Fascinating stuff Ring. Basically puts a sock in the mouth of one of my favorite GR profs who gave a lecture about the equivalence between the Unruh effect in Rindler quantization and the Minkowski quantization particle detector.
However, I’m unconvinced that you’ve proven your point. The paper does demonstrate that there will be no way a constantly accelearting particle forms an event horizon, but how does it imply that there is a neccessarily zero Ricci curvature scalar? And even if the contracted scalar was zero, that doesn’t neccessarily say the Ricci Tensor has to be zero, only that the sum over its components must be zero.
For any given SD forums thread, it has a small but nonzero chance of decaying into a Great Debate. The chance of it decaying increases with time.
Straight Dope Forums Law of Increasing Entropy:
The total order of any Great Debate thread only decreases with time. It takes an expenditure of energy by a Moderator to add order to a thread.
Sorry about that, just a weak attempt at making humor (but as the Conservation of Humor Law states: Humor cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another)
-Blah
Well, no, if it’s happening, you can’t just ignore it. Here’s a question that would work: If someone is at star B, then travels at the speed of light to star A, stays a week, then travels at the speed of light back to B, how much time would have passed on star B? However, once you get faster than the speed of light, you run into some serious trouble.
Incidentally, the reason I can just say that someone travels at the speed of light and not say the speed of light with respect to a certain reference frame is this: If something is moving at c in one reference frames, it is moving at c in all reference frames. You may recognize this as one of the initial assumptions of Special Relativity theory, but it’s neat to see it quantitatively as well. Try plugging in V[sub]2[/sub] = 1 into the first velocity addition formula I gave in my first reply, and you’ll see that V[sub]Total[/sub] = 1, regardless of V[sub]1[/sub].
Then I imagine that the travel would be instantaneous in the frame of reference of the wormhole. But you don’t say what that is. Okay, let me try to put this another way. In the Galilean universe, if something is traveling at infinite speed to you, then it’s traveling at infinite speed to me as well. Not so in SR. Imagine that the two ends of a wormhole are one light-day apart. You see Louie enter one and exit the other instantaneously. I imagine this is what you have in mind for your magic transport. But is that what really happened? Only in your reference frame. Observer P, who’s in a different reference frame, sees Louie enter, and then exit 12 hours later. And what’s worse, Observer Q, in yet another frame, sees Louie exit, and then 12 hours later, enter! It’s not as simple as saying “it all happens instantaneously”.