THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF SPECULATIVE REASON
So why all the fuss about hypothetical wormholes in a fictional universe?
First, remember that what originates in fiction doesn't necessarily remain in fiction forever. When Jules Verne wrote about a journey to the moon in his 1865 novel no one (other than possibly Verne himself) dreamed of ever actually going there. Yet the first manned landing on the moon took place just over a hundred years later. Another example of science fiction morphing into science reality is the holodeck of the fictional Star Trek universe. Recent advances (1, 2) in virtual reality are bringing the possibility of creating an actual holodeck of sorts within reach in the not far distant future. And 3-D printing seems about to realize in real life the replicator of the same science fiction entertainment franchise.
Remember further that many theories and real world discoveries of physics and other sciences had their beginnings in speculative fiction or speculative reason of other sort. For example Einstein (1912) agreed on the importance of Minkowski's spacetime formalism and used it for his work on the foundations of general relativity.
While spacetime can be viewed as a consequence of Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, it was first explicitly proposed mathematically by one of his teachers, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, in a 1908 essay building on and extending Einstein's work. His concept of Minkowski space is the earliest treatment of space and time as two aspects of a unified whole, the essence of special relativity. The idea of Minkowski space led to special relativity being viewed in a more geometrical way.
However, the most important contribution of Minkowski's geometric viewpoint of spacetime turned out to be in Einstein's later development of general relativity, since the correct description of the effect of gravitation on space and time was found to be most easily visualized as a "warp" or stretching in the geometrical fabric of space and time, in a smooth and continuous way that changed smoothly from point-to-point along the spacetime fabric.
[Wikipedia]
These are but a few among many similar examples. The possibilities inherent in speculative fiction and other forms of speculative reason then can be ignored only at risk of significant loss to the future of science and technology.
© 2013 Martin Hauser