GoKawiil
Tech News
Interest in wormholes as serious research subjects appears to be waning after decades as a popular science topic, according to recent commentary on the field. Once treated as speculative but plausible solutions within general relativity, wormholes now face renewed scrutiny over whether they offer testable predictions or practical scientific payoff.
A physics team led by Ron Folman at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, working with researchers from Germany, the UK and the US including Roger Penrose, has built an interferometer that splits a single atom into two simultaneous paths—one falling freely and one held still—that reconverge at the same point. This setup lets them measure how free fall changes the atom's quantum phase, something theorized nearly a century ago but never directly tested due to the need for ultracold atoms and a way to compare phase differences.
Physicist Níckolas de Aguiar Alves of the Federal University of ABC revisited the 'Picard Maneuver' from Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode 'The Battle,' in which Captain Picard jumps to warp speed and stops abruptly to create a visual double image that confuses an enemy ship. Working through the relativistic math, he found the tactic holds up better than the show's writers likely realized, tying it to real physics involving objects moving faster than a medium's speed of light.
A new browser-based demo, shared on Hacker News, simulates a park environment where light travels at only 5 kilometers per hour instead of its real-world speed. As users move through the space, they can observe relativistic effects like length contraction, time dilation, and the Doppler shift, all normally imperceptible at everyday speeds.
Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis proposed training a large language model only on scientific knowledge available before 1911 to see if it could independently derive general relativity, calling it a meaningful test for artificial general intelligence. Several research teams, including one led by Ido Kaminer at Technion, have since built such 'vintage' AI models restricted to historical data, but early results have exposed shortcomings in current systems rather than demonstrating breakthrough reasoning.