Physicist Can't Rule Out Time Travel

It's Hollywood fiction now, but one local scientist says if we can just figure out how to avoid the massive explosions predicted from traveling through a wormhole, maybe the theoretical premise of the movie "Jumper" could be brought one step closer to reality. The new film, featuring the ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson and Hayden Christensen (of "Star Wars" fame), is about a troubled young man who develops the ability to instantly "jump" from place to place by teleportation -- a leap across space and time. "You can't rule it out," said John Cramer, a University of Washington physicist invited to speak to a Seattle audience before a preview showing of the sci-fi flick one recent evening. Cramer is both a science fiction writer and a physicist working on an experiment perhaps no less bizarre in concept than the notion of people teleporting through wormholes. "These were once known as Einstein-Rosen bridges," the UW scientist said to a full house of moviegoers at the Oak Tree Cinemas in North Seattle. Later renamed "wormholes," Cramer explained, they are basically tunnels in space-time that instantaneously connect two otherwise disparate points in the universe.