Negative mass/energy is NOT antimatter, but rather "exotic" matter. At the physics one level, antimatter is just matter w/ the opposite charge of the normal particle. If you find significant amounts of negative mass around, let me know and I'll build you a wormhole. I'll need approximately a galactic mass of said matter....
Gravity is not a law - it is a theory. Newton's theory of gravity is incorrect (it fails when the gravitational field gets too large). Einstein's theory of gravity is also wrong - it also fails in certain instances (it predicts an infinte gravitational field strength at the very center of a black hole). Any theory which has an infinity in it is wrong. It may work well for most situations, but it is only that a theory. It's fairly easy to see when Newton's theory fails: F = GMm/r^2 - when r -> 0, the field strength becomes infinite. If either theory were a "law" both would be correct and a lot of physicists would be/have been out of business, say like Einstein.
Um, naked eye, all you can expect to notice is that Mars is brighter.
It struck me as less impressive than when Mars and Venus were next to each other a few years ago and you could really see how one is red and one is blue.
Venus is _not_ blue. I don't know what you were looking at, but the only blue things in the solar system are Neptune and Uranus and they're only barely visible to the naked eye.
If you had used a telescope you could have easily seen a number of features that are not regularly visible. Examples - Hellas Planetia, the southern polar cap in pretty good detail, etc.
The Segway could not have been going 12 mph when it took over 2 1/2 hours to get to the top all told!!!! See this article.
The current human bicycle record up Mt. Washington is 49 minutes and change. Yes this is a professional cyclist, but the majority of people who get into the one day ride to the top make it in under 2 hours.
So your questions should not be, "Why not buy a motorbike?", but why not just buy a bike?!?!?!?!?!? It's cheaper, less maintenance cost, and with a set of panniers can make your weekly run to the store/work/play.
Speaking as a theoretical physicist (usual work is on semiclassical black holes - general relativity + small quantum perturbations - think Stephen Hawking), I do all of these, but I use Keynote for presentations. It can export to PDF though.:-) I still have my FreeBSD machine, but it's an old Pentium Pro 200 MHz machine. It's kinda slow for X related items, but I still use it as a server.
previously you said a restaurant meal was $50 - where the hell are you eating poor college student???
you suggest that you're willing to spend $10 on a movie, but not $15 on a CD - um, that's like 2-3 hours of entertainment for $10 vs a virtually lifetime length interval of musical entertainment for the CD; if you're _so_ poor why don't you go steal your movies with your music
what DVDs are you buying for $40?? heard of renting?
Life is tough - get a job, make some money and shut up. You'd probably have a lot more money and free time if you didn't spend your life eating $50 restuarant meals and searching Kazaa for songs.
I imagine you'd probably steal a car too because "they're just too damn expensive and you can't afford a new Lexus."
Did you read the books? The fremen all had still suits, but many of the townspeople wouldn't. Which is why you could tell a fremen by the scars left on their face once the still suit was removed.
Yes - but I'm talking about Paul and Chani hanging out in the desert, san chill suit (san clothes even). Most of the Fremen weren't wearing suits as I recall, but again I haven't seen it since the original air.
Frankly I've been trying to forget it - especially the stupid hats!:-)
Everyone says the mini-series is more faithful to the books. Okay, so we had the weirding modules in Lynch's film. Big deal. The makers of the mini-series can't even get the basics right. Reasons to hate the Sci Fi Dune miniseries:
Um, it's supposed to be HOT on dune. Like really really really hot. Why are people walking around without still suits? Why are the castle windows OPEN and the wind from outside fluttering through the curtains?
Why does a worm come when Paul and mom are wondering in the desert ONLY when they start walking wo/ rhythm. Hell, they'd been walking rhythmically for a long time, then suddenly they fall down a dune and the worm comes! Huh?
William Hurt was apparently stoned out of his mind the entire movie.
Paul was not a whiny brat in the book - he was supposed to be mature, especially for his age.
The navigators are supposed to look like fish, not bats.
The hats.... someone should have killed the costumer who must have found hats on sale somewhere. Or maybe they paid him to take them away.
Why is Chani, a young fremen, so fat? Hell, why are all the Fremen so water fat? This is talked about in the book how Paul looks "water fat" initially. There is no way a fremen should have breasts that large, but then fan boys probably wouldn't watch it.
The acting just plain sucked.
What was with all of the different classes doing their little tai chi/dancing when they talked?
That's just a few of the reasons I can think of off the top of my head having not seen the mini-series since its original airing. As many others have said, I suffered through it, hoping it would get better... The trailer doesn't leave much hope for "Children of Dune" whether you liked the book(s) or not.
1) It's supposed to be HOT on Arakis - if that's so why was virtually the entire cast running around without still suits for the whole damn series? Why were windows to the castle open??? At least get the setting of the series right!
2) Why the hell are all the Fremen fat? Let's take for instance Chani, whom many people seem to think looked more "desert-like" than Sean Young in the movie. Give me a break. Chani was supposed to be able to kick ass - the series actress looked like she'd have a hard time opening a can of pop. She was carrying _way_ too much weight around for someone who is living in the desert. I think most of the guys who liked her did so because of her tits. See Tomb Raider....
3) Why did the Sarduakar look like the girl who played Chani could kick their ass? Same with Gurney and the rest of the "warriors."
4) William Hurt - what pathetic acting. I remember when he used to be good. He seems to be getting worse everytime I see him in something.
5) Stupid damn hats!
6) Badly done worms.
7) Since when is Paul a little whining mama's boy?
8) Where was the political intrigue?
The movie had it's bad points I am happy to admit. But if you can't even get the feel of the book down (which I feel the series completely misses) then why are you bothering? Dune was supposed to be about politics - the movie makes it about how Paul whines over every little thing. Kyle Maclaclan's Paul would kill the series Paul while the series Paul was whining about how his knife didn't feel right in his hand and it was too hot.
well, except for the fact that BSD itself started in 1978.... yes, the free BSDs are relatively young (about the same time as Linux) but BSD has been around a LONG time
I love the stories! I have the same feeling. Back when I was an undergraduate, I was working in an atmospheric chemistry lab and using an HP gas chromatograph. The guy I was working for was a temporary hire so we got the hand me downs. The GC was over 15 years old and used analog controls while all the other labs around us had nice new ones with digital readouts and such. We modified that GC to work for us and the damn thing never ever broke (I wanted a new one)! That was 10 years ago and as far as I know that GC is still in use...
On the other hand I'm very thankful for the durability of HP products. I've been using an HP 15C for almost 20 years. My dad worked at HP and got one for me for a birthday gift. I've actually had 3 of them - the first one was stolen in high school when my locker mate left the damn locker open! The second one I got was destroyed when some person who was clearly upset with me, snuck into my office when I was in graduate school and stabbed it with a knife! I managed to find another one for $50 somehow almost 5 years past the last time they were made. Now I worry about what will happen if this one dies! I don't like the 48 series - too big! As someone else said about the 12C, the 15C for me was the end all of the scientific calculator. It could integrate, do complex numbers and matrices, was programmable, and yet was compact enough to carry around in a shirt pocket. If I can't find batteries, I've contemplated buying a 12C (since they're still in production) and stealing its batteries!:-) I sure can't use a non-RPN calculator!
I remember a friend of mine had a 12C and it has a cool function where you can input 2 dates into it and it will tell you how many days there were between them. I remember being taunted into showing that the same thing could be done on the 15C (which didn't have that built in). It was the first program I ever wrote.
I still have my HP IIP printer that is over 10 years old - still works great. Our department ONLY uses HP printers.
Goodbye Bill - we'll miss you.
(and my dad met both Hewlett and Packard when he worked at HP)
Except as you note I still need M16 but I also have to have GNOME installed. I don't use Gnome - I don't want Gnome. So instead of having a browser with some bloat, I now have a desktop environment, a big browser (M16) and a little tiny web browser.
We really still have no idea about how the force of gravity is transmitted from one object to another. (The other fundamental forces all seem to have a medium to transfer force.)
Um, what? Sure we do - it's presumably (since we haven't seen one) transmitted by an exchange of gravitons which move at the speed of light. The other forces do not have a "medium" but rather a particle which is exchanged to provide the force. For example:
electromagnetic force -> photon weak force -> Z, W particles
In some sense you're correct - we do not have a quantum theory of gravity as quantum theory, at its most basic level is not relativisitically correct (take a look at the Schrodinger equation - it doesn't treat time and space equally).
We do have a fairly good understanding of how Einstein's equations tell us how gravity bends space and that bend in space tells gravity how to move.
But then again the nature of an orbit depends only on the distance between two bodies and not their masses.
While what you say is mostly correct, you are making a particular choice of units that: 1) isn't all that convenient for things orbiting the Earth and 2) won't eliminate the overall dependence on the mass of the Earth. Astronomers (and many astronomy classes) use a version of the 3rd law where in the correct units and if one of the masses is much greater than the other (and in the standard astronomy class units, you measure the mass in terms of mass of the Sun and the big object happens to be the mass of the Sun) then you can ignore the masses.
Kepler's 3rd law really looks like (where it's now appropriate to use any consistent set of units and then make approximations):
(m1 + m2)(period)^2 = (4pi^2/G) a^3
where a is the semimajor axis of the orbit. Note the presence of G, m1 and m2. Also note that it's not the distance between the planets exactly, but the semimajor axis of the orbit that it depends on.
Is this GNOME's fault. I've never thought about it before but does GNOME and/or KDE work on anything other than Linux.
GNOME and KDE both work on FreeBSD and I believe Net and Open as well. Is it easy to keep GNOME updated? It's hard as hell as I'm sure the FreeBSD GNOME port maintainer will tell you. In addition to the normal "update everything at once" that all GNOME users have to do, he has to go through and patch all the Linux-isms.
This is one of the problems right now in general, in that the skill of portable programming is fading and many (certainly not all) coders are writing for Linux not Unix. This shows up in Linux specific system calls when there are other calls that work fine for all Unices.
One quick comment - modern wormhole theory is definitely not based on the Einstein-Rosen bridge. The E-R bridge is just a collapsing Scwarzschild black hole - to use it as a wormhole you would still have to go faster than the speed of light
Modern wormhole theory is based on the work of Michael Morris and Kip Thorne (Morris was one of Thorne's grad students at CalTech). It has since proven to be very problematic for a number of reasons.
First, wormholes require exotic matter to maintain them - it's exotic because it has internal stresses much greater than in any known material and that at least some observers would see a negative energy density. All matter we know about has positive energy density. It is possible to create negative energy densities through the Casimir effect, but the magnitude is not nearly enough to support a wormhole (see Larry Ford and Tom Roman's work). It's possible that quantized fields could be the necessary exotic matter in particular wormhole spacetimes, but that's been shown to be not true (at least for 5 particular traversable wormhole spacetimes -see the work of Taylor, Hiscock, and Anderson). Yep, I'm the "Taylor" from above.:-)
I haven't even mentioned the whole stack of problems that arise when you try to turn the wormhole into a time machine! (basically you can't or it requires a strange, fairly unphysical geometry - see the work of Tanaka and Hiscock).
We cannot come even close to the energies released during the big bang (energy equivalent to all of the mass and energy present in the universe today. We're not even close. We haven't even found the Higgs particle yet (and that is something to worry about, especially if you're a physicist). Either we find the Higgs particle RSN or most of quantum electrodynamics is wrong (the Higgs particle sets the mass for all of the other interacting particles).
Both biology and the study of very high energies/fundamental interactions are complex. There are hints now that the electron, which we thought was the smallest free charged particles (quarks can't be free), appears to have structure inside of it. We still have no idea how to unify gravity with the other 3 fundamental forces. Lots of people think M-theory is the way to go (M-theory is the successor of string theory) but I'm not holding my breath as they have nothing we can check by doing an experiment and likely won't for a long long time. There's lots more fundamental physics we just don't get precisely for the same reason biology and medicine "seem" primitive - it's too complex.
There are maybe 3 people in the world still working on wormholes (one is Matt Visser who wrote a nice book on wormholes - can't find the reference right now - in the wrong office so I can't see it on the shelf).
Work done by Ford and Roman showed that to have a wormhole you need stupendously large amounts of negative energy density to maintain the throat of the wormhole (what you would travel through). Think millions of galaxies worth of mass stretched over an area smaller than 10^(-19) meters thick.
Work by Taylor, Hiscock, and Anderson (yes I'm Taylor) showed that even the simplest kind of matter field you can imagine, a scalar field, will not support the wormhole throat. The other fields' (fermionic, electromagnetic, and gravitational) effect have not been calculated because they're much too difficult in this case, but in simpler cases they vary from the scalar field by a factor of 2-4. This isn't nearly enough to maintain the wormhole throat.
Because of all these problems (and others), most everyone has abandoned wormhole research for the time being. There are hints (work by Tanaka) that it may be possible, but it seems very unlikely in the general case that we can create or maintain a wormhole (if we happened to find one suddenly).
Man, why is that all the crackpots always come to general relativity or quantum mechanics?
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is wrong. Wheeler and DeWitt don't believe it anymore (and yes I've heard both of them talk about it). DeWitt thinks it may have still been an okay jumping off place but it's got about as much validity in trying to describe the universe as Newton's laws have in describing black holes or objects moving near the speed of light.
I think you can find a real statement of how useful this article is by looking at the bottom:
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK
Note this man does not have any professional credentials listed. If he actually works at a university with a degree in physics I'd eat my hat.
Tired of crackpots who haven't earned a PhD... Maybe this guy is the replacement for Abian (the time has mass guy on comp.sci.[physics,astro] who died fairly recently)
Slashdot Mirror
Negative mass/energy is NOT antimatter, but rather "exotic" matter. At the physics one level, antimatter is just matter w/ the opposite charge of the normal particle. If you find significant amounts of negative mass around, let me know and I'll build you a wormhole. I'll need approximately a galactic mass of said matter....
Gravity is not a law - it is a theory. Newton's theory of gravity is incorrect (it fails when the gravitational field gets too large). Einstein's theory of gravity is also wrong - it also fails in certain instances (it predicts an infinte gravitational field strength at the very center of a black hole). Any theory which has an infinity in it is wrong. It may work well for most situations, but it is only that a theory. It's fairly easy to see when Newton's theory fails: F = GMm/r^2 - when r -> 0, the field strength becomes infinite. If either theory were a "law" both would be correct and a lot of physicists would be/have been out of business, say like Einstein.
Um, naked eye, all you can expect to notice is that Mars is brighter.
It struck me as less impressive than when Mars and Venus were next to each other a few years ago and you could really see how one is red and one is blue.
Venus is _not_ blue. I don't know what you were looking at, but the only blue things in the solar system are Neptune and Uranus and they're only barely visible to the naked eye.
If you had used a telescope you could have easily seen a number of features that are not regularly visible. Examples - Hellas Planetia, the southern polar cap in pretty good detail, etc.
The Segway could not have been going 12 mph when it took over 2 1/2 hours to get to the top all told!!!! See this article.
The current human bicycle record up Mt. Washington is 49 minutes and change. Yes this is a professional cyclist, but the majority of people who get into the one day ride to the top make it in under 2 hours.
So your questions should not be, "Why not buy a motorbike?", but why not just buy a bike?!?!?!?!?!? It's cheaper, less maintenance cost, and with a set of panniers can make your weekly run to the store/work/play.
Speaking as a theoretical physicist (usual work is on semiclassical black holes - general relativity + small quantum perturbations - think Stephen Hawking), I do all of these, but I use Keynote for presentations. It can export to PDF though. :-) I still have my FreeBSD machine, but it's an old Pentium Pro 200 MHz machine. It's kinda slow for X related items, but I still use it as a server.
Life is tough - get a job, make some money and shut up. You'd probably have a lot more money and free time if you didn't spend your life eating $50 restuarant meals and searching Kazaa for songs.
I imagine you'd probably steal a car too because "they're just too damn expensive and you can't afford a new Lexus."
grow up
Hey, the Weekly World News is "The Paper"....
See "So I Married an Axe Murderer".
Did you read the books? The fremen all had still suits, but many of the townspeople wouldn't. Which is why you could tell a fremen by the scars left on their face once the still suit was removed.
:-)
Yes - but I'm talking about Paul and Chani hanging out in the desert, san chill suit (san clothes even). Most of the Fremen weren't wearing suits as I recall, but again I haven't seen it since the original air.
Frankly I've been trying to forget it - especially the stupid hats!
- Um, it's supposed to be HOT on dune. Like really really really hot. Why are people walking around without still suits? Why are the castle windows OPEN and the wind from outside fluttering through the curtains?
- Why does a worm come when Paul and mom are wondering in the desert ONLY when they start walking wo/ rhythm. Hell, they'd been walking rhythmically for a long time, then suddenly they fall down a dune and the worm comes! Huh?
- William Hurt was apparently stoned out of his mind the entire movie.
- Paul was not a whiny brat in the book - he was supposed to be mature, especially for his age.
- The navigators are supposed to look like fish, not bats.
- The hats.... someone should have killed the costumer who must have found hats on sale somewhere. Or maybe they paid him to take them away.
- Why is Chani, a young fremen, so fat? Hell, why are all the Fremen so water fat? This is talked about in the book how Paul looks "water fat" initially. There is no way a fremen should have breasts that large, but then fan boys probably wouldn't watch it.
- The acting just plain sucked.
- What was with all of the different classes doing their little tai chi/dancing when they talked?
That's just a few of the reasons I can think of off the top of my head having not seen the mini-series since its original airing. As many others have said, I suffered through it, hoping it would get better... The trailer doesn't leave much hope for "Children of Dune" whether you liked the book(s) or not.enuf said
okay, written by Richard Feynman - probably the best physics textbook ever written for student understanding
1) It's supposed to be HOT on Arakis - if that's so why was virtually the entire cast running around without still suits for the whole damn series? Why were windows to the castle open??? At least get the setting of the series right!
2) Why the hell are all the Fremen fat? Let's take for instance Chani, whom many people seem to think looked more "desert-like" than Sean Young in the movie. Give me a break. Chani was supposed to be able to kick ass - the series actress looked like she'd have a hard time opening a can of pop. She was carrying _way_ too much weight around for someone who is living in the desert. I think most of the guys who liked her did so because of her tits. See Tomb Raider....
3) Why did the Sarduakar look like the girl who played Chani could kick their ass? Same with Gurney and the rest of the "warriors."
4) William Hurt - what pathetic acting. I remember when he used to be good. He seems to be getting worse everytime I see him in something.
5) Stupid damn hats!
6) Badly done worms.
7) Since when is Paul a little whining mama's boy?
8) Where was the political intrigue?
The movie had it's bad points I am happy to admit. But if you can't even get the feel of the book down (which I feel the series completely misses) then why are you bothering? Dune was supposed to be about politics - the movie makes it about how Paul whines over every little thing. Kyle Maclaclan's Paul would kill the series Paul while the series Paul was whining about how his knife didn't feel right in his hand and it was too hot.
well, except for the fact that BSD itself started in 1978.... yes, the free BSDs are relatively young (about the same time as Linux) but BSD has been around a LONG time
I love the stories! I have the same feeling. Back when I was an undergraduate, I was working in an atmospheric chemistry lab and using an HP gas chromatograph. The guy I was working for was a temporary hire so we got the hand me downs. The GC was over 15 years old and used analog controls while all the other labs around us had nice new ones with digital readouts and such. We modified that GC to work for us and the damn thing never ever broke (I wanted a new one)! That was 10 years ago and as far as I know that GC is still in use...
:-) I sure can't use a non-RPN calculator!
On the other hand I'm very thankful for the durability of HP products. I've been using an HP 15C for almost 20 years. My dad worked at HP and got one for me for a birthday gift. I've actually had 3 of them - the first one was stolen in high school when my locker mate left the damn locker open! The second one I got was destroyed when some person who was clearly upset with me, snuck into my office when I was in graduate school and stabbed it with a knife! I managed to find another one for $50 somehow almost 5 years past the last time they were made. Now I worry about what will happen if this one dies! I don't like the 48 series - too big! As someone else said about the 12C, the 15C for me was the end all of the scientific calculator. It could integrate, do complex numbers and matrices, was programmable, and yet was compact enough to carry around in a shirt pocket. If I can't find batteries, I've contemplated buying a 12C (since they're still in production) and stealing its batteries!
I remember a friend of mine had a 12C and it has a cool function where you can input 2 dates into it and it will tell you how many days there were between them. I remember being taunted into showing that the same thing could be done on the 15C (which didn't have that built in). It was the first program I ever wrote.
I still have my HP IIP printer that is over 10 years old - still works great. Our department ONLY uses HP printers.
Goodbye Bill - we'll miss you.
(and my dad met both Hewlett and Packard when he worked at HP)
Except as you note I still need M16 but I also have to have GNOME installed. I don't use Gnome - I don't want Gnome. So instead of having a browser with some bloat, I now have a desktop environment, a big browser (M16) and a little tiny web browser.
sigh... I just want a BROWSER and that's all!
Um, then why am I using Navigator-4.73 for FreeBSD? I _never_ use Communicator precisely because it has all the cruft in it
Um, what? Sure we do - it's presumably (since we haven't seen one) transmitted by an exchange of gravitons which move at the speed of light. The other forces do not have a "medium" but rather a particle which is exchanged to provide the force. For example:
electromagnetic force -> photon
weak force -> Z, W particles
In some sense you're correct - we do not have a quantum theory of gravity as quantum theory, at its most basic level is not relativisitically correct (take a look at the Schrodinger equation - it doesn't treat time and space equally).
We do have a fairly good understanding of how Einstein's equations tell us how gravity bends space and that bend in space tells gravity how to move.
While what you say is mostly correct, you are making a particular choice of units that: 1) isn't all that convenient for things orbiting the Earth and 2) won't eliminate the overall dependence on the mass of the Earth. Astronomers (and many astronomy classes) use a version of the 3rd law where in the correct units and if one of the masses is much greater than the other (and in the standard astronomy class units, you measure the mass in terms of mass of the Sun and the big object happens to be the mass of the Sun) then you can ignore the masses.
Kepler's 3rd law really looks like (where it's now appropriate to use any consistent set of units and then make approximations):
(m1 + m2)(period)^2 = (4pi^2/G) a^3
where a is the semimajor axis of the orbit. Note the presence of G, m1 and m2. Also note that it's not the distance between the planets exactly, but the semimajor axis of the orbit that it depends on.
Sigh... young physicists..
GNOME and KDE both work on FreeBSD and I believe Net and Open as well. Is it easy to keep GNOME updated? It's hard as hell as I'm sure the FreeBSD GNOME port maintainer will tell you. In addition to the normal "update everything at once" that all GNOME users have to do, he has to go through and patch all the Linux-isms.
This is one of the problems right now in general, in that the skill of portable programming is fading and many (certainly not all) coders are writing for Linux not Unix. This shows up in Linux specific system calls when there are other calls that work fine for all Unices.
We're working on getting Chuck Cranor to write an article similar to Matt's on NetBSD's UVM system. You could write him and tell him to get going! :-)
Brett Taylor
Editor in Chief - DaemonNews
Modern wormhole theory is based on the work of Michael Morris and Kip Thorne (Morris was one of Thorne's grad students at CalTech). It has since proven to be very problematic for a number of reasons.
First, wormholes require exotic matter to maintain them - it's exotic because it has internal stresses much greater than in any known material and that at least some observers would see a negative energy density. All matter we know about has positive energy density. It is possible to create negative energy densities through the Casimir effect, but the magnitude is not nearly enough to support a wormhole (see Larry Ford and Tom Roman's work). It's possible that quantized fields could be the necessary exotic matter in particular wormhole spacetimes, but that's been shown to be not true (at least for 5 particular traversable wormhole spacetimes -see the work of Taylor, Hiscock, and Anderson). Yep, I'm the "Taylor" from above. :-)
I haven't even mentioned the whole stack of problems that arise when you try to turn the wormhole into a time machine! (basically you can't or it requires a strange, fairly unphysical geometry - see the work of Tanaka and Hiscock).
Both biology and the study of very high energies/fundamental interactions are complex. There are hints now that the electron, which we thought was the smallest free charged particles (quarks can't be free), appears to have structure inside of it. We still have no idea how to unify gravity with the other 3 fundamental forces. Lots of people think M-theory is the way to go (M-theory is the successor of string theory) but I'm not holding my breath as they have nothing we can check by doing an experiment and likely won't for a long long time. There's lots more fundamental physics we just don't get precisely for the same reason biology and medicine "seem" primitive - it's too complex.
Work done by Ford and Roman showed that to have a wormhole you need stupendously large amounts of negative energy density to maintain the throat of the wormhole (what you would travel through). Think millions of galaxies worth of mass stretched over an area smaller than 10^(-19) meters thick.
Work by Taylor, Hiscock, and Anderson (yes I'm Taylor) showed that even the simplest kind of matter field you can imagine, a scalar field, will not support the wormhole throat. The other fields' (fermionic, electromagnetic, and gravitational) effect have not been calculated because they're much too difficult in this case, but in simpler cases they vary from the scalar field by a factor of 2-4. This isn't nearly enough to maintain the wormhole throat.
Because of all these problems (and others), most everyone has abandoned wormhole research for the time being. There are hints (work by Tanaka) that it may be possible, but it seems very unlikely in the general case that we can create or maintain a wormhole (if we happened to find one suddenly).
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is wrong. Wheeler and DeWitt don't believe it anymore (and yes I've heard both of them talk about it). DeWitt thinks it may have still been an okay jumping off place but it's got about as much validity in trying to describe the universe as Newton's laws have in describing black holes or objects moving near the speed of light.
I think you can find a real statement of how useful this article is by looking at the bottom:
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK
Note this man does not have any professional credentials listed. If he actually works at a university with a degree in physics I'd eat my hat.Tired of crackpots who haven't earned a PhD... Maybe this guy is the replacement for Abian (the time has mass guy on comp.sci.[physics,astro] who died fairly recently)
Brett
I guess it's time for your weird day:
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