Wormholes
Wormhole Basics
Where
do wormholes come from?
Could
you connect a wormhole to itself and would you want to?
Could you turn a wormhole inside out, and
would you want to?
Do weird things
happen if you rotate the wormhole mouths at high speed?
What is the
correlation between the diameter of a wormhole and the
mass/energy needed to create one?
How far
apart typically are the two mouths of naturally occurring
Planck-scale wormholes in the quantum foam, and can naturally occurring
wormholes theoretically link two points light-years apart in the
instant before disappearing?
Is the
3rd Toposophic absolutely the minimum level of sophistication
needed to create a wormhole?
If a rotating
mass passes through a wormhole, does the wormhole have to
acquire a spin?
Can a
wormhole have more than two mouths?
Would an
ultrarelativistic wormhole mouth have interesting/useful
properties?
Are linelayers Von Neumanns (that is, capable of
self replication)? If not, shouldn't they be?
How far will a wormhole extend? Could it be between
any two points in the universe?
Wormholes need 'exotic matter' to help keep
them open. What is 'exotic matter'? Is it the same as dark matter or
negative matter?
Do wormholes have physical properties?
With newer, more efficient inflation
techniques, how much exotic matter is needed to create a traversable
wormhole?
Once created are wormholes stable, or do you have
to work to keep them stable?
What if wormhole mouths are moving at relativistic
(near the speed of light) speeds relative to each other? What's all
this about 'empire time'?
As wormhole buses are used to maintain
communications in a Dyson Swarm, wouldn't this result in Visser
collapses being a routine occurrence, unless great care was taken that
*all* the wormholes were chronologically synchronized with each other?
Can wormholes be
used to collect and distribute energy?
Exotic Matter
Exotic Matter Basics
Is the type of exotic matter used in wormholes
particulate in nature, composed of particles analogous to quarks,
leptons, etc.? If so, how big (hypothetically) are these particles? If
they are any larger than Planckscale, how are they rammed down the
throat of an initially Planckscale wormhole to initially stabilize and
begin enlarging it?
How is exotic matter kept from blocking the
wormhole? That is, how is it organized in such a way that it
allows ships and other such objects to pass through and still holds the
wormhole open?
Wormhole FAQs
Wormholes are a cornerstone of the OAUP scenario, in that an
interconnected set of interstellar civilizations like that we've
depicted would be impossible
without them. It is also one of the scenario's more controversial
features. The following is a list of commonly asked
questions.
Before proceeding onto the FAQs themselves we recommend you first read
Wormholes - A
Layman's Guide. If you require a more in-depth look at the
information provided by the
Laymen’s Guide, please refer to these parent articles:
Wormhole
Engineering in Orion's Arm: An Overview and
Traversable
Lorentzian Wormholes: An Overview.
Where do wormholes come from?
There are a variety of sources used to create wormholes.
1. At the Planck scale, spacetime undergoes quantum
fluctuations, as pointed out by Wheeler, who coined the term "spacetime
foam" (Wheeler also invented the term "black hole" and "wormhole"). The
fluctuations of the spacetime foam create non-simply connected
manifolds, also known as wormholes. In fact, current (late
2007)
thinking
[1] postulates relic leftover wormhole
networks "frozen"
after
the Universe inflated and cooled as a possible Dark Matter candidate.
2. A type of black hole (see below) can be converted into
a wormhole using phantom radiation. Orion's Arm calls these
Hayward-Koyama wormholes.
[2]
3. Versions of M/string/Randall-Sundrum theory contain
wormhole solutions.
Could you connect a wormhole to itself and would you want to?
Wormholes are distinguished by their topological character. An
astrophysical black hole has one "mouth" (also known as the event
horizon). A theoretical black hole has two "mouths", the black hole end
and the white hole end, as does a wormhole.
One cannot perform topology change. A wormhole with two mouths cannot
be converted into one with 1, 3, or more mouths.
In addition to their topology, objects in general relativity are
described by their metric which is, roughly, the shape of spacetime
including all matter and curvature as described by gravitation fields.
The metric of the mouth of a given wormhole requires a minimum distance
from other objects with an equivalent magnitude metric (e.g. star,
planet, etc.) This is called "asymptotic flatness". If the asymptotic
flatness condition is violated, the wormhole metric stops behaving like
a wormhole, and the wormhole collapses. This collapse has been shown to
involve either
[3]:
1. Conversion of 70% of the wormhole "mass" into energy,
with the remaining 30% becoming a black hole (BOOM!)
2. Exponential expansion of the wormhole into a baby
universe at "right angles" with our current universe
The dominant process appears to be the first one, and it is very
sensitive to initial conditions (that is, it is chaotic). In other
words, doing
this is likely to be very harmful to the being attempting it.
Could you turn a wormhole inside out, and would you want to?
See above.
Do weird things happen if you rotate the wormhole mouths at high speed?
The Morris-Thorne-Kuhfittig wormholes used in Orion's Arm are
spherically symmetric. Assuming you could find a means to rotate the
wormhole, inducing relativistic rotations is equivalent to introducing
a perturbation in the wormhole metric. A time-dependent perturbation of
as little as 1% of the wormhole "mass" can cause wormhole collapse,
with the effects as described above.
What is the correlation between the diameter of a wormhole and the
mass/energy needed to create one?
See the
Layman's
Guide to Wormholes.
How far apart typically are the two mouths of naturally occurring
Planck-scale wormholes in the quantum foam? Can naturally occurring
wormholes theoretically link two points light-years apart in the
instant before disappearing?
Naturally occurring wormholes typically appear and vanish with their
mouths separated by distances comparable to the Planck scale. However,
during the cosmological inflation epoch, some wormhole mouths
could become separated by very large distances. As the temperature of
the Universe dropped, some of these relic wormholes could have had
their topological properties frozen into the large scale structure of
spacetime (much like bubbles of air in ice).
Planck-scale wormholes appear and disappear due to the frothy nature of
spacetime itself, not due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (as
is the case with virtual particles). Thus, widely separately relic
Planck-scale wormholes would be stable (due to conservation of
topology), and could be present in the universe today. As previously
mentioned, some current (2007) theories posit this as an element of
dark matter.
Is the 3rd Toposophic absolutely the minimum level of sophistication
needed to create a wormhole?
Yes, although as the creator's toposophic level rises so does the
efficiency of wormhole construction. For example a third singularity
intelligence could create a 100km radius wormhole using 1.369e35 kg of
matter (almost 70,000 stars like the sun), while a sixth singularity
intellect would only require 1.369e26 kg (roughly 23 earths). In
addition to the efficient use of mass, the third singularity intellect
can only expand a wormhole at about 1/120th the speed of a sixth
singularity intellect.
With respect to wormholes, we are like DaVinci -- we have the knowledge
to design and construct wormholes. We just lack the tools and materials
at present.
In this case, as soon as we're able to manipulate black holes and
stellar-sized masses, as well as generate inflaton fields
[4] (which
requires 10^13-19 GeV particle accelerators), we'll be able to
construct wormholes.
It's the whole tooling thing that puts wormholes up at S3.
If a rotating mass passes through a wormhole, does the wormhole have to
acquire a spin?
Yes and no. Any mass large enough to impart a spin on the wormhole
would defy the asymptotic flat space requirements and cause the
wormhole to fail – spectacularly.
Can a wormhole have more than two mouths?
No. If it were possible to create planar wormholes, one could construct
a
polyhedral wormhole structure with many gates (though technically each
pair of surfaces is a single wormhole, the structure then incorporates
multiple wormholes). Non-spherical wormholes also have the advantage of
relatively benign asymptotic flatness requirements, such that placing
them within close proximity shouldn't cause stability problems.
Unfortunately, non-spherical wormholes have nearly intractable
engineering requirements. There is no way to minimize the amounts of
negative stress energy required, and the amounts of "exotic matter"
scale quadratically with linear gateway size. For example, a simple
one-meter facet requires 10E-3 solar masses of negative energy density.
Also, the corners are completely unstable, and cannot be constructed
using the known array of topological artifacts (monopoles, strings, and
branes). The best solution uses "negative energy cosmic strings", but
these require a stiffness property not possessed by the usual
(physical) Nambu-Goto/Polyakov strings.
Would an ultrarelativistic wormhole mouth have interesting/useful
properties?
Due to Lorentz contraction a wormhole cannot exceed 0.74c without
failing.
Are linelayers Von Neumanns (that is, capable of self replication)? If
not, shouldn't they be?
Linelayers aren't Von Neumanns because to do so and be useful as
linelayers, one half of a wormhole pair would have to be passed through
the gate carried by the first ship and given to each daughter vessel.
This would cause the destruction of the wormholes.
How far will a wormhole extend? Could it be between any two points in
the universe?
If you mean how far apart can the mouths be moved and the wormhole
still work, the distance is infinite. So you could, in principle, have
a wormhole connecting opposite ends of the universe. You just have to
carry one end there by linelayer, with a maximum speed of 74% the speed
of light. If you mean, how far apart can the wormhole mouths appear
when popping up in the quantum foam and potentially being expanded,
then you are limited to the area within the Weylforge – a few
thousandths of a meter.
Wormholes need 'exotic matter' to help keep them open. What is 'exotic
matter'? Is it the same as dark matter or negative matter?
See the
Exotic Matter FAQ.
Do wormholes have physical properties?
Yes, the same properties as any other object such as mass, spin, and
charge. Typically, mass is better described by the metric, as wormhole
mass is more difficult to quantify in the same way as stellar mass,
there being several operating definitions such as Bondi mass or ADM
mass. (I have typically put quotations around the term mass to allude
to these issues). Spin is normally zero, because wormholes aren't
created from astrophysical processes (and so don't acquire angular
momentum); charge is an undesirable property.
A wormhole is essentially a black hole with a skin or caustic of
"exotic matter" where the event horizon of a black hole would be.
With newer, more efficient inflation techniques, how much exotic matter
is needed to create a traversable wormhole?
The Morris-Thorne-Kuhfittig wormholes described in the "Wormhole
Engineering in Orion's Arm: An Overview" use exotic matter from scalar
quantum field fluctuations, i.e. negligible amounts that are already
available. This is fortunate, because large amounts of exotic matter
are difficult to obtain.
Hayward wormholes require enormous amounts of exotic matter in the form
of phantom radiation, and for that reason are much more difficult to
construct (as well as being less "mass efficient").
Once created are wormholes stable, or do you have to work to keep them
stable?
Wormholes are dynamically unstable; a fluctuation equivalent to as
little as 1% of the wormhole "mass" can cause collapse. Thus, the
larger the wormhole, the more stable it is. However, wormhole failure
modes are non-linear and chaotic, and given the extremely large energy
releases and other bad effects, all wormholes are stabilized as a
matter of course.
What if wormhole mouths are moving at relativistic (near the speed of
light) speeds relative to each other? What's all this about 'empire
time'?
Wormholes are usually prevented from moving at relativistic velocities
by linear instabilities due to length contraction. Empire time doesn't
exist, for more details see the Time and History in Orion's Arm FAQ.
As wormhole buses are used to maintain communications in a Dyson Swarm,
wouldn't this result in Visser collapses being a routine occurrence,
unless great care was taken that *all* the wormholes were
chronologically synchronized with each other?
Visser collapse only becomes an issue when you either move WH mouths
around at relativistic speeds such that you get time dilation between
mouths, or if you set up a network of WH such that you can create a
time machine.
Moving WH mouths around a solar system at non-relativistic speeds to
set up a network should not cause a problem. There might be a tiny
amount of time dilation between gates, but it would be so small that
the gates would have to be very close to each other to induce Visser
collapse.
Can wormholes be used to collect and distribute energy?
Using wormholes for power distribution: Go to your nearest O- and
B-type stars. Enclose them in Dyson spheres lined with energy
collectors. Bring along a wormhole mouth. Send the energy back through
the Nexus. Now you're a Type 2.5 Civilization!
Even easier: use a grazer (a wormhole with an asymmetric "mass"
distribution between mouths) to deconstruct the stars into a handy
plasma stream which you then pass through a monopole field, magmatter
screen, or Q-ball field to totally convert the star masses directly
into energy.
[1] "Foam-like structure of the Universe", A.
Kirillov and D. Turaev,
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0707/0707.0208v2.pdf
[2] "How to make a traversable wormhole from a
Schwarzschild black
hole", S. Hayward and H. Koyama,
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0406/0406080v1.pdf
[3] "Fate of the first traversable wormhole:
black-hole collapse or
inflationary expansion", H. Shinkai and S. Hayward,
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0205/0205041v2.pdf
[4] "Density Fluctuations in the Oscillatory Phase
of Nonclassical
Inflaton in FRW Universe", K.K.Venkataratnam1 and P.K. Suresh,
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.3129v1.pdf
Exotic Matter FAQs
First, some disambiguation.
Exotic matter was the term used in Morris and Thorne's 1988 paper on
wormholes to describe mass/energy with a negative stress-energy tensor.
Later refinements codified this as mass/energy that violates the
Averaged Null-Energy Condition (ANEC), which is described in detail on
page 6 of reference
[1].
Exotic matter can also refer to such strange states of matter as
charmonium, pentaquarks, magmatter, Q-balls, and their ilk.
With respect to wormholes, exotic matter means mass/energy that
violates ANEC. The term "negative stress-energy tensor fields" is more
technically accurate and precise, and less likely to be confused with
the other forms of exotic matter. It also seems to be a term only a
physicist would use. ;-)
Is the type of exotic matter used in wormholes particulate in nature,
composed of particles
analogous to quarks, leptons, etc.? If so, how big (hypothetically) are
these particles? If they are any larger than Planckscale, how are they
rammed down the throat of an initially Planckscale wormhole to
initially stabilize and begin enlarging it?
There are actually at least three forms of negative-stress energy
tensor fields:
1. Quantum Fluctuations: Quantum fluctuations occur in
classical quantum field theory in scalar fields describing photons and
neutrinos. Such fields are governed by the Quantum Inequalities first
formulated by Ford and Roman, and can be classically observed in the
Casimir effect (although practical wormhole construction is impossible
using Casimir fields). Such fields form the extraction kernel of a
Weylforge.
2. Inflaton: The inflationary scalar field which caused
expansion of the current Universe. One of the unanswered mysteries
remains the status of the “Landscape”, the enormous phase space of
M-theory compactification parameters. A local minimum of the Landscape
is responsible for our current Universe.
3. Phantom Energy: The accelerated expansion of the
Universe may be attributed to the approximately 70% of mass-energy
known as dark energy, or quintessence in some Cosmological models.
Candidates for dark energy include ghost scalar
fields
[2] and axions
[3], and phantom energy traversable wormholes have
been shown to exist
[4] that are capable of accreting dark energy and
expanding
sufficiently fast to overtake the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
In general, "exotic matter" is not particulate, and not even matter,
but a bosonic (force) field.
How is exotic matter kept from blocking the wormhole? That is,
how is it organized in such a way that it allows ships and other such
objects to
pass through and still holds the wormhole open?
Exotic matter, being made of bosonic fields, has no problem happily
coexisting with you or any other material object occupying an
overlapping volume in spacetime. In practical wormholes, the negative
stress-energy tensor fields are confined to a region of the wormhole
called the Caustic, which is a very thin (micrometers or thinner)
region of spacetime.
[1] A. Getchell, "Traversable Lorentzian Wormholes:
An Overview",
http://www.orionsarm.com/whitepapers/TraversableLorenzianWormholes-Overview.pdf
[2] S. Sushkov and S. Kim. “Cosmological evolution
of a ghost scalar
field.” arXiv:gr-qc/0404037 v1 8 Apr
2004
[3] P. Gonzalez-Diaz. “Axion Phantom Energy.”
arXiv:hep-th/0401082 v1
13 Jan 2004
[4] F. Lobo. “Phantom energy traversable
wormholes.”
arXiv:gr-qc/0502099
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the authors and the Orion's Arm Universe Project
as per the current
Terms
Design notes
- This page is a further explanation of wormholes as used in the
setting as of 2007; some older pages may not yet reflect these changes.
