Slashdot Mirror
Wormholes Unstable (BBC)
An anonymous reader writes that "The BBC reports on recent theoretical physics research showing that wormholes may not be very useful for space or time travel. Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly. Too bad for budding time travelers and space explorers!"
who read the headline as "Windows Unstable" and thought, duh... of course it is...
Duh, that's why they have the dampener things on the stargate.
And they only take reservations millennia in advance. I hate to cancel now.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
A completely theoretical and as-yet-to-be-discovered phenominon is unstable, and unusable for transportation? Say it aint so!
This work obviously needs to be run by a futurologist for a second opinion.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
According to the article theoretically a wormhole that opens to a random place/time is still stable. It would make a great getaway. "You don't know where I'm going and neither do I. *poof*"
That's why the artificially-created stable one near the Deep Space Nine station was so strategically valuable.
Elementary sci-fi!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Well there goes my plans for the summer!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Be careful of this if you have not yet returned from the recent Time Travelers convention
Nice job. Now you look like a massive tool.
wormholes? all bill and ted needed was a phonebox.
I suppose this makes it more like the "improbability" drive now, doesn't it?
You wouldn't have to be in a wormhole very long to travel somewhere (sometime) else--as long as you're not counting on the return trip.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Maybe one day you'll get the chance to go back and time and try again.
From the FUTURE...
We all knew from DS9 that stable wormholes just don't happen in nature. That's why the one to the Dominion Empire was so unusual. It was STABLE. Very rare indeed, and it needed the intervention of an alien species to stay intact.
Why is this considered news?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I was under the impression this was already established. I remember seeing a TV show about Stephen Hawking and some other guy betting that time travel was impossible due to the instability of wormholes.
We all know that there's only one stable wormhole in the galaxy, near a planet called "Bejor."
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
"I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as if millions of sci-fi fan boys suddenly lost their erections and started crying."
Even though I'm a huge SG1 fan, I (and a lot of others in my Information Theory class) had a _lot_ of trouble with the wormhole concept. I don't know enough physics to articulate my problems well, but I really can't imagine how the entropy associated with these things would allow any _useful_ information (leave alone objects) to pass through. Any physics-literate /.-ers care to comment?
Go somewhere random
I thought the idea was to use some exotic form of energy to hold them open.
Technoli
Like a big hammer? Or more like a giant screw driver?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
or you'll end up in the Delta Quadrant.
That they made jodie foster wear that goofy outfit when she travelled through the wormhole.. come on, I'd like to think todays audiences are mature enough to handle a little bit of nudity, seeing her hotly oiled up and sleek body slips through the cosmic threshold shouldn't dismay anyone.
I'm going with her on the next trip, in the raw baby!
Who needs wormholes anyway, you can use the heavily distorted space time around a black hole to time travel instead.
"Honey, call the space-time travel agent - we have to take the train to Andromeda or risk being thrown into separate tangential universes and stuff. "
We can send a man to the moon, but we can't even get a wormhole to stick around.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Well, no wonder the time-travel convention was a bust :)
And exactly what does this "quickly" concept have to do with time travel? :P
And that just seems so shortsighted...
From the article:
But building a wormhole with a throat radius big enough to just fit a proton would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 30. A human-sized wormhole would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 60.
"Frankly no engineer is going to be able to do that," said the York researcher.
Well, I don't know if any engineer could do that with pencil and paper, but I am sure a computer could do it. Well, I am not sure a computer could do it, but growths in computational speed and power have certainly surprised us so far...
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Just apply a charge to a conductive body. The charge will dissipate across the entire surface of the body. Without the ability to channel or control electricity it will never be useful.
It's Heisenberg all over again!
Man, if only we had known that wormholes were unsafe for space travel back in 1995, we could have been spared the agony of seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager
JANEWAY: Chakotay, take us into the wormhole.
CHAKOTY: Aye aye, Captain!
PARIS: (aside to TORRES) Heh, she said "wormhole."
*crunch*
- Time Bandits
The one I was using tomorrow worked just fine, well, it did until it broke yesterday.
----
Everyone knows you have to move out of any nearby gravity wells before you can initiate a jump.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
...but assholes persist forever!
John Rhys-Davies ended up on that gods-awful "Revelations" mini-series on his last slide....
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Ok, so a semi-classic wormhole is unstable....
Does it fall apart in pico seconds, seconds, days, weeks, months, years, eons??
Depending on how hard they are to make (assuming you can make them) perhads it is GOOD that they fall apart in a few seconds. That lets you warp a ship out of the system without upsetting all the orbits etc.
Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly.
Mathematically, physics says the same thing about a stable fixed-point in a static magnetic field.
And yet...
I have one of those cool little-magnet-levitating-over-a-big-magnet toys sitting on my desk at home, happily violating the (human-formalized) laws of physics.
Funny how, despite the numbers just not working well, little things like "friction" in the real world make sooooo many "impossible" things work just fine... All those nasty infinite series that would otherwise make the world very messy to calculate, eventually taper off to nothing, in a very real and practical way.
So how long before they start mining PHB's brains for Exotic matter?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
If wormholes allow time travel, their brevity is nearly irrelevant.
--
make install -not war
(Well, it's not really new anymore, but ...)
* Garbage disposal, including of Objects of Power of the sort that seemingly vanquished evil galactic overlords require for their return to total mastery.
* Practical jokes. "Star? Your planet orbited a star? I don't see a star around here, do you?"
* Sex toys for transcended superbeings who exist as fluctuations in the quantum foam but who have not forgotten what it was like to be carbon based, young, and in estrous on the sunny plains of Ghyr'd'tos.
As Hawking, and several other authors are quick to point out, as we don't yet have a unified field theory, nothing can be ruled out completely, it may be unlikely, but nothing is impossible...yet.
but I have wormhole technology implanted in my brain.
"travel through wormholes ain't like dusting crops farmboy!"
It's fiction. Going nowhere doesn't make as interesting stories as going somewhere.
Why is this a bad thing? It is only bad if your goal is to return to earth in an A to B... B to A fashion. In 200-1000 years we may be very interested in simply jumping in a wormhole and seeing where it takes us. It still could be great for SPACE EXPLORATION.
...we fired a beam of concentrated verteron particles to help stablize the nutrino field, then use the warp field generated by the nacelles to bind the fabric of space-time while travelling through the event horizon?
*g33kd*
The person would pass through a region of the wormhole called the throat, which flares out on either side.
According to one idea, a wormhole could be kept open by filling its throat, or the region around it, with an ingredient called exotic matter.
Fools.
BDR Gear
Outdoor gear, MREs, and more!
...by low self esteem. What scientists really need to address is why they feel this way about themselves. Then through proper therapy and medication we can rehabilitate them as functional entities in the time/space continuum.
Not only does it let you travel in style, but the stainless steel construction makes it ideal.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
I fear there are bigger reasons why people won't be traveling through wormholes. First, biologically tissues are far too fragile for the intense gravitational, electromagnetic and radiation fields that are likely to come with these phenomena. Second, biologically systems (and the attendant life support systems) are far too bulky. Creating a wormhole is uniform over the size of a person or ship will be extremely difficult. Even if the hole is big enough for a person, the center of the wormhole will likely stretch space in ways severely different from the edges of the hole. Macroscopic objects would be shredded.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Not a single John Crichton commment...Just a bunch of DS9/SG1 tripe -_- Where are the REAL nerds at!
Did nobody catch the irony of this post? "Wormholes unstable" plus "first post" not really being first. Come on.... it's not that hard! Not exactly comedy gold, but a little funny at least.
SYS 64738
Speaking of wormholes, there appears to be one in Slashcode that is making comments disappear from one thread and have them appear in another, possibly in a completely different article.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Enormous energies to open... check.
Enormous energies to keep open... check.
Enormous external energies trying to shut it... check.
Instability... check.
Yup, every single thing about wormholes said so far in the pop-sci world looks to be largely a lot of the same. Big energy to make it work, and then it doesn't for very long. Did the BBC report just summarize what's already been written by Kaku, Pournelle, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam?
I think we have another instance of a not-so-new formula for getting something on Slashdot: collect what's already gone before, write the same conclusion in new words and sentences, put a new author's name on it, proclaim it sensationally.
I'm waiting for the reports on whether wormholes can even be used for transport regarding effects on space-time geometery and how that relates to basic particle stability, ie, can the conditions in and around wormholes cause proton decay, or undo weak or strong nuclear forces? We have no idea what would happen to matter going into any wormhole that would actually be possible as opposed to ideal cases on paper. What we use for conjecture on paper bears little relationship to the real physical world frequently. What if we're totally wrong about quantum electrodynamics inside a wormhole?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
...and they've implanted the knowledge in the brain of one "John Crichton"
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
let me go back and make sure this report never comes out...
Well John Titor did it so obvisually it can be done.
Anybody who watched Farscape knows that already! But tell these guys to ask John Chrichton, as he's figured it all out...
No wonder my travel agent doesn't offer an insurance policy with a death benefit for wormhole traveling. I guess taking a black hole would be safer.
my bad
If this had come out earlier, a lot of nerds wouldn't have wasted a perfectly good Saturday evening. http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/
Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up good storylines, or given you clairvoyance enough to switch to a better show...
ack..uhh..ahhh..
From the summary:
:(
"Too bad for budding time travelers and space explorers!"
You tell me, now I'm stranded in this time!
(I miss my XBOX-3D *sniff* )
Wormholes entirely governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, on the other hand, would likely transport their payloads to an undesired time and place. And with the right source of brownian motion, you could make your host's undergarments jump an entire foot to the left.
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
Worms might have conquered the universe except for a fatal flaw. They can make stable wormholes but can't stay underground after it rains.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This would never, ever happen naturally, but nowadays most people have a silicon chip strapped to their wrist. See if you can count how many are within five feet of you.
If wormholes are possible at all, then we'll just have to build a control system to stabilize them, that's all.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
too bad he's unaccounted for.
From the article:
:)
"The concept of wormholes will be familiar to anyone who has watched the TV programmes Farscape, Stargate SG1 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The opening sequence of the BBC's new Doctor Who series..."
Why didn't they just post the article directly to slashdot?
-j.
We need to make use of the abundance of assholes.
A controlled wormhole must control the basic 3 phases of matter but also control the 4th phase of matter, plasma. We should find a way to tweak assholes a little bit to get what we need. Perhaps we can start by sending them into space.
Apparently everyone at slashdot thinks this is funny. Isn't this supposed to be BAD NEWS?
I thought that all earlier calculations on wormholes showed that you needed something exotic to keep them from collapsing.
...how we could *possibly* travel into the past? It seems logically impossible for such a thing to occur. We'd be having infinate visits from the future, because there is an infinate amount of future ahead of us.
Does that make sense?
Still no cure for cancer.
The wormhole doesn't have to be stable to be useful. You could create a wormhole around a ship, and allow it to break apart behind. You could also say that rockets are unstable, because they only have a stable stream of plasma for a few feet--yet they still move the rocket.
Of course, putting limits on things that are still fiction is kind of ironic.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Check it out! http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/business/mutfund /23cnd-bbc.html
One season of Farscape could have told them this.
Not to mention pale skinned chicks are hot and there are creepy dudes in leather trying to get wormholes for themselves......
You need to have a net negative mass, which means that your exotic matter (or energy equiv) must be equal to the mass of the object traversing the wormhole, PLUS the mass of the wormhole itself, PLUS the mass of any other particles within the wormhole, PLUS the mass equiv of the energy that the vaccuum created naturally has.
You also need to bear in mind that exotic matter is believed to have a very short half-life - about 10^-30 seconds - which means that it must be traversing the wormhole at high speed and must constantly be replaced at that rate.
But that isn't all! There is a problem with wormholes in close proximity to each other - they are unstable. And quantum-scale wormholes supposedly occur everywhere in the quantum vaccuum. So, you've got to do some fairly complex stuff to exclude other wormholes from the vicinity of the one you want.
Generating the exotic matter/energy is also a hard problem. Methods include the Casmir Effect, which requires generating fields of absolutely staggering strength to exclude all possible positive energy between two plates. The exclusion principle, combined with the requirement that a vaccuum must have a non-zero state in QM, is what forces the existance of a negative state.
So, what you need to do is basically have gigantic Casmir Effect-based exotic matter generators, which will require vastly more positive energy then the negative energy they create.
I think I figured out that you'd need to convert most of the galaxy into pure energy in order to move even a relatively small object via a wormhole over any kind of reasonable distance, once you take these additional requirements into account.
The problem is, if you are capable of collecting a galaxy together to convert it into enough energy to do this, you have sufficient technology to reach anywhere in the galaxy anyway, making the wormhole method of travel totally unnecessary. Besides which, you also get the benefit of having somewhere to go.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Okay, apparently exotic matter doesn't work, according to the article. /lart self. It's interesting that the uncertainty principle can work on wormholes also...
of course, 10^-18 is a number very similar to 10^60 or even 10^-60.
Or not - bad comparison.
Well, that's one way to get a stable wormhole.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I get my fishing bait from it.
here we come!!!!
Privacy is terrorism.
That aliens really did kidnap humans for genetic experiements. God damn those Eidolons.
Come on you people, this is like having a topic called "hacker used unix!", or "bill gates uses microsoft windows!"
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
Now I'll never get a chance to meet my sebacean dream girl! :(
Darwinian Evolution Produces Change, But Not Necessarily Detectable (that doesn't mean the whole man from apes thing isn't holding up, you know)
Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly.
That's when you inverse the warp field to produce a reverse graviton stream, thus stabilizing the worm hole to maintain continuous fabric in space-time. Everybody knows that. Don't you watch Star Trek?
Instability of the wormhole increases with its diameter ("throat"). However, "large" diameters are only needed to transfer physical objects. If all you transfer is information, throat size is irrelevant unless you are transmitting really huge amounts of data.
I've been taught that Einstein-Rosen bridges ("Wormholes") are unstable in MSc lectures. This knowledge is at least five to ten years old. I can't find the appropriate paper at the moment, but if you try this summary of Black Hole Theory, for example, it will tell you on page 25 that Wormholes are not crossable. There are similar problems with time machines ("closed timelike curves") and other strange phenomena of Quantum Cosmology: They all sound so cool at the beginning, but the closer you look, the less interesting they get.
I thought this was already well known.
You can RTFA, or read the actual paper here. (available as PS or PDF). Beware, a working understanding of general relativity may be required.
You never watched Deep Space Nine, did you? You lucky bastard!
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I'm as disappointed as you are.
Farscape kicks Star Trek/SG-1's asses any day of the week (currently on a Farscape marathon...)
My worked just fine until tomorrow!
+++ATH0
Not only are they unstable, but they're way too small to travel through. But they are a nice place for the worms to live.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That would make a bit of sense.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
*:Must be read in an "over the top" scottish accent!!:*
Captain! The crew is ready to travel through uranus, there is just one problem, the wormhole is not quite as stable as we thought... we're gonna have to astroglide it before we can fire off the probability drive and then we can go through the black hole and be givin' her all she's got!!
But I've had a sneaky ugly worry (founded by far too little knowledge of anything resembling necessary science) that it could conceivably be a quantum phenomenon, in other words no other species could exist within our light cone (or galaxy? farther?) due to some universal law that makes it impossible. Though anthropomorphic law aside, that would make it really, really unlikely that we exist, statistically speaking. Anyway, much as I would really like to see some FTL, and assuming the quantum worry I have is unfounded, there are two good things that could come out of this opinion that wormholes are unstable. For one thing, as much as I try to explain SETI etc. to my Dad, he says "I don't want to have any bug eyed monsters coming here" and of course, if they are like those in Starship Troopers then he's right. We're safely far away for a while maybe. Other thing is, no wormholes might mean that there is a chance of life existing outside our "light cone", i.e. the farthest we could ever go in the universe at light speed, I suppose. Those reasons both make me feel a little better. Any physicists out there?
What if you made the wormhole about 2 feet long?
Then factor in, that the exotic matter is accelerated to give it more mass.
Now add that the object being moved, is considered stationary, as it is moving in a "bubble" inside the wormhole.
Look at bubbles floating to the surface in water. How could something a thousand times less dense than the staggeringly massive ocean hope to push it aside?
Is there some rule that a wormhole must reach from the thing being transported to the destination? Can't it be created (like the even horizon of a bubble) along the way.
What is the calculation for the energy for a worm-bubble? How much acceleration of the exotic matter is possible?
By the way, I'd like this point I'm making considered as prior art in case Microsoft copyrights.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
... but he won't leave me alone. :(
-John
...aren't black-holes already deemed "theory"? I mean, we don't have any scientific PROOF that they exist, it's all just theory, right? Black "holes" could very well be areas in spacetime that are concaved OUT instead of IN. There was an article (and no, I can't find it now) where one guy came up with a theory that light has different speeds, and that black holes were really areas in spacetime where time itself comes to a halt. That basicly if you ever were to try to go INTO one, the result would be that the closer that you get to it, the slower you can go. This would make the black hole seem to never get any closer, and it would take an infinate amount of time to reach the center.
It depends on what quickly means here.
n/m
I can tell you that this article is completely false. Why, I just got back from Alpha Centauri not 5 years from now through this very technology!
No smoking sigs indoors.
It is great how there is this heated discussion about whether wormholes are or are not safe for space travel (and people are actually disappointed when they turn out to be unsafe) while no-one has ever seen a wormhole to begin with.
With gas costing what it does this is how I was planning on wormholes to get me to Cancun Mexico this summer. Time rethink my summer plans.
shame on you for not noticing the farscape reference here:
2 &cid=12615641
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=15046
what kindof fan are you? Only a new seasoner???
Gravity Sucks
Also a late arrival, came after your comment:
2 &cid=12615816
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=15046
Gravity Sucks
The BBC reports on recent theoretical physics research showing that wormholes may not be very useful for space or time travel. Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly. Too bad for budding time travelers and space explorers!
"Also in the news this evening, recent theoretical physics research suggests that the Earth's atmosphere will never be very useful for traveling long distances over the surface of the planet at great speed. Air appears to be unstable, and any machine we make to try and utilize this medium for human flight has always fallen apart quickly. Too bad for budding air travelers and aviators. Time to give up now."
The universe will always be bigger and more complex than we think it is, folks. I wouldn't worry too much about never being able to time travel, use wormholes or travel faster than light (or all of the above). Eventually a way will be found, even if it means breaking the theoretical laws we think we know. Any scientist worth his or her salt knows that no matter how much we learn, there may always be something around the corner that will blast what we thought we knew into a million pieces and turn everything on its head. It is the height of hubris to assume otherwise.
This isn't exactly a response to your post, but more a question for this entire thread... but you seem like you may be a physicist or at least well versed enough in the mathematics thereof to be able to do "back-of-the-envelope calculations" about it, so maybe you can answer this question for me.
Why is it assumed that because something has negative mass - which I would define as "the quality of being repelled from, rather than attracted to, ordinary positive mass" - it has negative *energy*? Likewise, why is it assumed that any energy (such as vacuum energy) translates directly into positive mass?
I've always viewed it similarly to charge. Both mass and charge are a form of potential energy. An electron and a proton have the same amount of electrical potential energy as one another, only differing in the nature of that potential relative to other charges (whether it repels or attracts a positive or negative charge). But does a proton then have "positive" potential energy and an electron have "negative" potential energy? If the answer to that is no, then why does something with "negative" mass have to have "negative" energy? Is a space filled with a negative charge "less than empty vacuum"?
I'm well aware of e=mc^2 of course, and why that would lead to a negative value for e if you have a negative value for m. But given that physics traditionally deals with only positive values for m, wouldn't e=|m|c^2 (using the absolute value of m, instead of just m) return the same results for all physics thus far, dealing with positive mass, without the counterintuitive "less than nothing" idea of "negative energy" if ever we managed to produce something with negative mass?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
anyone who's watched farscape already knows this...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly."
Could this be a clue that wormholes are only stable as long as their "perfection" is altered/modulated by data being transferred by some method, so that they are in a constant state of change? Just a thought that occurred to me, I'm not a cosmologist or physicist, etc.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
How interesting that this was reported just two days after I completed my famed Damn Wormholes! bumperstickers. Buy many as they are now unstable and may disappear or explode at any minute.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Did we not learn anything from John Crichton, a second-generation IASA astronaut with a doctorate in theoretical sciences???
You would have thought that after the four seasons that we spent aboard Moya, that we might have at least learned that wormholes are unstable...
No, wait..... I spent the my time fantasizing over Officer Aeryn Sun!!!! opps.....
FARSCAPE LIVES!!!!!
http://www.farscape.com/
http://www.scifi.com/farscape/
What if you built your wormhole, set the two ends 10 meters apart on Earth, then sent one end far away under extreme acceleration and back to Earth again, so that the end you sent away is "younger" than the stationary end, and has (from the perspective of anyone traveling with the sent-away end) raced, say, a hundred years into the future in a (subjective) decade.
Looking back through the sent-away end (if it could function like just some sort of window), did the travelers see time on Earth near the stationary end pass at the same rate as them, i.e. on the other side of the wormhole, as viewed from the sent-away end, only a decade has passed? If that is the case, then couldn't they just step through the wormhole when it gets back to Earth, and come out 10 meters away and 90 years in the past? If people 300 years after the sent-away end returned, stepped through the sent-away end back 10 meters and 90 years, then walked 10 meters over to the sent-away end again, could they not do this three times and go back 270 years? (At which point the local-time sent-away end is far out in space and not available to be stepped into again).
Basically, with such a construction you could always come back in time to the creation of the wormhole, jumping back in increments of whatever the age difference due to relativistic effects is. And with that ability, you get all your staples of temporal paradoxes possible. If next year we build this thing, the sent-away end returns in 110 years with a 100 year differential, and then one of my psycho descendants 200 years from now jumps back twice and kills me before I have any kids... there's your grandfather paradox.
Although there is the alternate possibility which would disallow this... those who travelled with the sent-away end, looking back, saw time on Earth pass by at an accelerated rate, everything running fast-forward (faster as they on the ship accelerate more), likely blue-shifted, extra bright/hot, probably a pressure differential due to relative temperature differences (if both ends are in atmosphere)... in effect, the people on the ship looking back see everything speed up and all forces amplified, so time runs fast-forward and light and heat explode out of the wormhole; while those on Earth looking through the wormhole at those on the ship see everything slow down, forces diminish, things cool off, lights darken and redshift, as air is sucked through the wormhole into the ship.
When the ship returns to Earth and becomes stationary relative to the other end of the wormhole, the effects normalize, but to both the people on Earth and the people on the ship, 100 years worth of events have passed on Earth, and 10 years of events have passed on the ship. But to the people on Earth, those ten years on the ship stretched out slowly over 100 years of viewing time, and to those on the ship, those 100 years on Earth exploded past in a decade. The wormhole ends stay synched in the same timeframe, not permitting time travel that way, and offering the interesting prospect of viewing relativity at play.
I'm not sure myself which is the correct scenario. Any physicists care to comment?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
AFAIK (and that's not much) energy is something needed to "have potential", or ,in other words, to do work.
Moving something is a kind of work.
How do I move the entire fabric of space with some "exotic matter" that has energy in debt?
Also, if I am unable to measure the amount of energy or potential that I have (or that any other thing has), how do I recognize something that has negative energy?
I see connected people! - The seventh sense
In other news, scientists speculate the sun might be hot.
I don't need to travel in time, I just need to transmit winning lotto numbers to myself.
My invisible friend Fred is inherently unstable. I'm not sure if he exists in the first place.
Don't worry, it can be stabilized with a concentrated tachyon particle stream from the main deflector dish. Everyone knows that. ...Oh you might need to reroute power from the aft shields but that's fine.
and the amount of blind faith this requires, and yet doubt the existence of GOD, creation, etc.
Just amazing.
If humans are ever to figure out how to travel through time, wouldn't someone have done it already? Unless there's going to be a totalitarian government keeping track of our every actions, if some genius whackjob wanted to come to sometime before now, he or she could.
All the points raised in the article were discussed in Robert L. Forward's Indistinguishable From Magic, which I read back in '95. And it's not like he came up with these ideas... his book is just a paperback.
One thing Dr. Forward talked about in his book was using micro-wormholes to send radio transmissions. Sure, it's not as cool as sending a ship through, and anyone who received the message couldn't send one back to us via the same wormhole, but maybe someone on the other end of the wormhole might have a few trick up their sleeves to let us know they received our transmission.
PS - this is my first post on Slashdot
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
A preprint means nothing, wait until it is published, maybe it will never be.
What's all this deal with test images?
I just completed a podcast interviewing Dr. Stephen Hsu, one of the contributors to this research. He explains more about how wormholes are theoretically impossible to keep stable.
Publisher, Universe Today - http://www.universetoday.com
I was just looking, but yours appears to be the only. So here goes:
Dren! I'll never get back to my frelling home then.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
He was droped into warmhole. How we can save him?
The same article says that squeezing a proton through needs ~10^30. An electron is three orders of magnitude smaller, so now we're at 10^27. Photons can have even less energy. Still a ways to go, but in the 1940's it would have been considered utterly impossible to get silicon as pure as we have now, by nearly as many orders of magnitude.
Maybe we won't ever be able to squeeze a human through. You're saying you can't see any use for a 'time modem'?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I recall reading about doing this - acceleration raises the energy or 'temperature' of a vacuum (it creates particles with energy) analogous to how compressing a gas raises its temperature, and likewise, stopping acceleration lowers the energy just as releasing the pressure on a gas lowers its temperature.
If you have a box with a vacuum (temperature at absolute zero) in it, then accelerate it, creating energy inside, and allow the energy to dissipate (so the temperature is again at absolute zero), then remove the acceleration, the box will have negative energy in it.
This is more of a thought experiment than something that can easily be done. Googling "zero point energy" should give more info/a better explanation, though it looks like there's some crap ("devoted to the new energy technology") out there too.
Tag lost or not installed.
What! Aren't you geared up to watch StarScape? Or was it FarGate?