Wormholes and CoE

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-20 12:49am

If you open a (stable) wormhole with one terminii at 1 metre above the ground and the other at 1 kilometre above the ground, traversing it means you suddenly gain potential energy, but this would violate CoE because you cant suddently magically get potential energy from nowhere.

I'm assuming that the energy wouldnt be drawn from the wormhole generator (since the wormhole is stable and nolonger requires a generator).

Even if the wormholes gravity pulls you towards it, that doesnt change the fact that the potential energy from the earth is still there.

What do you think would happen then if you go through the wormhole? I think the wormhole would loose energy and become smaller. That, or your body is converted partially to (potential) energy to recover the gain and you promptly die because you now are missing your spleen or something like that.

Opinions?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-01-20 12:53am

A wormhole could not exist so close to a planet, because the enormous gravitational forces would rip the planet apart. Sci-fi wormholes tend to be these silly phenomena like in "Sliders" where something can be three feet away and totally unaffected. The actual theorized phenomenon requires monster gravitational distortions.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-20 01:00am

oh well fooey :p

But the situation could be done around a black hole and in interstellar space. Then the potential energy difference would be ENORMOUS!

theres undoubtedly a situation where it could be done, especially with a black hole since nothing has more gravity then a black hole AFAIK.

if the gravity of the blackhole goes through the wormhole then there might not be an issue except on the side of the terminii opposite the blackhole.

The Dark · Post by **The Dark** » 2003-01-20 01:05am

I suppose it could pull energy away from the wormhole, necessitating either some other means of returning energy to the wormhole (dropping something through the other side), or (eventually) causing the wormhole to collapse.

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2003-01-20 02:59am

Real-life theoretical wormholes aren't fixed in place like their scifi counterparts. If one were to make a Thorne-type traversable wormhole and drive a mass through it, the wormhole would move in such a way that momentum would be preserved. I can't seem to wrap my head around the resulting kinematics at the moment but if the effect does not prevent the use of two wormholes in a gravity well as a perpetual motion machine this scenario is probably yet another proof of why wormholes are impossible.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-01-20 03:06am

Enlightenment wrote:Real-life theoretical wormholes aren't fixed in place like their scifi counterparts. If one were to make a Thorne-type traversable wormhole and drive a mass through it, the wormhole would move in such a way that momentum would be preserved. I can't seem to wrap my head around the resulting kinematics at the moment but if the effect does not prevent the use of two wormholes in a gravity well as a perpetual motion machine this scenario is probably yet another proof of why wormholes are impossible.

Theoretically, the only thing that could traverse a real-life wormhole would be a tachyon, since anything else wouldn't make it to the other side in time and would become part of the singularity.

Of course, if you can travel faster than light, you really don't need wormholes in the first place.

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2003-01-20 03:16am

The level of my do-maths physics ability isn't high enough to understand the real papers on this issue but from reading Kip Thorne's popular book (Black Holes and Time Warps) I get a very clear impression that his wormhole solution is spacelike--i.e. traversable.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-01-20 03:38am

Enlightenment wrote:The level of my do-maths physics ability isn't high enough to understand the real papers on this issue but from reading Kip Thorne's popular book (Black Holes and Time Warps) I get a very clear impression that his wormhole solution is spacelike--i.e. traversable.

I was under the impression that the solutions in general relativity gave wormholes which moved around a lot. Thorne created the solutions for a traversable wormhole for Contact, if I remember correctly, after Sagan asked him to.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2003-01-20 08:00am

The Unseen university has already experimented with this concept and produced amazing results...

SyntaxVorlon · Post by **SyntaxVorlon** » 2003-01-20 10:00pm

In which book?

The Dark · Post by **The Dark** » 2003-01-20 10:10pm

Enlightenment wrote:Real-life theoretical wormholes aren't fixed in place like their scifi counterparts. If one were to make a Thorne-type traversable wormhole and drive a mass through it, the wormhole would move in such a way that momentum would be preserved.

Y'know, I was gonna say that the wormhole would have to move, but I couldn't remember whether or not they're stable. Time to rewrite yet another section of my sci-fi universe

.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-01-20 11:15pm

SyntaxVorlon wrote:In which book?

They talk about it in The Last Continent. There was that unfortunate incident with the Privy...