The following principle is clearly fixed in human consciousness: overcoming long distances is often associated with the loss of a large amount of time. Almost the entire history of mankind, the maximum speed of movement rarely exceeded the speed of human walking.
Even travelers on horseback only in fairy tales and films jump at full speed, but in fact, most of the way on horseback, a horse rarely moves faster than a person. On short distances, undoubtedly, there was a gain in time, but more or less long journeys required a decrease in the horse's speed so that it would not get tired, or even freeze on the way. In order to replace tired horses, all sorts of services were created with coachmen and stables - they allowed you to move a little faster …
Therefore, until the beginning of modern times (more precisely, before the invention of the first steam locomotives), the fastest and cheapest way to travel was by sea. And only the appearance of a car and an airplane about a hundred years ago could somehow speed up the movement of a person in space. Relatively little time has passed and humanity has developed its transport system so much that it can easily get to any corner of its planet in a few hours.
However, the new horizons opened, noticeably cooled the ardor of humanity. It turned out that the world around us, our Universe, is so huge that, even traveling at maximum speeds, it is unlikely that it will be possible to fly anywhere in a time acceptable for human life.
Indeed, travel to the nearest stars will take years, and up to more or less interesting for us - centuries. There is no need to talk about other galaxies: flights to them at such a pace will take about one hundred times more time than how long we exist as a species. However, it seems that nature has left a loophole for us. And not even one!
It all started a long time ago. Even in the ancient world, many quite serious authors have repeatedly described the most interesting phenomena of the stay of some individuals in two places almost simultaneously. And this would not be surprising, if not for one "but". But these places were located more than 1000 kilometers from each other.
For a modern person, this is not a problem at all. Even by car, having spent about 10-12 hours, it is possible to drive such a distance. Well, really, you need a good car and a fast road. However, and this can be solved - you can use an airplane: three hours and the distance covered. All this is good, only the first such case happened to Djoser, the pharaoh of the third dynasty, who managed to move from Memphis to Luxor and back in one day. And this is no less than almost a thousand kilometers. Moreover, nowhere is it said that Djoser somehow "flew" or "rode" on anything. It is said that he was both there and there.
It would be possible to attribute such cases to the conscience of the authors who wished to elevate this or that ruler by rewarding him with superpowers in their story, however, when the number of such cases reaches dozens and among such personalities not only the powerful of this world, but also ordinary people appear, this makes think …
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One of the most recent such phenomena was the travels of Francesco Forgione, better known as Padre Pio. He lived in the middle of the 20th century, that is, he was practically our contemporary. This man appeared almost simultaneously in different cities of Italy, but even with modern means of transportation he could not do this.
This phenomenon is called biolocation; its classical definition implies simply the observation of the same person in different places. There are many mystical explanations for this, but if you follow the logic, and not particularly dwell on something supernatural, then the only intelligible explanation for such a phenomenon can only be the movement of this person. It remains only to find out how these people managed to move at such a high speed.
The human mind has a number of postulates that are obvious at first glance. The combination of these postulates is called “common sense”. They are quite simple and commonplace. often we don't even pay attention to these statements. For example, the law of addition, which states that the sum does not change from a change in the places of the terms, or the fact that the arrow of the compass always points to the north, or the rule “wash your hands before eating,” and so on. Behind the seeming obviousness of such statements, in fact, there is a rather serious evidence base, but somehow we don’t think about it (and often we don’t even know it). But, the most interesting thing is that these rules are in fact special cases that are practically never violated in everyday, ordinary life.
But, if we consider the situation "in general" or in some special, special conditions, then everything turns out to be not at all simple. And addition is not commutative, and the compass does not always point to the north, and washing hands is sometimes not useful, but rather the opposite … Actually, this is how discoveries are made: someone questions the obvious truths and proves that they are just special cases more complex and serious phenomena, and a special approach to them is needed.
One of these obvious rules is that the shortest distance between the beginning and the end of a journey is a straight line. This was the case until the 19th century, when everyone successfully used the rules of Euclid's geometry and drew everything on flat surfaces. However, progress does not stand still. And in 1817, Nikolai Lobachevsky created a new theory of geometry - the geometry of spaces in which ordinary geometry with its laws, axioms and theorems becomes meaningless. Lobachevsky takes geometry to a new level. In his works, the space itself can change and this change has a very strong effect on absolutely all the processes occurring in it. Roughly speaking, at different points of the same space, the same laws manifest themselves in completely different ways.
And at the end of the 19th century, Albert Einstein revolutionized physics by creating his theory of relativity. Generalizing the ideas of Lobachevsky and Einstein, in 1904 the French mathematician Henri Poincaré created his theory of multidimensional spaces. According to her, the three-dimensional world in which we exist, our entire Universe, is just an insignificant part of some huge structure that exists in four dimensions. And that, in turn, is the same insignificant part of some space, which has five dimensions, and so on. Surprisingly, Poincaré's conjecture is fully proven mathematically.
Another thing is also true: if there are multidimensional spaces (with more than three dimensions), then there must be spaces of lesser dimension. That is, our Universe consists of many two-dimensional planes, each of which is made up of many one-dimensional straight lines. In turn, each line is from a set of points, and each point is from a set of zero spaces.
But that's not all. Within the framework of, for example, a three-dimensional model, or our world, any plane existing in it is finite in size, even if for the inhabitants of this plane it seems infinite. If we take, for example, a sheet of paper, then for us, who see it in three-dimensional space, it has some dimensions, but for a hypothetical creature living on it, it is infinite. Even if this creature crawls to the edge of the sheet, it will move to the other side, crawling to its edge, and again will be on the side where it was before. And from the point of view of this creature, the journey has no end, just as there are no boundaries for its two-dimensional Universe …
If an inhabitant of this plane wanted to move to the other side of the sheet, he would have two ways: either to crawl over the edge, or, having made a hole in the sheet, immediately find himself on its other side. Naturally, in the second case, the travel time would be much shorter than in the first.
A similar situation is possible in our world. You can, for example, break into a goal in a straight line, spending a lot of time on the journey, or you can, "piercing" the space to be at the desired point almost instantly. And this is quite real, because in four-dimensional space our Universe, which seems to us infinite, is, alas, finite.
And all this could be considered just a funny game of the mind of mathematicians, if physicists had not intervened. In the 20th century, two phenomena were discovered that confirmed Poincaré's hypothesis experimentally: first, the tunneling effect, when electrons pass through a potential barrier, disappear from our space and after a while reappear in it; and the second - fluctuations, when bosons of huge masses during their lifetime do this several times. Where these particles disappear and where they return to us again is a mystery, but the fact that these are the same particles is an established fact.
It is not yet clear how it is possible to create such "holes" in space to move objects much larger than elementary particles (for example, a ship with a crew), but the possibility of their existence was proved more than 30 years ago by Stephen Hawking. In addition, even by the most approximate calculations, the amount of energy required for this is not that great.
Perhaps the personalities in relation to whom cases of dowsing were recorded had the gift of moving through space. We cannot say for sure, but in the stories about Djoser there is a certain "door" that the pharaoh could open at will. It was the mention of this door that prompted director Emmerich to create a whole sci-fi Stargate franchise.
Be that as it may, but scientists have already taken up the issues of breaking through "wormholes" in our space. And one of the goals of the Hadron Collider was precisely to create microscopic black holes, which are the objects closest to the very tunnels through space.