The Dimensional Door

Imagine if you could walk through the doorway in one place and arrive elsewhere on the other side. Could we create a practical and easily replicable device that would allow for safe and simple instantaneous travel from one place to another regardless of the distance? How could the two doorways be connected? Once connected, what would you see inside the doorframe? Could you get chopped in half whilst passing through? Would such travel affect your body chemistry, DNA, atoms, etc.? Would differences in air pressure from both sides create gusts of wind or other differential phenomena? These are a few of the questions that quickly come to mind.

The previously invisible was made visible. To put this idea into perspective, the telephone has been around for less than 150 years. What was it that brought us to discover that we could project our voices across vast distances? Humans began to fly in the 1870s with the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon followed by the first ‘heavier than air’ flight by the Wright brothers in 1903. In the 1890s, the wireless was another strange inspiration that mobile telephone users do not even think twice about today, never mind high definition multi-channel satellite services. In less than 200 years of human evolution, all of these impossible ideas have become commonplace.

Gravity: what is this force that we have only superficially harvested for hydroelectric power generation? In what other way could this puzzling force be harnessed? How could it be related to magnetism and time? Could this all be explained by the fifth or another dimension? These are very big questions that physicists have been studying for a number of centuries.

Ideas about dimensional travel have been around for a long time. H.G. Wells published, The Time Machine, in 1895. Instantaneous travel is explored further in stories such as Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 book, A Wrinkle in Time, or the way the witches and wizards in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, first printed in 1997, are able to travel from one fireplace to another. The film, Stargate, released by MGM in 1994, also contributes to the canon of teleportation stories not to mention Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek from the 1960s. Nonetheless, the question remains how to adapt these ‘fantasies’ into a real world application?

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