Is e do shùilean a dh’fhosgail.
(It is your eyes that will open the way).
This is something of a “fun” topic for me. In some sense, it reminds me of when I was a small child wandering through the woods where I lived. I always felt safe among the stoical sentinels: the towering oaks, the fragrant hemlocks, the colorful sugar maples, and the white birches. These trees were home to many arboreal tenants, such as chattering red and gray squirrels, chipmunks, and raptors, including merlins, hawks, and owls. There were ancient and therefore somewhat indistinct trails for me to follow, which were nevertheless as prominent to me as Broadway in midtown Manhattan is to a commuter. But I always wondered what I might be missing—what might lie unseen until after the sun sets? Was there a world of strange denizens hiding under a rock or a rotted log? Or maybe there was another reality hidden alongside the first, entered through a door that I might be able to make appear if I knew just what to say. Perhaps this curiosity is what beckons people to explore caves—wanting to see where a cave leads and what they might discover enroute. Or it explains why astronauts dream of going to Mars.
I wanted to write something on a topic that became increasingly complex for an old man to ponder, so I had to break it down into smaller components. I want to begin by discussing a theme or concept known as “doors,” or more properly, portals that lead to another reality or world. Those who are familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass know that Alice left this world once when following the white rabbit down a rabbit hole and on another occasion by passing through a bedroom mirror. Then there are the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, where the Pevensie children and their kin stumbled into the magical land of Narnia, whether through the back of a wardrobe, being drawn into a painting, through the bottom of a pool, or finally, after death. Both of these authors (Carroll, who was also a mathematician, and Lewis, an academician in his own right) wrote of fictional passageways that only worked at certain times or under certain conditions, and sometimes only for certain people.
It is sort of like Stonehenge, where once a year on the summer solstice the sun occludes a certain sarsen stone, under which there is a treasure. So, I want to write about what may very well be science fiction because there is no evidence that any of this is true or even possible. However, there is some mathematical modeling that convinces a number of physicists that alternative realities may, in fact, exist but have not yet been discovered. A few theorists, like Kaluza and Klein, might go so far as to insist that they must exist. If these other worlds or dimensions do exist, there may likely be a portal somewhere to access them, perhaps even in the same forest I explored as a child. That is a very big caveat, however.
Today, as much as in the past, the notions of portals—whereby people can pass from one reality to another—remain a popular topic. In the photo above, people in New York City stare at a portal that shows them a street scene in Dublin, Ireland, in real time. The people in Dublin, meanwhile, see the pedestrians in Manhattan. This is not magic because no one is teleported anywhere by stepping through the portal. In fact, they likely cannot pass through because the street scene from Dublin must be projected onto something, even if it is a hologram. So, this “portal” is more like a larger version of FaceTime without audio capabilities, using existing technology. Still, it is novel and draws crowds.
A brief history of portals
In the ancient world, when Greek civilization was at its peak, the notion of portals took hold. However, not every portal back then was worth visiting. In this case, I’m referring to portals that served as gateways between the world of the living and that of the dead in Hades, and almost without exception, they only worked one way. The Greeks recognized seven or so portals that were generally located around inhospitable or inaccessible places, or
those that marked the location of superhuman feats by heroes such as Hercules.
In the ancient city of Hierapolis (Ἱεράπολις, meaning “holy city”) in modern-day Türkiye, the Gates of Hell (Plutonium) were located, characterized by a cave that emitted toxic gases. This site was known for its association with the Greco-Roman god of the underworld:
The site is built on top of a cave which emits toxic gases, hence its use as a ritual passage to the underworld. Ritual animal sacrifices were common at the site. Animals would be thrown into the cave and pulled back out with ropes that had been tied to them. Archaeologists noted that the fumes emitted from the cavern still maintain their deadly properties as they recorded passing birds, attracted by the warm air, suffocated after breathing the toxic fumes.
The Trojan hero Aeneas entered Hades from the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, which is located near present-day Naples in Italy. He was on a quest to meet his deceased father.
There was another portal in the Cave of Matapan, located at the southernmost part of mainland Greece. It was here that the Greek poet and musician Orpheus passed to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, who had left this world after being bitten by a deadly viper. However, he failed in his task at the very last moment. A temple to Poseidon (now a church) was located there. This portal is also associated with another famous figure. For his Twelfth Labor, Hercules had to overpower and bring back Cerberus, the three-headed, ferocious dog that guarded the gates of Hell (i.e., Hades). That task took him to the Cave of Matapan (also known as Taenarum), where he descended to the Styx via a cave.
Other examples of portals in mythology and folklore
Other examples of portals in a broad sense include the Norse notion of Bifröst, known to us (particularly among lovers) as the Rainbow Bridge that connects Midgard (the realm of humans) to Asgard (the realm of the gods). As with the Greek portals to Hades, one side of the portal is our world, while the other side represents another realm (the place of the dead). Bifröst, however, connects Earth with the heavenly Valhalla, the kingdom of heroes.
Finally, the Celts had a well-developed notion of entry points between mortals and immortals, as well as faeries and such. These portals were often found in lakes or hills.
Go ask Alice
Lewis Carroll wrote about Alice Liddell. Carroll was not the author’s real name; it was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and he taught mathematics at Oxford during the mid-nineteenth century. Around that time, he made the acquaintance of Dean Henry Liddell, and this thirty-year-old scholar appeared to pursue a Lolita-like relationship with Liddell’s ten-year-old daughter named Alice. Carroll’s hobbies included photography, and he took over a thousand photos of young children, a few (including at least one of Alice) taken in some state of undress. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an impromptu tale Carroll spun to entertain Alice one afternoon, and she encouraged him to write it and have it published as a book, which was a commercial success in Victorian England. Soon after, Carroll fell out of favor with Liddell. The reason is lost to history, but we can easily imagine why. A sequel to the book, Through the Looking-Glass, followed several years later.
The contribution Carroll makes to the theme of this post is that there are alternate realities that can be entered through portals. The portals to these realities may be a rabbit hole or a magical mirror. The alternate realities include a society with different laws and customs, characters who dress and behave in ostentatious ways, and so on.
C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia
Lewis’s seven-book series is set in England during the German Blitz of World War II. Children were evacuated by the thousands from London, Birmingham, Leeds, and other cities with the intention of relocating them to the countryside, where they would be less likely to be injured in the bombings. While staying in a large English manor, the four Pevensie children (two boys and two girls) discover a passage to a place called Narnia by entering a large wardrobe that had no back. If you pushed your way through the heavy coats stuffed with mothballs, you would currently find yourself in a forest with talking animals as well as humans. The earthly characters learn things about themselves during their different visits to Narnia over an undisclosed but significant period of time. A few regular characters disappear, and new ones are added.
The premise is that if all of creation were cursed because of the sin in the Garden of Eden, and if there was intelligent life beyond what we have on Earth, then that life would need redemption as well. How would God appear to a society of beavers or a herd of unicorns? Or fauns? Or mice? To Lewis, a close friend and companion of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was writing about Middle-earth at the time, it made sense that God would appear as an animal Himself (in this case, a Lion). The seven books cover the history of Narnia from creation until the end of that world, and earthly children are allowed to play a significant part in the process.
Today, we have role-playing games and movies (such as Jumanji) that feature portals (in the video game Jumanji, the game board itself is the portal). The movie Stargate has spawned three or more entire series. Consequently, many people are familiar with portals.
How would you know a portal if you saw it?
While in theory, portals (if they exist) could be any shape, in fiction they are usually portrayed as round. This is possibly because black holes and wormholes are thought to be round. In fact, were a real portal to be discovered, it might be more likely to be round than any other shape. This is because it takes less energy to maintain a spherical shape than any other shape. Raindrops, for example, are spherical (round), so nature seems to prefer things that are round. I’ve even seen a gash in a very ill person “morph” over a period of weeks into a circular lesion.
While a portal to another world or dimension might be smooth like the surface of a mirror, it might also have a textured, shimmering, or colored appearance, such as a rotating tunnel with a cloud-like appearance, and so on.
There might be strange animals in the vicinity of a portal, or unfamiliar plants and flowers, as different species and seeds are pulled or pushed into our reality from that of another whenever the portal opens. What might actually pass through depends, of course, on the portal’s size. Like wormholes in space (another hypothetical construct you may have heard about), most wormholes are thought to be very small barely allow something the size of a sesame to enter. Other wormholes might allow a truck to transit. Here’s your text with corrections for spelling, grammar, and punctuation, along with slight adjustments for clarity and flow:
So it would likely be the same with portals. If the portal disturbs a dimension in some way while opening, a person nearby might feel extremely dizzy and nauseated to the point of vomiting. There would be a significant distortion as far as proprioception and time are concerned. This sensory conflict (between our three-dimensional reality and an additional dimension) creates a disturbance in the person’s vestibular system, as the distortion from the dimensional perturbation conflicts with what the person’s other senses are telling him or her. This conflict is what sets the nausea and vomiting into motion, as the body seeks to self-correct, perhaps supposing that some sort of poison has been ingested.
Other subjective signs and symptoms, including unusual or unfamiliar sights, sounds, smells, temperature changes, time dilation, and shifts in gravity, may occur as well, depending on what lies on the other side of the portal. A person standing at the threshold may feel as if they are being pushed or pulled toward the portal, or they may not feel any direct force at all.
There may be other phenomena that occurs when a portal opens. See here for example.
Show me the science
Once again, and at this point in my post, references to portals have been taken from mythology and science fiction. In fact, there is not even a suggestion that portals are empirical, let alone verifiable or falsifiable. However, if string theory becomes the prevailing paradigm in astrophysics, then the certainty, or at least the possibility, of portals must surely rise. In advanced mathematics, the suggestion of portals is even stronger. Take, for example, the Einstein–Rosen bridges named after two reputable theorists: Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.
E-R bridges
At first, Einstein-Rosen (E-R) bridges (a.k.a. wormholes), which are permitted in general relativity, were assumed to require some sort of exotic matter and/or negative energy density—yet to be discovered—to stabilize them. If they could be stabilized, they would be microscopic. Once more minds were attracted to string theory, the rigor of these requirements was loosened a bit to allow certain, perhaps more accessible, electrically charged subatomic particles to serve as a ballast (so to speak). From that point, scientists began looking for ways to transfer information from place to place using the microscopic wormholes, which led to the prospect of transporting living things—including people—which, in some sense, can be thought of as information rather than matter. The information that makes a person unique starts with his or her DNA, of course, but then branches out to their neurophysiological profile and memories. This may not be an impossible task, given what we are learning about quantum entanglement. In theory, a person could be reduced to atoms or subatomic particles, shot through a wormhole, and then recompiled on the other side—not that any of us would ever see this.
Some believe that exotic matter is still a requirement to anchor a wormhole. That raises the problem of discovering this exotic matter (except for tetraquarks and pentaquarks, which CERN has proven) which itself is a matter of scientific speculation. Perhaps anti-matter? Tomorrow, I will get a PET scan. The “P” in the name of the procedure stands for “positron,” which is a form of antimatter, though it is not exotic matter.
Other theorists have raised the possibility of “quantum tunneling,” based loosely (very loosely) on what we already know and practice in electrical engineering.
Does our reality leak?
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been looking for unaccountable energy loss from their experiments on the possibility that any “missing” energy might have leaked into another dimension or universe, ostensibly through a portal, but to date, they have found none.
Could a portal open in our universe under normal physical laws?
Possibly, if there are one-dimensional branes (strings) left over from the early universe, and they happen to pass each other rapidly, the supergravity effect of each brane or perhaps the vibrational patterns of the different branes might cause a portal to open in spacetime.
There would be no warning or notice to us, such as what we receive when a solar flare is approaching Earth. It would just happen, perhaps for a very brief period of seconds or minutes, and it might suck whatever is nearby (animal, vegetable, or mineral) through it.
And speaking of gravity, there are gravitational waves that Einstein predicted in 1916 as well as gravitons (which I won’t go into.) Gravitational waves are “ripples in spacetime generated by accelerating masses, particularly during violent astronomical events like supernovae or the merging of black holes and neutron stars.” Our solar system is hurtling through space at incredible speed as our galaxy carries us through the universe and as our solar system travels through space relative to other stars outside of the Milky Way. Then, there is also the speed at which we rotate around the core of our galaxy. At some point we may pass through a gravitational wave. This wave might shorten or lengthen distances from place-to-place on our Earth (but likely imperceivably and temporarily at that.) It could also affect the higher dimensions in ways we cannot even imagine (even if we know for sure they exist.)
At the Planck scale (the smallest scale known), space or time might not present a smooth, tenacious “fabric.” Instead, it might be uneven and “bubbly,” with areas of unequal density or some areas more permeable than others. This could cause a rupture or portal.
Any high-energy phenomenon, such as colliding neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts, or sufficiently large supernova explosions, might be enough to disrupt the stability of the status quo.
Of course, Type III civilizations if they exist might know how to manipulate cosmic laws to provide some sort of permanence to the portals. And, if a Type III civilization does exist somewhere, then it doesn’t matter what we know or think. The inhabitants of this advanced civilization would be able to establish portals on earth and visit here however and as often as they wish and there would not be anything we could do about it.
This is what we know and have to work with. I ask those of you with graduate degrees in STEM fields to be gentle in your critique of my explanation.
