Wormholes Unstable (BBC) 403
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!"
Am I the only one... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
What you've encountered here is akin to that phenomenon, only on a word-association level. You saw "W----s unstable" and your brain said, "WINDOWS!" This phenomenon is especially prevelent in males ages 9 through 120, who readily associate almost anything they encounter with their own genitals or breasts.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
As a male, I admit I spend way too much time associating things with my breasts.
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Funny)
Actually my brain interpreted it as a political statement.
Re:Hilarious? (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't the cancellation of Star Trek, this is real space travel. And therefore less important.
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
I felt a disturbance in the force... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Duh (Score:2)
Re:You never watched DS9 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 subspa
Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but where are you gonna get the damn Naquadah from, huh?
Huh!?! P3x742!?
That's old news! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's old news! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Duh (Score:2)
But I have a date at Antares! (Score:2)
Oh No! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit, and just as my theoretical nanotube space elevator was almost complete.
Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Funny)
Were you going to take that elevator to your theoretical girlfriend?
Re:Oh No! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but my mom wouldn't let me cut a hole in the basement ceiling.
Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Funny)
Captain: I'll give you a ride on my space elevator if you show me your wormhole.
Green-skinned lady-of-casual-virtue: Well if it wasn't a nanotube, maybe you'd get somewhere! It takes exotic matter to keep my wormhole from collapsing.
Re:Oh No! (Score:2)
Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's likely much more (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
"Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:"Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake? (Score:5, Informative)
The mass/energy equivalence is actually quite important, because really mass is energy - in the early Universe, energy was all there was. What we call matter "condensed" out of that. The two are not just comparable, therefore, they really are the same stuff. Thus, E=MC^2 is true for both positive and negative masses, because negative mass must be condensed from negative energy.
(I'm not sure if that's very clear.)
Anyways, a negative charge is NOT the same as negative energy. An electron has a positive mass and will therefore convert to a positive amount of energy, and likewise if you were to "fuse" that energy, you would get an electron with it's attendent negative charge but positive mass.
Nor is antimatter the same as negative matter. Antimatter and matter are largely the same stuff, but "rotated". (Matter has 720' symmetry, so if you "rotate" matter only 360', it becomes antimatter. This is covered in Professor Hawking's Brief History Of Time.)
Negative matter has negative mass. This means that it would have negative momentum, negative gravity and all sorts of other bizare characteristics. (To give you an example, a positive massed rocket that used negatively massed fuel would fire the engines in the direction it wished to go.)
Because the forces inside a negative mass are repulsive, negative mass is highly unstable, as all the forces are trying to blast it apart. What you would want is matter that is sufficiently distributed that the repulsive force (in this case, things like gravity) are weaker than what would be attractive forces (in this case, say, the strong nuclear force, which is normally repulsive, in positive matter).
It is very unclear as to whether you could have complex atoms with a negative mass, simply because gravity and the strong nuclear force are not equal and therefore there would be a high degree of asymmetry in what would be possible.
Negative mass or negative energy is required in a stable wormhole, because it forces the throat of the wormhole to stay open. Normally, a wormhole would collapse instantaneously, whenever any positive mass or energy tried to cross it, but the negative mass/energy prevents it from doing so. Provided there is enough.
Essentially, what you are doing is creating a region of space that has such an intense repulsive force that "normal" space cannot enter into that region.
Of course, this does beg an important question - is the force so great that NOTHING can enter? If so, then such wormholes may exist almost everywhere and we'd never know, as the normal Universe would wrap round it.
Re:"Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was not claiming that a negative charge was negative energy, or asking for clarification about that. I was analogizing the potential energy due to charge (electrostatic force) with the potential energy of a mass (gravity). An electron and proton, ignoring gravity, have a certain amount of potential energy relative to one another just because of their charges; that is to say, if released, they would move closer together and gain velocity, and kinetic energy. A hypothetical particle identical to an electron but with a greater charge would have *more* potential energy relative to that proton, as the attraction between them would be stronger, even though their masses are the same, so it's pretty clear that the attraction due to charge counts as "potential energy" the same as attraction due to mass.
But now, take the potential energy due to charge (again, ignoring gravity) of two electrons. As the charge of a proton and and an electron are equal but opposite, is the potential energy between them (ignoring gravity) not the same? Or would you say an electron has a negative potential energy (even considering gravity now) to another electron, since they would repel one another? In that case, the "positive" and "negative" differences of energy seem only to apply to potential, not kinetic, energy, and refer only to the direction of the force applied relative to another body.
Furthermore, in the case of electrical charges, that attraction or repulsion is relative to not only the strength but the sign of charge of another body, in which case, how do you know that this exotic matter with negative mass, while it may have negative (repulsive) potential energy to positive mass, does not have positive (attractive) potential energy to other exotic matter? After all, we know that likes attract with positive masses, so it stands to reason that likes would attract with negative masses as well.
Has anyone ever made or discovered particles of this "exotic matter" and measured the relative attraction of them to each other? I imagine for the extremely short lifespans you claim for it, it would be difficult to do such an experiment, especially here amongst all this positive mass, and especially to isolate the effects of gravity from electric and nuclear forces.
This is a common area that seems conceptually vague amongst every physicist I've personally spoken with and most of the ones I've read. Einstein seemed to clarify it best in his personal layman's version of relativity. People speak of the "size" of particles, and of "matter", as nebulous concepts separate from the force-fields which define the characteristics of those particles. For example, when pressed to define "volume" as an independent quality of a particle, as when people say "atoms are mostly empty space", most people, even physics professors, I speak to fail to give any definition.
Is it the size of an atom the radius of its outermost valence level? By that definition the entireity of space inside that valence shell IS the atom and is therefore not empty. So, scratch that idea, the space of the atom is only filled by the particles it's made out of and the rest is empty. Ok - what's the volume of an electron, or a proton? It's not clear how that should be defined - by it's mass? By its charge? How do you measure volume in units of mass or charge? Do you measure the volume by the extent that the strong nuclear force keeps other particles (of regular, non-antimatter at least) from overlapping that pointin space?
What is the extend or nature of something devoid of any of its force-fields? Can you run into an empty shell with no mass, charge, or nuclear forces? What exactly would you be running into? People say atoms are mostly empty space - I say everything is nothing but space, and none of it is empty.
From recollection, Einstein spoke in his laymen's book on relativity about an a c
Re:Actually, it's likely much more (Score:3, Interesting)
Another option would be to use quantum tunelling. You need to find a particle which can only exist under certain rarified conditions, such that space would "exclude" that particle, which would result in the particle "tunneling" through that space and appearing o
Re:Oh No! (Score:2)
hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
Re:hmmm (Score:2)
Escape (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Escape (Score:2)
Re:Escape (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Escape (Score:2)
And the obligatory "what if you made a transported the size of a pea and sent it through, then beamed through?" just thinking around the problem, my ~2 milrays
Of course they're unstable. (Score:5, Funny)
Weird (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Weird (Score:2, Funny)
Hey, did you feel that? Like some kind of ripple in the space-time continuum.
We knew that (Score:4, Insightful)
Elementary sci-fi!
Screwed up plans (Score:4, Funny)
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is hardly news. (Score:2)
Why is this considered news?
Re:This is hardly news. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is hardly news. (Score:5, Funny)
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'...
Re:This is hardly news. (Score:3, Funny)
I get all *my* scientific knowledge from 'Enterprise'...
Gee, I have some really bad news for you...
Re:This is hardly news. (Score:2)
Disturbing? No.
Predictable? Yep.
Re:This is hardly news. (Score:2)
Everyone knows that! (Score:2)
I thought this had been known for a while. (Score:2)
Re:I thought this had been known for a while. (Score:2)
I don't really have the background to understand the paper in detail, but from the BBC article, it sounds like they're saying that even if you had some exotic matter, you still couldn't build a wormhole stable enough to travel through, not get vaporized, and end up at a known time and place.
Be careful (Score:2)
You know what's bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
I'm going with her on the next trip, in the raw baby!
Re:You know what's bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
Drat, Drat, and Double Drat. (Score:2)
"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.
This explains the low-attendance ... (Score:5, Funny)
Still might be useful having small ones (Score:4, Interesting)
And that just seems so shortsighted...
Re:Still might be useful having small ones (Score:2)
Something in the order years or sun-output for even microscopic wormholes.
So I dont think its shortsighted.
Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:2)
Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:4, Informative)
Suppose, a few years from now, individual processors can do 100 trillion floating point operations per second. And you wire up 20,000 of these nodes in parallel. And suppose each floating point operation can magically operate one of those 10 to the 60th things-that-it-needs to (TFA didn't say *what* had to be controlled to within one in 10 to the 60th).
That's still 10^34 years. Not counting leap years.
I'm not holding my breath ...
Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:2)
But seriously...I also didn't quite understand what needs to be measured to keep the wormhole open. Perhaps the amount of "exotic matter" needed to keep the tube open? There may be some feedback mechanism that will make the entire operation less impossible. Although, the whole thing seems to theoretical, that we should perhaps just stop wondering abou
Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:2)
Even the mass of passing neutrinos would be like hammerblows on a eggshell in that reagard.
Ten years too late (Score:5, Funny)
JANEWAY: Chakotay, take us into the wormhole.
CHAKOTY: Aye aye, Captain!
PARIS: (aside to TORRES) Heh, she said "wormhole."
*crunch*
Not true (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not true (Score:2)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
So, (to haven so) how are you planning (howen planninged ar
For real, or just in theory? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
PHB Mining (Score:5, Funny)
So how long before they start mining PHB's brains for Exotic matter?
The Worm Turns (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Worm Turns (Score:2)
Re:The Worm Turns (Score:3, Insightful)
So much for CDW ... (Score:2)
(Well, it's not really new anymore, but ...)
Many, many remaining uses (Score:3, Funny)
* 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.
Yeah right. (Score:4, Funny)
Fools.
Human-compatible wormholes, not (Score:3, Interesting)
WHAT!?!? Are there no Farscape fans on /. !?!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Timetravel_0, (Score:2)
Just ask Chrichton (Score:2)
That explains the insurance... (Score:2)
muahahah (Score:2)
Unstable (Score:2)
"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* )
A silicon chip could never occur naturally, either (Score:2)
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
All you need is PART of the wormhole (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, putting limits on things that are still fiction is kind of ironic.
No, The BBC is unstable! (Score:2, Funny)
Improbabilitydrive (Score:3, Informative)
I've never had much luck using wormholes (Score:3, Funny)
Now that is funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Audio interview with one of the researchers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:first post (Score:2, Funny)
Easy explanation: (Score:2)
Re:Information Theory Hell (Score:2)
Real wormhole theory would assume that its a reversible portal connecting multiple points in space. Inconsistancies in SG1 happen to do with EM radiation able to pass through the "wrong way" when matter cant, some weird nullification field, and other such.
Im happy with wormhole theory IF its a size of a proton wormhole with infinite bandwidth to transmit/receive. How much data could you fit in the whole spectrum? Now if each side's view and everything were converted
Re:Information Theory Hell (Score:2)
Re:Information Theory Hell (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Information Theory Hell (Score:2)
Took me a while to figure out what you were talking about; I thought you had written SGI not 1.
Re:Information Theory Hell (Score:2)
Re:Heisenberg (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*Obli. Treknobabble* But what what if... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Someone explain to me... (Score:3, Interesting)
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