Science as fiction

Wormholes Possible? Yes, And Using String Theory, I Am Also The Pope

By Hank

Science 2.0 fave Dan Vergano at USA Today wrote an article based on the arXiv preprint written by Panagiota Kanti, Burkhard Kleihaus and Jutta Kunz called "Wormholes in Dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Theory".

They get right to it, writing "We construct traversable wormholes in dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory in four spacetime dimensions, without needing any form of exotic matter" - magic stuff being what Caltech's Kip Thorne said would be needed to prevent collapse of these holes in space if, you know, wormholes were science.

It's a relief they were able to fix that pesky issue.  Except it's become increasingly obvious that far too many theorists don't know what a prediction is, and maybe an experiment too.  The more we learn from the LHC, and it is revealing a lot, as HEP experimentalist Dr. Tommaso Dorigo showed recently (chilling as it may be, since that ol' Higgs demon is getting chased into a smaller corner with less and less chance of being seen), the more disbelief it leaves for multiple dimensions and...well...wormholes.

Vergano seems to be having fun with it, he always does, and lets pass sentences of theirs like "When the first wormhole, the ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’, was discovered in 1935"(1) without wondering if the writers of the arXiv paper are as confused about what a 'discovery' is as they are 'prediction' and 'theory' and 'testability' but he passes muster with his editors by appearing to give their paper a fair shake, writing

Introduce the cosmological possibilities opened by this description of reality, add in a few equations, and the study finds that wormholes suddenly acquire stability, even if constructed of normal matter. 

Which is his nice way of saying that as long as you buy that a universe of strings makes anything possible, anything is possible.   I always like to invoke Bertrand Russell at times like this, namely his assertion of the related proposition that once a contradiction is allowed into a closed system anything can be proven. In discussing this one time, supposedly someone in the audience yelled out a challenge: "If 2 plus 2 equals 5, prove that I am the Pope."

Russell replied, "If 2 plus 2 is 5, then 4 is 5; if 4 is 5, then (subtracting three from each side) 1 is 2; you and the Pope are two, therefore you and the Pope are one."

In a world of string theory, I can be the Pope, and I can fight vampires across the multiverse using wormholes to get places.  I just need to modify dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory with low-energy heterotic string theory and it's all quite easy.

NOTE:

(1) Though because it has the name Einstein in it, people just believe it, and it made Thor come from Asgard to movie theaters of Earth this Summer, so we thank them for that.  Sean Carroll says he takes the blame.