In our news briefs recently you no doubt saw the story about movie makers and scientists coming together to discuss teleportation. Now Scientific American has joined in the fun, with their own Q&A about what’s possible and what’s not involving quantum physicist H. Jeff Kimble of the California Institute of Technology. Perhaps the best summary though is given by the ever-dependable Alan Boyle on his Cosmic Log, in a recent post titled “When Science Meets Fiction“. Alan goes further than just the recent MIT meet-up, pointing out this historical episode:
The real-world physics behind the possibility of wormholes has been entangled with science fiction for decades. The concept was fleshed out by Caltech physicist Kip Thorne when Carl Sagan asked him to come up with a plausible way to get his heroine back and forth through space-time in the novel “Contact.” To Thorne’s surprise, he found that there was nothing in physics that absolutely ruled out the existence of wormholes, as long as you could get your hands on a huge amount of negative energy.
Good fun reads – and nice and speculative, just the way we like it here at TDG. Just as long as we don’t overdo the need to consult science on everything…because sometimes it’s just plain stupid.
