Stardrive technology?

[Chronos]

Quoth Der Trihs:

What would do the reflecting? I wouldn’t expect a real wormhole to have interior walls like you see on sci-fi shows; since it is a spacial distortion I’d expect moving side to side within the wormhole to bring you back where you started in a loop. Like circumnavigating the globe, or a closed universe.

Right, when you get down to it, nothing is going to be literally bouncing off a wall on the inside of the wormhole, or anything like that. Rather, most geodesics which lead into the wormhole will also end up leading back out the same end. From the particle’s point of view, it hasn’t reflected off of anything; it’s just going in an unimpeded straight line. But from an outside observer’s point of view, the particle entered the hole, and then some time later, came back out.

But exactly how this works is going to require [Chronos] to explain it.

Personally, I’m not all that fond of the virtual-particle explanation, since it requires full-on quantum field theory to do that explanation justice, and most folks you’ll be explaining it to won’t have that background. The explanation I prefer is the thermodynamic one, which is rigorous even at an introductory level (though obviously you have to go past an introductory level to get any actual numbers out of it). The basic argument is that, first, black holes must have considerable entropy, since the entropy of a final state must be greater than that of an initial state, and black holes are pretty much the ultimate in final state. Second, we learn from thermodynamics that anything that has an entropy must also have a temperature. And third, anything that has temperature must emit radiation.

[Ring]

But isn’t temperature the conjugate of energy? If so, where does that energy come from? Or are you saying that information is energy?

[Der_Trihs]

@Chronos

Quoth Der Trihs:Right, when you get down to it, nothing is going to be literally bouncing off a wall on the inside of the wormhole, or anything like that. Rather, most geodesics which lead into the wormhole will also end up leading back out the same end. From the particle’s point of view, it hasn’t reflected off of anything; it’s just going in an unimpeded straight line. But from an outside observer’s point of view, the particle entered the hole, and then some time later, came back out.

Ah, thanks, I think I can visualize how that works.

@Ring

Or are you saying that information is energy?

The two are equated sometimes.

[Lumpy]

One problem is that if you can connect two distant points of space via wormhole, you can also connect two distant points of time; IOW, wormholes make time travel possible. In fact unless General Relativity is wrong in some major respect, FTL travel by any method whatsoever is the equivalent of time travel.

Another problem might be tidal forces at the mouth of the wormhole. Wouldn’t they be equal to that of a black hole of equal size?

[Chronos]

In fact unless General Relativity is wrong in some major respect, FTL travel by any method whatsoever is the equivalent of time travel.

Special Relativity, even. There’s plenty of room for GR to be wrong, and many folks investigating the possible deviations, but SR is the best-tested theory in all of science, so it’d be a really big deal if something violated SR.

Another problem might be tidal forces at the mouth of the wormhole. Wouldn’t they be equal to that of a black hole of equal size?

The average tidal forces, probably, but I see no reason that you couldn’t shunt off all the curvature into easily-avoided “corners”.