ourselves in a different timeline or parallel universe. No need for wormholes or inter-dimensional windows, our mind can do the trick. It is always plausible that we will come up with a machine that could speed up the process, make us more aware of those messages from the future in order to help us make the right decisions and perhaps modify the life of others to change history. Note that I am not convinced that this is possible, it is merely a hypothesis.

I know this is difficult to understand and I have more details on the pages mentioned above. You would not find many physicists to confirm this though. I also have to admit that a great number of great physicists are convinced that parallel universes exist via the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and perhaps they are right. Mathematically this appears to be true, but I sometimes wonder if our interpretation of what we observe is right.

You might want to do a search on “Parallel Universes” in the book section of websites like amazon.com, There are new books out there with Parallel Universes in the title that would certainly answer all your questions.

Please let me know if you have questions about this. I would love to help you understand any comments in this report.

Regards,

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