Category Great Scientists

Can Einstein Rosen bridges exist?

The Einstein-Rosen bridges or wormhole tunnels use the theory of general relativity. But do they exist beyond the realm of imagination?

Imagine this magic door you can open and that lets you travel from one place to another in less time. This is a wormhole. A hypothetical bridge through space and time, wormholes are shortcuts in the universe.

They are of course hypothetical. These are theoretical passages through space and time. Also called Einstein-Rosen bridges, these are bridges that were proposed by Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen using the theory of general relativity.

It is the tunnel between two black holes or points in space-time. These are bridges that connect two different points in space-time that create a shortcut and thereby reduce the travel time.

While the existence of wormholes has been predicted mathematically through Einstein’s theory of general relativity, no wormholes have been discovered.

Wormholes act as tunnels or theoretical bridges connecting points in space and time in such a manner that the journey between two points is less when compared to that through normal space.

Why called a wormhole?

It was American theoretical physicist John Wheeler who came up with the word wormhole. The Einstein-Rosen Bridges were compared by him to the movement of a worm through the middle of an apple, eating from one side to another. Were it to travel through the circumference of the apple, it would take a longer time whilst it can travel directly through the apple.

This particular space-time conduit is shorter. This term came into being through this analogy. And thus was born the wormhole.

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WHO WAS PETER HIGGS?

Peter Higgs is a British physicist who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle, which was confirmed through the discovery at CERN, a European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2012. He and Belgian physicist François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles.” The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.Higgs was born in England in 1929. He was taught at home as a child. Later, he attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol and was inspired by the work of the school alumnus Paul Dirac founder of the field of quantum mechanics. Peter Higgs graduated in Physics from King’s College London in 1950 and achieved a master’s degree in 1952. He was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1951 and performed his doctoral research in molecular physics under the supervision of Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins. He received his PhD degree in 1954 and became a lecturer in mathematical  physics at Edinburgh in 1960 and remained there till his retirement in 1996.

In 1956, Higgs began working in quantum field theory. In 1964, he proposed the theoretical existence of the Higgs Boson. Higgs developed the idea that particles – massless when the universe began – acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. Independently of one another, both Peter Higgs and the team of François Englert and Robert Brout proposed this mechanism. In 1964, Physical Review Letters, published Higg’s paper which predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs boson). In 2012, two experiments conducted at the CERN laboratory in Geneva confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle. Definitive confirmation that the particle was the Higgs boson was announced in March 2013.

Picture Credit : Google