The relationship between science and literature is as close as that of a window to the painting that covers it. One only has to take down the painting to realize that what is presented through the window is less interesting than the painting.
Something similar happens when we read an expectation story and then go looking for the scientific source that inspired it. Because good science fiction authors do so much research themselves that there have been times when their research has given rise to new scientific studies. And this is what literature professor David Toomey tells us in his essay “The New Time Travelers” (Buridán Library), in which he cites the case of the well-known astrophysicist Carl Sagan when, one spring day in 1985, he called his colleague Kip Thorne in his office Norman Bridge Laboratory at Caltech to research the novel he was writing. It was to be Sagan’s first and only foray into fiction, since, as we know, he dedicated his entire life to writing popular science books.
Sagan’s novel was called Contact (Nova) and is about contact with an extraterrestrial culture. According to Kip Thorne in his book Black Holes and Curved Time (Criticism), the documentation Sagan requested was on gravitational physics, and Kip Thorne, pleased to be able to help his friend, read the manuscript carefully. So much so that he realized the mistake Sagan had made in introducing black holes for time travel. Because Sagan had initially imagined that Dr. Eleanor Ellie Arroway traveled through a black hole to the star Vega, which was shocking to physicist Kip Thorne, as Sagan suggested it as a round trip, because once you enter a black hole, not only can you return to the place of origin, but it is impossible to leave it without dissolving. For all of these reasons, a black hole was not credible for the interstellar travel that Sagan proposed in his novel.
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At that time, Thorne Sagan suggested swapping the black hole for a wormhole, also known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge. The first quantum simulation of a wormhole opens a new door to understanding the universe, a kind of shortcut with two mouths. one for the entrance and one for the exit. However, another problem arose with this solution, as a black hole’s tunnel tends to narrow until it closes completely. This would cause a spaceship traveling through the hypothetical tunnel to disintegrate. Then Thorne goes further and finds the key to keep the tunnel open; invents a matter of negative energy that causes bodies to repel each other through gravity. By injecting the aforementioned exotic matter into the tunnel walls, the wormhole would never close.
And so the novel Contact was based on valid scientific hypotheses, and this led to Thorne interfering with the novel in a way that led him to advance research on closed time curves, which we’ll talk about in the next section. Delivery.
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