because nothing moves. If we set up the conditions properly, these zero-energy state plates will experience a higher “pressure” on the outside surfaces than on the inside surfaces, and they will collapse. Since they started out at a zero-energy state, while collapsing they enter a lower or negative energy state, called the Casimir Effect. It sounds like fantasy, but the Casimir Effect is real, measurable, and can be used under the right circumstances to stabilize a wormhole. The problem is harnessing sufficient energy to bring this whole scenario about in the first place. We’re talking about energy levels on the order of that produced by a star, something we are not even remotely capable of doing today. But it’s not impossible. One can imagine a civilization sufficiently advanced that it can generate such energy levels. These guys would be able to manipulate space-time itself, and to move about within space-time in ways we cannot even imagine.The capability to move through time, no matter how remote, raises the conundrum of paradoxes: Going back in time, killing your grandparents, so that you cannot be born, and so can’t go back in time in the first place, which means your grandparents were not killed, which means...
Imagine a wormhole so positioned that the entrance and exit are near each other, and where the entrance is in the “present,” whereas the exit is a second or so in the “future.” Now imagine shooting a billiard ball into the entrance at such an angle that the exiting ball (the same one) will strike itself on its path toward the entrance, deflecting it from entering the wormhole in the first place. Kip Thorn and colleagues have calculated that there simply is no angle where this can happen. Every possible angle causes the exiting ball to miss the ball rolling toward the entrance. In this instance, at least, the universe absolutely prevents a paradox. Nevertheless, we still are faced with the consequences of killing the grandparent, since one can imagine no method of “preventing” the action that does not require intervention of something or someone. String theory, which is the current explanation of how the universe really works, supplies an interesting answer. In this approach, every time a “decision” is made, the universe branches or splits into two separate time lines, something that happens countless trillions of times each microsecond. This results in a “multiverse” with virtually infinite branches that are