Worm Hole Engineering
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There is still one problem with wormholes for any hyperspace
engineers to take careful account of. The simplest calculations
suggest that whatever may be going on in the universe outside,
the attempted passage of a spaceship through the hole ought to
make the star gate slam shut. The problem is that an
accelerating object, according to the general theory of
relativity, generates those ripples in the fabric of spacetime
itself known as gravitational waves. Gravitational radiation itself, travelling ahead of the spaceship and into the black hole at the speed of light, could be amplified to infinite energy as it approaches the singularity inside the black hole, warping spacetime around itself and shutting the door on the advancing spaceship. Even if a natural traversable wormhole exists, it seems to be unstable to the slightest perturbation, including the disturbance caused by any attempt to pass through it.
There is an interior tunnel in the exact Kerr solution of the Einstein Field Equations, but it’s unstable. The slightest perturbation would seal it off and convert the tunnel into a physical singularity through which nothing can pass. I have tried to imagine a superior civilization that would control the internal structure of a collapsing star to keep the interior tunnel stable. This is very difficult. The civilization would have to monitor and stabilize the tunnel forever. But the point is that the trick, although it may be very difficult, is not impossible. It could operate by a process known as negative feedback, in which any disturbance in the spacetime structure of the wormhole creates another disturbance which cancels out the first disturbance.
The two waves would cancel out, producing total silence. For simple sound waves, this trick can actually be carried out, here on Earth, in the 1990s. Canceling out more complex noise, like the roar of a football crowd, is not yet possible, but might very well be in a few years time. So it may not be completely farfetched to imagine Sagan’s "superior civilization" building a gravitational wave receiver/transmitter system that sits in the throat of a wormhole and can record the disturbances caused by the passage of the spaceship through the wormhole, "playing back" a set of gravitational waves that will exactly cancel out the disturbance, before it can destroy the tunnel. But where do the wormholes come from in the first place? The way Morris, Yurtsever and Thorne set about the problem posed by Sagan was the opposite of the way everyone before them had thought about black holes. Instead of considering some sort of known object in the Universe, like a dead massive star, or a quasar, and trying to work out what would happen to it, they started out by constructing the mathematical description of a geometry that described a traversable wormhole, and then used the equations of the general theory of relativity to work out what kinds of matter and energy would be associated with such a spacetime. What they found is almost (with hindsight) common sense. Gravity, an attractive force pulling matter together, tends to create singularities and to pinch off the throat of a wormhole. The equations said that in order for an artificial wormhole to be held open, its throat must be threaded by some form of matter, or some form of field, that exerts negative pressure, and has antigravity associated with it. Now, you might think, remembering your school physics, that this completely rules out the possibility of constructing traversable wormholes. Negative pressure is not something we encounter in everyday life (imagine blowing negative pressure stuff in to a balloon and seeing the balloon deflate as a result). Surely exotic matter cannot exist in the real Universe? But you may be wrong. |
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