The Physics of Fiction: How Art and Science Inspire Each Other

While much science fiction is based on theoretical physics, occasionally literature returns the favor and inspires scientific ideas. A perfect symbiosis between the two came about in the early 1980s, when astronomer-turned-novelist Carl Sagan was researching his fictional work Contact and turned to his friend physicist Kip Thorne for advice. Sagan wished to devise a way the main character of his novel could journey quickly to a remote civilization in space. He knew that there had been considerable discussion of how Schwarzschild black holes might be able to connect with other objects: additional black holes, or perhaps even their hypothetical opposites that spew energy rather than absorbing it, dubbed “white holes.” Those connected bodies could potentially be very distant from each other in ordinary space—perhaps even in another part of our galaxy, or other galaxies altogether. Such a mechanism could be a conceivable shortcut to a faraway, inhabited world, Sagan pondered, at least in speculative fiction. However, he read that astronauts attempting to travel through such links could possibly end up in danger. He asked Thorne to clarify. Thorne’s extensive knowledge of the wildest solutions in general relativity, from black holes to gravitational waves, made him exactly the right person to ask. He had been fascinated by astronomy since a young age, while growing up in Logan, Utah. Logan lies in a valley that gets a lot of snow in the winter, so as a boy Thorne wanted to be a snowplow driver. At the age of eight, however, his mother brought him to a talk about the solar system. Five years later, reading a popular book by physicist George Gamow, who helped develop the Big Bang theory, sealed the deal; Thorne wanted to be an astronomer. If traversable wormholes are feasible, they could well link to other universes—that is, otherwise-disconnected parts of space—instead of our own universe. After undergraduate work at Caltech, Thorne began a PhD program in physics at Princeton. There, his mentor, John Wheeler, introduced him to wondrous objects in general relativity, such as black holes, geons, wormholes, and so forth. Later Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler […]

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