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NIELS BOHR The commonly held assumption that the "aliens" inhabiting the UFOs are visitors from another galaxy, routinely traveling millions of miles for brief, spasmodic, encounters, has increasingly been doubted by the most serious investigators. Their typical objections to the "intergalactic traveler" theories derive from applying basic astrophysical assumptions. Traveling at a million miles per day from even our nearest star, Alpha Centari, would entail a trip that would take 70,000 years to accomplish. Furthermore, where are they in the meantime, between encounters? And, why don't we observe them en route? The problems facing conventional conceptions of space travel include the limitations deriving from the velocity of light as well as the enormous supply of energy required. However, the objections advanced to interstellar travel may also prove to be naive. Two provocative alternatives have been suggested. Mathematical subtleties in theoretical physics have suggested the possibility of exploiting deformations in the four-dimensional space-time which are known as transversible wormholes. A traversible wormhole could be a shortcut through both space and time.'* When Charles L. Dodgson, while teaching mathematics at Oxford, but writing as "Lewis Carroll," had Alice go through the looking glass, or fall down a rabbit hole, he was exploiting the wormhole concepts he had gleaned from Georg Riemann's advanced geometry. (We'll explore this shortly) There are some who believe that—theoretically—even time travel could be possible. In 1988, Kip Thorne and Michael Morris of the California Institute of Technology and Ulvi Yurtsever at the University of Michigan suggested that since these wormholes could connect regions that exist in differenttime periods, perhaps some form of time travel might eventually prove possible. (Not to change the past, but perhaps to fulfill the past. We'll explore this in chapter 14.) 51 CHAPTER FOUR REALITY'S TWILIGHT ZONE "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it." INTERGALACTIC VISITORS? "WORMHOLES" AS SHORTCUTS