Scientists appear to have been able to create a wormhole in a laboratory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, but it’s not the same type of wormhole that you and I might have been thinking of before you actually learn about what the concept was about.
The theory behind a space-time wormhole is an invisible bridge that connects two very distant points in space-time with the help of gravitational energy; and scientists have made a miniature representation of a wormhole using magnets and electromagnetic energy in a laboratory.
Although it’s not like the real thing that we’ve been unable to find or harness anywhere else in our universe, it works as a proof of concept and offers a base to begin learning more about them.
The magnetic wormhole transfers a magnetic field into what scientists are calling a “special dimension,” and this is because the magnetic field appears to disappear. This is accomplished using a tunnel of meta-materials.
The only real difference between the space-time wormhole and this magnetic wormhole is that one is a manipulation of gravitational energy and the other is a manipulation of electromagnetic energy. In simpler terms, one handles matter and the other handles electromagnetism, but they can’t be interchanged because each serves a different purpose.
As we know, magnets have two poles, with one being North and the other being South. By using this electromagnetic wormhole, scientists have created something called a monopole, which is something that does not exist naturally in nature. This happens because the electromagnetic field is being channeled into the aforementioned “special dimension.”
Unlike space-time wormholes, this wormhole can’t actually transfer matter from one place to another, so it’s really nothing more than a proof of concept that we can just sit back and learn from, but scientists do believe that it’s possible we may be able to harness this electromagnetic wormhole in future technologies that we don’t even know about yet.
To learn more about the concept, you can watch the Discovery News video below:
Source: Discovery News