Chapter 12 11. Faster Than Light
In Star Wars, when the Millennium Falcon carried our protagonists Luke Skywalker and Han Solo from the desolate planet Tatooine, Meet a band of vicious Imperial battleships swarming the planet.The Imperial battleship unleashes a barrage of intense firepower on our protagonist's ship with laser cannons, gradually breaking through its force field. The Millennium Falcon has less firepower than the opponent.Under the pressure of this defiant laser fire, Han Solo growled that their only hope was to jump into "hyperspace".On a small gap in time, the hyperdrives came alive.All the stars around them suddenly converge toward the center of the display, pulling straight, blinding light.A hole opened, and the Millennium Falcon flew in, into hyperspace, and freed.
Is this science fiction?no doubt.But is it possible that this is based on scientific fact?perhaps.Faster-than-light travel has long been a staple of science fiction, but recently physicists have given serious thought to the possibility.
According to Einstein, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe.Even our most powerful nuclear particle accelerators—capable of creating energies that exist only in the centers of exploding stars or the Big Bang—can't shoot subatomic particles faster than the speed of light.Apparently, the speed of light is the ultimate traffic cop in the universe.If this is the case, then any of our hopes of reaching distant galaxies seem illusory.
Or, maybe not...
In 1902, when Albert Einstein was still young, it was hard to imagine that he would become the greatest physicist since Isaac Newton.In fact, that year marked the lowest point of his life.As a freshman Ph.D., all the universities he applied to refused him a teaching position (he later found out that his professor, Heinrich Weber, had written him a very horrible letter of recommendation, perhaps in revenge for Einrich Weber. Stan misses so many of his classes).Also, Einstein's mother vehemently disapproved of his girlfriend, Mileva Marie, who was pregnant with his child at the time.Their first daughter, Lieserl, was to be born illegitimate.The young Einstein failed even at odd jobs.Even his lowly job teaching young children ended when he was brutally fired.In his depressing letters, he said he considered earning a living as a salesman.He even wrote to his family that perhaps it would have been better if he had never been born, since he was such a burden to his family and had no chance of success in his life.When his father died, he was mortified that he thought his son was a complete failure when he died.
But, later that year, Einstein's luck changed.A friend arranged for him to get a job as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office.In that lowly position, Einstein would bring about the greatest revolution in modern history.He quickly analyzes the patents on his desk, then spends hours thinking about the physics problems that have puzzled him since childhood.
What is the secret of his genius?Perhaps the clue to his genius is his ability to think in terms of physical images (such as moving trains, speeding clocks, and stretched fabric) rather than pure mathematics.Einstein once said that a theory is useless if it cannot be understood by children.That is to say, the essence of a theory must be able to be represented by a physical image.As a result, many physicists get lost in the mathematical undergrowth, getting nowhere.But Einstein, like his predecessor Newton, was obsessed with physical images, and then mathematics, for Newton the physical image was the falling apple, and the moon.Is the force that makes the apple fall the same that guides the moon in its orbit?When Newton judged the answer was "yes," he created a mathematical architecture for the universe that suddenly revealed the greatest secret of the heavens—the motion of the celestial bodies themselves.
Albert Einstein formulated his famous special theory of relativity in 1905.At the center of his theory is a physical image that even a child can understand.His theory is the result of a dream that has haunted him since he was 16 years old.At that time, he asked a crucial question: What would happen if the speed of light was exceeded?As a young man, he knew that Newtonian mechanics described the motion of objects on the earth and in the sky, while Maxwell's theories deduced light.These are the two pillars of physics.
It was Einstein's greatest genius to realize that these two pillars were in conflict and that one of them was bound to collapse.
According to Newton's theory, it's always possible that you can outrun a ray of light, because there's nothing special about the speed of light.That means the light has to stay still while you race it aside.But the young Einstein realized that no one had ever seen a wave of light that was perfectly still—that is, as if it had been frozen.Therefore, Newton's theory does not work.
Eventually, as a university student studying Maxwell's theories in Zurich, Einstein found the answer.He discovered something that even Maxwell didn't know: the speed of light is constant no matter how fast you move.If you zip toward a ray or in the opposite direction, it still travels at the same speed, but this behavior defies common sense.Einstein found the answer to a question that puzzled him as a child: You can never race light because it will always move away from you at a constant speed, no matter how fast you go.
But Newtonian mechanics is a tightly knit system: like pulling on a slack thread, the slightest change in the theory's assumptions can unravel the entire theory's thread.In Newton's theory, the passage of time is uniform throughout the universe, and a second on Earth is exactly the same as a second on Venus or Mars.Similarly, the meter stick placed on the earth is also the same length as the meter stick on Pluto.But if the speed of light is always the same no matter how fast you move, then our understanding of space and time would have to be radically altered, and time and space would have to be deeply warped to preserve the constant speed of light constant.
According to Einstein's theory, if you were inside a fast-moving rocket spaceship, the passage of time inside the rocket would slow down compared to that on Earth.Depending on how fast you're moving, the hour hand beats at different frequencies.Also, the space inside this rocket spaceship is compressed, so depending on the speed, the length of the meter stick changes.And the mass of the rocket will also increase.If we look carefully inside the rocket with a telescope, we can see that the clock in the rocket runs slowly, people move in slow motion, and people look flat.
In fact, if the rocket were moving at the speed of light, time would appear to stop inside the rocket, the rocket would be compressed to nothing, and its mass would be infinite. Since these observations were all illogical, Einstein declared that nothing could Breaking the light barrier (since the faster an object moves the heavier it means that the energy motion is converted into mass. The exact total amount of energy converted into mass is easy to calculate, and in just a few lines we arrive at the famous Equation: E=mc2).
Since Einstein arrived at his famous equations, it can be said that millions of experiments have confirmed his revolutionary ideas.For example, the GPS system, which locks where you are on Earth to within inches, would be useless without the addition of relativity-based corrections (even the Pentagon generals have to listen to physics because of the military's reliance on GPS systems). Scientists introduce the theory about Einstein's theory of relativity). The GPS's clocks actually shifted as they moved rapidly across the ground, just as Einstein predicted.
The most vivid examples of this concept can be found in nuclear particle accelerators, where scientists accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light.In CERN's gigantic accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, Switzerland, protons are accelerated to trillions of electron volts, and they move at very close to the speed of light.
For a rocket scientist, light barriers aren't much of a problem right now, because rockets can barely exceed tens of thousands of miles per hour.But within a century or two, as rocket scientists get serious about sending probes to the nearest star, located more than 4 light-years from Earth, the light barrier will gradually become a problem.
For decades, physicists have tried to find the loopholes in Einstein's famous claims.A few bugs have been found, but most of them are not very useful.For example, if a flash of light is sent across the sky, in principle the image of the beam will exceed the speed of light.In a matter of seconds, the image of the beam moves from a point on the horizon to a point on the opposite side, spanning a distance that may extend over hundreds of light-years.But that doesn't matter, because no information can travel faster than the speed of light this way.The image of the beam travels beyond the speed of light, but this image does not carry any energy or information.
Similarly, if we have a pair of scissors, the point where the two blades intersect moves faster the farther they are from the junction, and if we imagine the scissors to be 1 light-year long, closing the two blades will move the intersection by more than Travel at the speed of light (again, this doesn't matter since the intersection doesn't carry any energy or information).
Also, as I mentioned in Chapter 4, the EPR experiment allows us to send information faster than light. (We may recall that in this experiment, two electrons resonate, and then they are accelerated and released in two opposite directions. Since these electrons are coherent, information can be sent between them faster than the speed of light, but this Information is random and therefore useless. EPR machines cannot therefore be used to send probes to distant stars.)
For a physicist, the most significant hole comes from Einstein himself, who in 1915 created general relativity, a more powerful theory than special relativity.The seeds of general relativity were planted when Einstein took a close look at a children's merry-go-round.As we saw earlier, objects shrink in size as they approach the speed of light.The faster you move, the harder you get squeezed.But in a spinning disc, the outer circumference moves faster than the central part (which, in fact, is nearly stationary).This means that a ruler placed on the edge of the disc must shorten, while a ruler placed in the center of the disc remains almost unchanged, so that the surface of the merry-go-round is no longer flat, but curved .Acceleration thus has the effect of bending space and time on the merry-go-round.
In general relativity, spacetime is a fabric that can stretch and contract.Under certain circumstances, the fabric could stretch faster than the speed of light.For example, considering the big bang, from which the universe was born 13.7 billion years ago, we can calculate that initially the universe expanded faster than the speed of light (this activity does not violate special relativity, since empty space — space between stars space - is expanding, not the stars themselves, expanding space does not carry any information).
The point is that special relativity only applies locally, that is, in your immediate vicinity.In the local vicinity (such as the solar system), special relativity still applies.But on a scale that encompasses everything (e.g., on the scale of the universe that includes ours), we have to use general relativity instead.In general relativity, space-time becomes a fabric, and this fabric can be stretched faster than light.It also allows for "holes in space" through which shortcuts can be taken through time and space.
Given these constraints, perhaps the solution to moving faster than light is to act according to general relativity.There are two possible ways to do this:
, a magical device that connects the outskirts of Oxford to the wonderful world.A wormhole is a device capable of connecting two universes.When we were in elementary school, we learned that the straight line distance between two points is the shortest.But this is not necessarily true, because if we roll up a piece of paper until two points touch each other, then we can see that the shortest distance between two points is actually a wormhole.
As Matt Visser, a physicist at Washington University, puts it: "The relativity academics are starting to think about how they can bring things like [warp engines] or wormholes out of the world of science fiction. Reality."
Sir Martin Reese, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, even said: "Wormholes, extra dimensions and quantum computers open up mind-schemes that could eventually transform our entire universe into a 'living universe' completely."
The best example of extended space is the Akubierre Drive, proposed by physicist (Migual Alcubierre) Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, using Einstein's theory of gravity.It is very similar to the propulsion system in "Star Trek".The crew of this starship sits inside a bubble (called a "warp bubble") where everything seems to be normal, even when the spacecraft breaks the light barrier.In fact, the pilot would think he was standing still.However, outside the warp bubble, when the space in front of the warp bubble is compressed, a very serious space-time distortion will occur.Time does not dilate, so time inside the warp bubble will pass normally.
Alcubierre admits that "Star Trek" may have played some role in getting him this solution. "People on 'Star Trek' keep talking about the warp drive, the concept of warping space," he said. "We already have a theory of how space can and can't be warped, and that's general relativity. . I think there should be a way to use these concepts to explain how a warp drive works." This is perhaps the first time a TV show has helped inspire a solution to Einstein's equations.
Alcubierre speculates that the trips made by his proposed starship would be similar to those experienced by the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. "My guess is that they might see something very similar to that, with the stars in long lines in front of the ship. Behind the ship, they can't see anything - just darkness - because the starlight cannot Move fast enough to catch them," he said.
The key to the Alcubierre engine is the power needed to propel the spacecraft to faster-than-light speeds.Typically, physicists first use positive energy to propel a starship that is always moving slower than the speed of light.In order to move faster than this way, to be able to exceed the speed of light, the fuel must be changed.A simple calculation shows that we need "negative mass" or "negative energy", which may be the most fascinating things in the universe - if they exist at all.Physicists have traditionally dismissed negative energy and negative mass as science fiction.But we can now see that they are irreplaceable for faster-than-light speeds, and they may indeed exist.
Scientists look for negative matter in nature, but have not found one so far (antimatter and negative matter are two completely different things. The former exists, and has positive energy, but has an opposite charge. The existence of negative matter has not been proven) .Negative matter would be rather weird because it would be as light as nothing.In fact, it will float in the air.If negative matter existed in the early universe, it should have drifted into outer space.Unlike meteors, which are attracted by the planet's gravity and slam into the planet, negative matter avoids the planet.It is repelled rather than attracted by large objects such as stars and planets.So while negative matter might exist, we can only hope to find it in outer space and never on Earth.
One solution to finding negative matter in outer space is to use a phenomenon called Einstein lenses.According to general relativity, when light travels near a star or a galaxy, its path is bent by the other's gravity.In 1912 (even before Einstein had fully developed general relativity), Einstein predicted that a galaxy might act as the lens of a telescope, and that light from some distant object moving in a nearby galaxy would As it travels through the Milky Way, it gathers at one point, like passing through a lens, and forms a typical ring when it finally reaches the Earth.These phenomena are called "Einstein rings".In 1979, the first Einstein lens was observed in outer space.Since then, the Einstein lens has become an indispensable tool for astronomers (for example, pinpointing the location of "dark matter" in outer space was once considered impossible. [Dark matter is an invisible but Mysterious matter that has weight. It surrounds the Milky Way and may be ten times more abundant in the universe than ordinary visible matter.] But NASA scientists have managed to create a map of dark matter, because dark matter passes through it time bends light, the same way glass bends light.)
Therefore, it should be possible to search for negative matter and wormholes in outer space using an Einstein lens.They should bend light in unique ways that can be observed with the Hubble Space Telescope.Einstein Lens has so far found no images of negative matter or wormholes in outer space, but the search continues.If one day the Hubble Space Telescope detects the existence of negative matter or wormholes through the Einstein lens, it will cause an uproar in the physics community.
The difference between negative energy and negative matter is that it does exist, but in very small quantities.In 1933, Hendrik Casimir used quantum theory to make a bizarre prediction.He claimed that two parallel plates of uncharged metal would attract each other like magic.Normally, the parallel metal plates stay at rest, so they don't have any net charge.But instead of being empty, the vacuum between two parallel plates is filled with "virtual particles" that sometimes disappear.
For a brief moment, the electron-positrons would burst into nothingness, cancel out and disappear back into the vacuum.Ironically, the vacuum that was once thought to be empty has now been shown to be alive with quantum activity.Normally, tiny explosions of matter and antimatter would seem to violate the conservation of energy, but, thanks to the uncertainty principle, these tiny violations are extremely short-lived, so energy is still conserved on average.
Casimir discovered that clusters of virtual particles create a net pressure in a vacuum.The space between two parallel metal plates is limited, so the pressure is low.But the pressure outside the metal plates is unconstrained and larger, so there is a net pressure that pushes the two metal plates together.
Normally, the zero-energy state occurs when the two metal plates are at rest and away from each other.However, as the metal plates move closer together, energy can be harvested from them.In this way, the energy of the two metal plates is below zero because the kinetic energy has been extracted from the metal plates.
This negative energy was actually measured in a laboratory in 1948, and the results obtained confirmed Casimir's prediction.In this way, negative energy and the Casimir effect are no longer science fiction but definite facts.The problem, however, is that the Casimir effect is so tiny that it requires sophisticated, sophisticated measurement equipment to detect this energy in the laboratory (in general, the Casimir energy is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the distance between the metal plates. This means , the closer the two metal plates are to each other, the larger they can be placed).The Casimir energy was precisely measured by Steven Lamoreaux at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1996, and the gravitational force is 1/30,000th that of a mother ant .
Since Alcubieri first proposed his theory, physicists have discovered a wealth of strange properties.People inside starships are cut off from the outside world for a reason.That means you can't simply press buttons at will, move faster than light, and communicate through air bubbles.There must be a pre-existing "highway" through space and time, like a set of trains passing according to a regular timetable.In this sense, the stellar spacecraft will not be an ordinary spacecraft that can change direction and speed at will.The stellar ship would actually be like a passenger car, floating on the "wave" of pre-existing compressed space, navigating along a curved corridor of space-time.Akubieri speculated: "We need a series of anomalous matter generators on this road, which is like a highway, controlling space for you in a synchronized way."
In fact, even weirder solutions to Einstein's equations can be found.Einstein's equations say that given a given amount of mass or energy, one can calculate the curvature of space-time that mass or energy will produce (the same way that rethrowing a rock into a pond can calculate the ripples the rock makes same).However, the equation can also be worked backwards.You can start with a chaotic space-time, like the one in The Twilight Zone (for example, in such a universe, you can open a door and find yourself on the moon. You can go around a tree and find yourself back in time with your heart on the right side of your body).You can then calculate the distribution of matter and energy associated with this particular space-time (meaning that, given the overall picture of the ripples on the pond's surface, you can work backwards to calculate the distribution of stones needed to create those ripples).In fact, Alcubieri arrived at his equations in this way.He started with a spacetime that kept moving faster than light, then worked backwards, and calculated the energy required to create it.
Aside from stretching space, the second feasible way to break the light barrier is to tear space apart through wormholes—tunnels connecting two universes.In fiction, the first mention of wormholes comes from the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, who wrote (Through the Looking Glass) under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.Alice's Mirror is a wormhole that connects the outskirts of Oxford to the magical world of Wonderland.Alice puts her hand through the mirror and is instantly teleported from one universe to another.Mathematicians call them "multi-connected spaces."
The concept of wormholes in physics dates back to 1916, a year after Einstein published his epic theory of relativity.Physicist Karl Schwarzschild—who later served in the German army—successfully solved Einstein's equations to precisely determine the state of a single point-shaped star.At locations far from the star, its gravitational field is very similar to that of an ordinary star, and, in fact, Einstein used Schwarzschild's solution to calculate the deflection of light around a star.Schwarzschild's solution had an immediate and profound impact on astronomy, and even today it remains one of the most famous solutions of Einstein's equations.Generations of physicists have used the gravitational field around this point-shaped star as an approximation of the gravitational field of a real star of finite diameter.
But if you take the point star solution seriously, you'll find that lurking at its center is a massive point object that has stunned and amazed physicists for nearly a century—the black hole. .Schwarzschild's solution to the gravity of a point star is like a Trojan horse.From the outside it looks like a gift from heaven, but inside it lurks all kinds of demons and ghosts.However, if one is accepted, the other must also be accepted.Schwarzschild's solution proved that weird things happen when approaching this point star.Surrounding the star is an invisible sphere (called the "event horizon"), which is a point of no return.Everything can only go in and out, like a cockroach trap.Once you cross the event horizon, you can never come back (once you are inside the event horizon, you have to move faster than light to escape back outside the event horizon, which is impossible).
As you approach the event horizon, the atoms in your body are stretched by tidal forces, and the gravitational pull on your feet is much stronger than that on your head, so you're "stretched into spaghetti" and then ripped apart.Likewise, the atoms in your body are stretched and ripped apart by gravity.
To someone looking at you approaching the event horizon from the outside, it would appear that you are slowed down in the passage of time.In fact, once the event horizon is touched, time will appear to stop!
Furthermore, when you cross the event horizon, you see light that has been bound and circulating around the black hole for billions of years.You're like watching a cartoon detailing the history of a black hole, all the way back to its beginnings.
Ultimately, if you fell directly into a black hole, there would be another universe on the other side of it.This is called the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1935: it is now known as a "wormhole".
Einstein and other physicists believed that a star could never evolve into such a monster.In fact, Einstein published a paper in 1939 proving that a flowing cloud of gas and dust could never condense into a black hole.So despite the wormhole lurking at the center of the black hole, he was confident that such a strange object could not have formed naturally.In fact, astrophysicist Arthur Eddington once said there should be "a law of nature that prevents stars from behaving so grotesquely."In other words, a black hole is actually a reasonable solution to Einstein's equations, but there is no known mechanism by which a black hole can form naturally.
That all changed with a paper written and published that same year by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hirtland Snyder.The paper proves that black holes can indeed form naturally.They hypothesize that a dying star has exhausted its nuclear fuel and then gravitationally collapsed so that it would implode under its own weight.If gravity can squeeze a star into its event horizon, then there is nothing scientifically known that prevents gravity from squeezing a star into a point-like particle—a black hole (this implosion may have given Oppenheim The idea of building the Nagasaki atomic bomb that relied on the implosion of a plutonium sphere a few years later).
A subsequent breakthrough came in 1963, when New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr studied perhaps the most practical example of a black hole.Objects spin faster when they contract, just as an ice skater spins faster when his arms are drawn in toward his body.As a result, the black hole should spin extremely fast.
Kerr found that a rotating black hole would not collapse into a point-like star, as Schwarzschild had postulated, but would collapse into a rotating ring.Anyone unfortunate enough to collide with the ring will be destroyed, but those who fall inside the ring will not die, but actually travel through the past.However, he (she) will not circle around at the other end of the ring, but cross the Einstein-Rosen bridge and circle around in another universe.In other words, the spinning black hole is the edge of Alice's mirror.
If he (she) moves around the rotating black hole again, he (she) will enter another universe.In fact, the act of repeatedly entering the spinning circle transports one to a different parallel universe, like pressing the "up" button on an elevator.In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, one on top of the other. “Through the magic circle, and—crack clack!—you are in a completely different universe, where both radius and mass are negative,” Kerr wrote.
There is one serious downside, though.A black hole is an instance of an "imtraversable wormhole", ie: crossing the event horizon is a one-way trip. —Once passing through the horizon and the Kerr ring, it is impossible to retreat through the Kerr ring and exit the horizon.
But, in 1988, Kip Thorne of Caltech and colleagues discovered an example of a traversable wormhole—one that can be entered and exited freely.In fact, with this understanding, traveling through a wormhole is no worse than flying an airplane.
Normally, gravity would crush the throat of the wormhole, killing astronauts trying to reach the other side of the wormhole.This is one of the reasons why traveling faster than light through a wormhole is impossible.But it is believed that the repulsive force of negative energy or negative mass could keep the throat open long enough for an astronaut to travel unimpeded.In other words, negative mass or negative energy is necessary for the solution of both the Alcubierian engine and the wormhole.
Over the past few years, a surprising number of exact solutions to Einstein's equations that allow for wormholes have been discovered.But do wormholes really exist?Or are they just a mathematical imagination?The important problems faced by wormholes are as follows.
First of all, in order to create the severe space-time distortion necessary to travel through the wormhole, a huge amount of positive matter and negative matter is required, approximately equivalent to a huge star or a black hole.Matthew Visser, a physicist at the University of Washington, estimates that the negative energy needed to open a 1-meter-wide wormhole would be equal to the mass of Jupiter, except that the energy would have to be negative."You need about a minus-Jupiter mass of energy to do this," he said. "Just manipulating a plus-Jupiter mass of energy is beyond our reach in the foreseeable future." ability."
Caltech's Kip Thorne speculates: "It will turn out that the laws of physics allow enough anomalous matter in human-sized wormholes to keep them open. But it will also turn out that creating wormholes and keeping them open Technology is far beyond the capabilities of our human civilization, unimaginable."
Second, we don't know how stable these wormholes can be.The rays from these wormholes would probably kill anyone who entered them.Alternatively, the wormhole might not be stable at all, closing as soon as someone enters it.
Third, the light rays falling into the black hole happen, ie: they gain more and more energy as they get closer to the event horizon.In fact, at the location of the event horizon itself, the light is technically infinitely blue-shifted, so the radiation from this sunken energy could kill everyone in a rocket.
Let us explore these issues in more detail.One of the problems is gathering enough energy to tear the fabric of time and space.The easiest way to do this is to compress an object so that it is smaller than its own "event horizon".In the case of the sun, this means compressing it to about 2 miles in diameter, and then it will collapse into a black hole. (The sun's gravity is too weak to naturally compress it to 2 miles in diameter, so our sun will never become a black hole. In principle, this means that anything - even you, if compressed enough, can become A black hole. That means compressing all the atoms in your body to less than subatomic distances—a feat that surpasses the level of modern science.)
A more practical approach would be to assemble a group of laser beams and fire an intense laser at a precise point.Or build a gigantic nuclear particle accelerator that creates two beams of atoms that then collide violently, unleashing enough energy to tear a tiny tear in the fabric of space-time.
We can calculate the energy required to create instability in space-time: roughly equivalent to the Planck energy, or 102 billion electron volts.That's an unimaginably large number universe, 1,000 trillion times more powerful than the most powerful machine available today, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located outside Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC can shake protons around in a large "ring" until they reach energies of trillions of electron volts, an energy not seen since the Big Bang.But even the behemoths of this machine are far from capable of producing energies anywhere near the Planck energy.
The next particle accelerator after the LHC will be the International Linear ColMer (ILC). Instead of turning the path of subatomic particles into a circle, the ILC will eject them onto a straight path.Particles are infused with energy as they travel along this path until they acquire unimaginably large energies.A beam of electrons will then collide with a positron, creating a huge burst of energy. The ILC will be 30-40 kilometers long, 10 times the length of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (Stanford Linear Accelerator), currently the largest linear accelerator.If all goes well, the ILC is scheduled to be completed within the next 10 years.
ILC产生的能量将为0.5-1万亿电子伏特——少于LHC的14万亿电子伏特，但这可能带有误导性（在LHC中，质子之间的对撞发生在组成质子的组分——夸克之间。因此涉及夸克的对撞少于14万亿电子伏特。这就是为什么ILC将产生比LHC所能产生的更大的对撞能量）。同样，由于电子没有成分，因此电子和正电子之间相撞的动态更为简单和彻底。
但现实地说，ILC同样远远不足以在时空中打开一个洞。要做到那一点，你需要一台强大1000万亿倍的加速器。对于我们这种使用死去的植物作为燃料（比如石油和煤）的0型文明而言，这种科技超出了我们所能集合的任何事物。但它对于一个III型文明来说或许会成为可能。
别忘了，一个III型文明在利用能源方面能动用整个星系的资源，消耗比—个II型文明多l00亿倍的能量，II型文明的能源消耗是以单单一颗恒星为基础的。而一个II型文明比一个I型文明消耗的能量多100亿倍，I型文明的能量消耗是以一颗行星为基础的。在100-200年间，我们脆弱的0型文明将达到I型文明的水平。
根据这一假设，我们距离能够实现普朗克能量还有非常非常远的距离。许多物理学家认为，在极度微小的距离，即10-53厘米的普朗克距离内，空间不是空无一物或者平静的，而是变得“满是泡沫”。它打出微小的气泡，气泡不断地短暂出现，与其他气泡相撞，随后消失在真空中。这些在真空中猛然进进出出的气泡是“虚拟宇宙”，非常类似于突然出现又消失的电子和正电子虚拟粒子。
通常，这一量子时空“泡沫”是我们完全无法看见的。这些气泡在非常微小的距离内出现，我们无法观察到它们。但是量子物理学家提出，如果我们将足够的能量集中在一个点上，直到我们达到普朗克能量，这些气泡可以变大。届时我们将看到时空中充满了小气泡，每个气泡都是一个连接到一个“婴儿宇宙”的虫洞。
在过去，这些婴儿宇宙被认为是一种好奇，一种纯数学得出的奇怪结果。但是，现在物理学家开始想象我们的宇宙最初可能也是从这样的婴儿宇宙开始的。
这样的想法是十足的想象，但物理学定律给出了可能，将足够的能量集中到一点上，在空间上打开一个洞，直到我们能接近显露出的时空泡沫和虫洞，它们将我们的宇宙和一个婴儿宇宙相连。
在太空中打出一个洞当然要求我们的科技有重大突破。但是，同样，它对于一个III型文明而言或许是可能的。比如，在一种叫“尾场桌面型加速器”（Wakeflekl tabletop accelerator）的事物上已经有了很有前景的发展。非比寻常的是，这一核粒子加速器非常小，可以被放置于桌面上，但却能产生数十亿电子伏特的能量。尾波场桌面加速器的工作原理是向带电荷的粒子发射激光，随后粒子会借助激光的能量移动。斯坦福直线加速器中心、英国的卢瑟福·阿普尔顿实验室（Rutherford Appleton Laboratory）和巴黎高等理工学院（Ecole Polytechnique）完成的实验证明，使用激光束和等离子体注入能量是可能实现短距离内的巨幅增速的。
但是，另一大突破在2007年实现了，斯坦福直线加速器中心、UCLA和USC的物理学家和科学家证明，一台巨型粒子加速器的能量可以在仅仅1米的距离内加倍。他们从一束电子开始着手，在斯坦福将其射入一个2英里长的管道，达到了420亿电子伏特的能量。随后，这些高能量电子被送入一个“加力燃烧室”中，它由一个仅88厘米长的等离子室构成，在那里电子获取额外的420亿电子伏特，使它们的能量加倍（等离子室充满了锂气。当电子穿过气体，它们制造出一种等离子体波，等离子体波制造出尾波。这个尾波转而流回电子束，并随后将它向前推，给予它额外的动力）。在这一了不起的成就中，物理学家们将过去每米能够加速一道电子束的能量纪录提高到了原来的3000倍。通过对现存的加速器添加这样的“加力燃料室”，我们原则上几乎是不付出代价地将它们的能量加了倍。
今天，尾波场桌面加速器的世界纪录是每米2000亿电子伏特。要将这一结果提高到更长的距离面临着无数的问题（比如在激光功率被注入电子束的时候维持电子束的稳定）。但假设我们能够维持每米2000亿电子伏特的功率水平，这意味着一台能够实现普朗克能量的加速器必须有10光年长。这完全在III型文明的能力之内。
虫洞和拉伸空间或许给予了我们打破光障最现实的方法。但这些技术是否稳定还是未知的。如果这些技术稳定的话，要完成它们仍旧必须使用数量巨大的正能量或负能量。
或许一个先进的III型文明已经具备了这项技术。或许还要过数千年我们才能哪怕是思考一下控制和利用这样规模的能量。由于对在量子水平上控制时空织物的基本定律仍旧存在争议，因此我把它归类为“二等不可思议”。
Notes: （《爱面丝奇境漫游记》的姐妹篇）中，爱丽丝穿过镜子进入了镜子那一头的魔法世界。——译者注
Notes: （《爱面丝奇境漫游记》的姐妹篇）中，爱丽丝穿过镜子进入了镜子那一头的魔法世界。——译者注