| One, Two, Middlesboogie |
07-16-2002 05:45 AM |
Taa for the info, Danny. I'd heard about that before but couldn't remember the terms for the two sorts.
There is a third way, though... much harder to set up and maintain but once in place far easier to teleport objects... wormholes.
I don't think the Oddworldians are advanced enough to do so, but in theory, if you have the power to manipulate the space-time continuum, you can join two black holes or other rips in the fabric of space, and this creates a tunnel between them, through which you can travel through in a few seconds, but which may be light years in length. Some physicists reckon that wormholes appear all the time by themselves at random points throughout the unierse, but usually they are too tiny to admit most animals and only stay open for a fraction of a second.
However, look at the bird portals in the Oddworld games. It seems that the birds are drawn to distortions in reality, which chanting Mudokons can penetrate and use for their own ends. Perhaps some force on Oddworld that doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe... possibly spooce... weakens the continuum mainframe and makes teleportation easier.
BIG EDIT: I've dug up my transcript of Channel 4's Equinox program on black holes, and it has this to say about wormholes (for best effect, read while listening to the opening music in ZoE):
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WORMHOLES IN BRIEF:
For decades, scientists have argued whether there is any safe passage through a black hole, which might lead you to emerge either somewhere else in our unierse or somewhere else in another universe entirely. The consensus now is that such a trip is impossible: the centre of the black hole is an unstable region of space and time, which would destroy you as you passed near the central singularity.
But in 1985, American physicist Kip Thorne realised it was possible - in theory, at least - to shore up the sides of the black hole tunnel, so making it a safe passage. To reinforce the black hole, we would need some kind of 'exotic matter' that exerts an antigravitational force. We don't know of any such matter at the moment, but theoretically it could exist. The idea is now particularly championed by Russian scientist Igor Novikov.
If - in the distant future - we could construct a wormhole, we could pass through it and, in an instant, travel from the Earth to the Moon, or Mars or the planet of a distant star. Thorne and Novikov have even devised ways of using a wormhole as a time machine. If, in the far future, someone stumbled across the entrance to a suitabl wormhole, he could step through it and travel backwards to any point up to the time when the wormhole was first created. So, the first we might know that a scientist somewhere has created a wormhole is the moment when tourists from the future start arriving!
'BIZARRE OBJECTS'
Igor Novikov of the Theoretical Astrophysics Centre in Copenhagen likes to speculate on what would happen if you joined two black holes together to make a wormhole: 'Wormholes are real bizarre objects. We can imagine a wormhole as two holes nd some kind of tnnel between them. But this tunnel is not in our space. It's in some case of hyperspace, outside of our dimension (He's using the word 'dimension' erroneously here. Our universe is made up of 10 dimensions, and the 11th dimension is what all the existing universes float around in as membraneous bubbles. When two collide, a new universe is spawned. If wormholes ever exist, Novikov is saying that they wil be in the 11th dimension - Anna).'
To make a wormhole, we would have to engineer spacetime. First, bend it until it begins to form a black hole but not so much that a singularity is born. Them join the bottom of this gravity tunnel to the bottom of a second tunnel to make two holes connected by a continuous tube through hyperspace. Step three would be to move one hole to wherever it was that you wanted to travel.
'One of them could be near our Earth,' speculates Novikov, 'another in another galaxy. But this tunnel could be extremely short - say, a few metres.'
The tunnel would also be very fragile, prone to collapse as soon as a traveller attempted to pass through it. But if we could develop the technology to tame the ferocious forces at work, we would have opened an interstellar shortcut. Says Novikov: 'We could travel from one galazy to another in,let's say, a few seconds.'
Whereas a black hole is a one-way street with a dead end at the singularity, a wormhole could be a freeway to the stars. Oxford University's Sir Roger Penrose thinks differently. 'These things are driven by romantic science fiction ideas, which is fine - a lot of science is driven that way and you do good things - but it seems to me that, according to the scientific evidence, this is not going to happen, it is not possible.' (Shut it, you killjoying old fart.)
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This is, of course, all assuming that black holes exist. Although there is great scientific evidence for them, no-one has seen one and we cannot prove they exist. |