What If the Spacetime Continuum is Broken? | Unveiled

What if the Spacetime Continuum was Broken?

You’ve heard it before a million times in all your favourite movies, the idea that time and space can be ruptured. By cosmic phenomenon, by dangerous technology, or by pesky time travellers who won’t stop trying to change history. But is it actually possible to do this? And if it is, would it really be so catastrophic?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if the spacetime continuum was broken?

“Spacetime” is a mathematical concept we use to understand the universe and how it works. Existence as we know and perceive it has four dimensions; three spatial dimensions – length, height, and width – and one temporal dimension – time. We think about space and time together like this because physics shows that the two are intrinsically connected when it comes to studying a given object at a given moment – in other words, an object has both coordinates in space and coordinates in time.

Time is weird though, to put it lightly. We know it’s there and always happening, but we can’t see it and we can’t travel forwards or backwards through it like we can through space. The concept of time dilation, which science experiments have proven, shows us just how strange the passage of time is. Essentially, time can move at different speeds from two different observation points. If you were on a space ship travelling close to the speed of light, aiming to get 10 lightyears away from Earth (as measured on Earth), to you on the ship it would only feel like a few months. But to the people on Earth, it would still take you ten years. If you turned around and came straight back, twenty years on Earth would have elapsed but for you only a fraction of that time will’ve passed.

Weird as this is though, it doesn’t constitute “breaking” the spacetime continuum, even though you would have technically travelled multiple years forwards in time. It’s just how time works. With that in mind, what does constitute breaking the spacetime continuum? It’s quite hard to break it when it doesn’t really work in the way that science-fiction teaches us. It’s not really a “fabric” that can be ripped or torn, though it does get stretched and warped by objects of different masses. The more mass an object has, the more it bends spacetime, which is what creates gravity. So, spacetime is really just a way to understand how particles work at specific points in their world-line, which is their entire history beginning to end.

But there are plenty of things in space that we don’t understand; black holes being a big one. We think we know how black holes form and what they do, but what happens inside one is still a mystery. We can’t send a person into a black hole to have a look, we can’t send a probe into a black hole because its communications wouldn’t be able to escape, and we haven’t yet been able to study them enough from afar. The big issue with black holes is the singularity at their heart. A singularity is a point of infinite mass and density, warping spacetime so much that nothing can escape its pull – including light. Scientists don’t really understand how this happens, though, and currently guess that somehow the laws of physics themselves break down inside a black hole. They also don’t understand what happens to the matter that the black hole pulls in. Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it doesn’t make sense that the centre of a black hole is destroying anything – it’s a problem otherwise known as the black hole information paradox. So, do black holes break spacetime? If it is able to be broken, a black hole is certainly the most promising candidate to do so, and that’s why various scientists are working to try and actually create miniature black holes, to get a better sense of what they’re capable of – whether that’s a good idea or not is up for debate.

There’s yet another, even more destructive way black holes could rupture reality, though: if two of them collide. And a black hole collision isn’t as far away as you might think. In about 100,000 years the two black holes in the centre of the quasar PKS 1302-102, 3.5 billion lightyears away from us, will collide. Scientific evidence points to the existence of a supermassive black hole binary in this system, and that the two enormous black holes might only be about 0.1 parsecs apart – or 2 trillion miles. This might seem like a big distance, but it’s actually less than the size of our solar system, which – while still vast to us – isn’t much when we’re talking about two supermassive black holes on the brink of crashing into each other. The gravitational waves this collision will produce, which is about 3.3. billion years in the making, will be one of the most amazing things scientists have ever been able to study. Provided we haven’t already destroyed ourselves with our analogue black hole generators by that point, it’ll be a cosmic spectacle to trounce all others!

Wormholes are another great prospect for rupturing spacetime, if we could prove they exist. Current physics does allow for and predict the existence of wormholes, but we’ve yet to observe one. A wormhole is an alternate route that leads from point A to point B in space, often shown as intergalactic shortcuts in sci-fi, and they work by bending spacetime around and making tunnels from one side to the other. Some theories about wormholes say that black holes might actually be wormholes, and the output of a black hole is a white hole, an enormous, glowing celestial construct that’s incredibly repulsive – the exact opposite of a black hole. Other theories propose that wormholes just pop in and out of existence all over the place very quickly, much too quickly for us to even work out what we were looking at, let alone try and traverse it. Most wormholes probably aren’t traversable because they’d likely be highly radioactive and very unstable, but do they break spacetime? If they exist, they probably just bend it in ways we don’t quite understand, and the fact that they might appear and disappear could mean that whatever tear they make or damage they create, they also fix when they go.

If even wormholes aren’t enough to punch a hole in the fabric of spacetime, despite literally being holes in spacetime, then maybe we need to examine things on a smaller scale. Once-hypothetical time crystals have recently been created for the first time. If time was already weird, time crystals are even weirder, literally breaking the laws of time by repeating their structures infinitely without consuming any energy. Natural crystals already repeat over-and-over where space is concerned, endlessly forming lattices and growing in strange, geometrical shapes. Time crystals, though, are our first tangible example of what’s called non-equilibrium matter, repeating themselves irrespective of space. They were thought to be impossible for years, but not anymore.

Time crystals still aren’t quite what we see in science-fiction, though, when we think of “breaking the spacetime continuum.” Nor are black holes and even wormholes. It’s generally an idea associated with the dangers of time travel - and taking those dangers too far. Time dilation means that we can travel forwards in time, but it’s when we try to go backwards that things become really tricky. Since most scientists generally think time travel backwards is impossible, and all would agree that devices like the TARDIS and the DeLorean are fully in the realm of fantasy, actually creating a backwards time traveller could truly constitute “breaking spacetime”. It, along with a usable method for faster-than-light travel, would be a sure-fire way to break apart the laws of physics and totally screw up reality.

And really, these are exactly the methods we see employed over and over again in science-fiction, because “breaking the spacetime continuum” is really a sci-fi concept first and foremost. But, true spacetime is probably much more resilient than the movies give it credit for, given that black holes and time crystals do and can exist, and wormholes could theoretically exist. Even the idea of going back in time and rewriting history needn’t have many, or any, implications for the fundamentals of the universe… Not if we accept the proposal of parallel universes and the multiverse - but that’s a whole new problem!

As far as we know, spacetime is extremely flexible and extremely durable; it’s bent, warped, and challenged by all kinds of cosmic phenomenon every day, but it has managed to last for the best part of 14 billion years. Reality hasn’t imploded on us yet, but that’s what would happen if the spacetime continuum was broken.