All That Tedious Mucking About…..

…in Hyperspace.

Much is made of “hyperspace”, but just what is it? Many science fiction writers have used the idea as a means to travel great distances easily.

There have been many ways in science fiction to overcome the fact that to travel to even the nearest galaxy would take 2 million years even at the speed of light.

In Star Trek, it was the “warp” drive”.

In Dune, the spice Melange gave travellers the ability to “fold” space and to “travel without moving”.

In The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is the Infinite Improbability Drive.

But most writers, especially in Star Wars, use “hyperspace” as a means to solve the problem.

This usually involves some way which space itself is manipulated so that a “tunnel” is created to take the traveller to another part of the Universe – a “short cut”.

The only feasible way to do this, in realistic physics, is to somehow harness the power of a black hole and its enormous gravitational pull. Way back when we were just getting used to General Relativity, Einstein and Rosen speculated that if a black hole’s gravity was strong enough to punch a hole in spacetime, might the “hole” not open up somewhere else in spacetime?

Indeed the “Einstein – Rosen Bridge” was the basis of a whole TV series called “Sliders”, starring Jerry O’Connell.The problem with this “bridge” was the black hole in the middle of it. Hit that and you are dead, and gravity will always suck you to it.

Roger Penrose in the 1960’s thought that a rotating black hole might have the form of a donut, so if you are skilful enough to fly through its centre, you would come out, MAYBE, 10,000 million light years from where you started, in real time.

The way to visualise it is like this:













If we regard the four dimensions of spacetime as only two, then the Universe would appear to be as a flat rubber sheet, with depressions caused by the stars due to their gravity. A black hole has enough gravity to create an infinitely deep depression, or maybe even to tear a hole in the “sheet”. Imagine, as the diagram suggests, that the sheet is “folded”, and the black hole can “come out” on another part of the “sheet”. It is obvious that the time to travel this short distance is far less than travelling “the long way round”, on normal spacetime. (Sort of begs the question as to what “abnormal” spacetime is, but then again…)

This “space” between the “sheets” was subsequently named “hyperspace”, and the amazing thing is that physics does not rule it out. Lest we forget, we are talking about black hole manipulation here, and as such, requires enormous engineering effort, but the main idea is absolutely NOT forbidden by physics.

In a very real sense, then, physics is actually constrained by its own applications.

It has even been speculated that should such an “Einstein-Rosen” bridge exist, it may not even take the traveller to the same universe, and recalling that spacetime involves “time”, there will be absolutely no guarantee that the traveller will even emerge just after he travelled through the bridge – he could actually end up a million years BC, or 2.414 trillion years AD.