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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.
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.
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Well there goes my plans for the summer!
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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.
"I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as if millions of sci-fi fan boys suddenly lost their erections and started crying."
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!
Well, no wonder the time-travel convention was a bust :)
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.
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*
The one I was using tomorrow worked just fine, well, it did until it broke yesterday.
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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?
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If wormholes allow time travel, their brevity is nearly irrelevant.
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Is it just me or do other people also find it disturbing that trekkies consider DS9 to be a reliable and reputable source of scientific information about wormholes?
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* Practical jokes. "Star? Your planet orbited a star? I don't see a star around here, do you?"
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Is it just me or do other people also find it disturbing that trekkies consider DS9 to be a reliable and reputable source of scientific information about wormholes?
I agree. DS9 hasn't been on TV for years; anything you learned from that is going to be out-of-date now.
I get all *my* scientific knowledge from 'Enterprise'...
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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!
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.
Well, the verteron particles could disturb the singular field and therefore cause a Higgs anomaly, which would not only immediatly destroy the wormhole, but in addition would disturb subspace up to a distance of 100 lightyears. You wouldn't be able to use Warp drives in that region afterwards (i.e. you'd be stuck).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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It seems quite reasonable, then, for the gate systems to not attempt to handle disassembly and reassembly in opposite directions concurrently, presumably for safety reasons. One would not want to rematerialize in the middle of someone else who was in the process of dematerializing. Since there would be no reasonable mechanism for preventing someone from stepping into the event horizon at the wrong time with a bidirectional gate mechanism, the designers made it unidirectional. Seems perfectly reasonable.
That said, it should be possible to switch the direction of the gate connection while the connection is open. I can't see any valid reason for that not to be possible except while someone is in transit, as it should amount to a mode switch in software, coupled with a simple flow control mechanism.
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Apparently everyone at slashdot thinks this is funny. Isn't this supposed to be BAD NEWS?
This isn't the cancellation of Star Trek, this is real space travel. And therefore less important.
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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.
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There's time travel, and then there's time travel.
If you travel more than a light year in less than a year, you've made a "time-like" journey. Theories about wormholes mostly permit this. That implies some strange causality, but not nearly as strange as what's ordinarily thought of as time travel. You still can't send yourself a signal "from the future", or affect your own past, even with multiple hops. From the point of view of your distant destination, you've traveled backwards in time, but not from your own point of view (well, you can watch your own past in real-time by "getting ahead of the light", but that doesn't lead to paradoxes by itself).
Even this kind of wormhole would present all sorts of difficulties, however. If the wormhole was "timelike" and the mouths were close to one another, it's quite possible for a photon to get caught in a loop, multiplying endlessly until the energy collapsed the wormhole. It's hard to see how this could be avoided for neutrinos.
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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.
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.
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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.
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?
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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?
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Actually it wasn't completely unique, just unusual.
Whenever a wormhole was discovered that seemed stable, the federation jumped in and got trading rights over it (cf. the episode that stranded the ferengi in the delta quadrant after the wormhole was found to be stable only on one side).
In later Voyager they communicated via a very small wormhole - enough to get a data signal through, but nothing else. IIRC that was artifically created, though.
There's also the Borg transwarp technology (OK they're subspace corridors, but they sure sound like wormholes to me...).
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.
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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.
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He was droped into warmhole. How we can save him?