Down the Rabbit Hole

September 04, 2008

The eagerly awaited (by me, at least) season premiere of Bones last night found our heroes, Booth and Brennen, in Merry Olde England solving not one, but two juicy murders. But had I actually been in England myself, I would have been glued to the telly for the debut of a new British series, Lost in Austen. It's about a young British Austen fan, Amanda, whose dull existence and slacker boyfriend don't quite measure up to her romantic fantasies. But then she bumps into Elizabeth Bennett in her bathroom late one night, who has traveled through time (and, apparently, from fiction to reality). With a little push from Miss Bennett, she finds herself trapped in the plot of Pride and Prejudice.

There's a nice long tradition by now of messing with Jane Austen's masterpiece, including last's year critically acclaimed film, Becoming Jane, and a "create your own adventure" book called Lost in Austen, a mashup of all of Austen's novels in which the reader makes a series of choices in order "to marry both prudently and for love." There's even another Austen-inspired time travel fantasy novel, Amanda Elyot's By a Lady, in which a young NYC actress is accidentally transported back to Regency England, gets involved in a shocking social scandal, meets Jane Austen, and experiences tantric sex with a well-bred gentleman who acquired the skill during his military travels to the Indies/Orient (if memory serves.)

The British series probably isn't quite that racy, although word has leaked out that our heroine, Amanda, does take Mr. Bingley out back for a snog. No report on how Jane Bennett felt about that, but part of the show's premise is that Amanda's presence alters the course of events in the classic novel. This is a variation on what, in physics, is known as the "grandfather paradox": if someone traveled back to a time before he was born and killed his own grandfather, then how could that person be alive to travel back in time to commit the murder in the first place?

Science fiction writers love to fiddle with these sorts of "what if?" scenarios. Wish-fulfillment fantasies are pretty alluring. In the new series, you get such interesting twists as Jane marrying the boring clergyman Mr. Collins, and younger sister Lydia eloping with Mr. Bingley. (That Bingley sure gets a lot of action -- who knew?)

Just for fun, let's leave aside the fact that Austen's world doesn't exist and therefore how could anyone travel back through time to visit it. (At least Elyot's novel has the heroine traveling back to actual Regency England, not a pretend version.) If there's any sort of time travel taking place, we're clearly dealing with some sort of wormhole (a version of a closed timelike curve).

The technical definition of a wormhole is any sort of "structure" that connects two otherwise distant or unrelated points in spacetime: 21st century vs. 18th century England, for example. It's an extension of black hole physics, namely, what if that point of infinite density at the center of a black hole (the singularity) actually had a hole in it? Einstein hypothesized that, according to the equations of general relativity, it was theoretically possible for black holes to bend spacetime to such a degree that, for a brief moment, it could tear, creating a wormhole. If you could pass through that wormhole, you could travel from one distant part of space to another -- and possibly even through time.

In mathematics, this sort of thing falls under the rubric of "multiply connected spaces." One of the simplest (mathematical) models for a wormhole is called Misner space, the brainchild of Charles Misner, a physicist at the University of Maryland. Let's take Amanda's tiny bathroom as an example. Imagine that bathroom comprises the entire universe (what a depressing existence that would be) and the walls in back and in front of her correspond to the mouths of a wormhole. In other words, every point on the front wall is identical to the corresponding point on the back wall.

The two bathroom walls are joined so that the two ends meet -- like a piece of paper folded over to form a cylinder -- so if Amanda walked through the front wall, she would re-emerge from the back wall. The most common analogy is to old video game screens that used to wrap the field of play around both the left and right edges of the computer computer.

If the bathroom were small enough -- and it does look pretty cramped -- Misner theorized that she might even be able to reach through the front wall and grab her own shoulder from behind when her arm emerged from the back wall. And if the walls happened to be moving at different velocities, there would be a time difference between the two "mouths," so Amanda could easily travel back and forth through time. That is way cooler than tantric sex.

Okay, it's not as easy as it sounds. Mind-boggling amounts of mass or energy would be needed to get the degree of spacetime curvature needed to form a wormhole -- far beyond anything we're even remotely capable of generating. The wormhole would be far too small -- 100 billion billion times smaller than the center of an atom -- for a speck of dust to pass through, never mind Amanda. A wormhole would only be open for fractions of a second before collapsing -- unless we could figure out a way to hold it open artificially with even more hypothetical things: negative matter, or (more popularly) negative energy.

And even then, any object that approached would cause gravitational ripples in spacetime, which would be amplified to infinite energy as it approached the singularity, warping spacetime even more severely and pretty much shutting the door. Physicists love to play around with various alternative models, though -- involving things like neutron stars or hypothetical gravity "doughnut" holes -- and who can blame them? It's their version of reinventing Jane Austen.

Photos: (top) Watercolor and pencil sketch of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain. (bottom) Illustration of  wormhole. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons License.

Comments

[arby]

I wish I had read that book by that wheelchair guy. (Thank you Homer) rb

[Alycia de Mesa]

Love it, Jennifer - and love your straight forward writing. Your blog could be renamed "Physics Even Stupid People Can Understand" ; )

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Thanks, Alycia, although one of the things I work to change is this notion that only "smart" people can understand physics, at least conceptually. I was an English major in college and hated math and science, until I discovered it was about cool new ideas and the process of discovery, not rote memorization of facts and numbers-crunching. And I've never looked back.

Besides, if we're not feeling stupid sometimes on a fairly regular basis, we;re probably not pushing our boundaries very much. Even physicists have those "Ack! I just don't get it!" moments....

[Roderick Reilly]

I see you have the dreary Austen portrait supposedly done by her sister.

Have you seen the "reconstructed" one at this link?

http://www.jasa.net.au/portrait/dring.htm

Much livelier, don't you think?