time travel via wormhole question

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_181.html
Now let me go over the theroy.

  1. pluck a wormhole out of the subatomic foam
  2. enlarge the openings to usable size.
  3. take one end and accelerate it to a speed near light.
  4. if the thing doesn’t explode- bring it back and the 2 will be out of time sync.
  5. jump through and travel through time.
    simple enough but very expensive.

my question is, once you have one working wormhole time machine, can you just send a new wormhole end through the old one and avoid the whole high speed trip part?

and my second question if the 1st is possible, can you send the end through a second time, 3rd, etc. to travel further back.

2

Wait, there’s something you’re missing by that method. It works pretty well for traveling <i>forward</i> by a <b>set amount</b>. Once you’ve established it, you can also travel backwards from the other end, but <b>only to the point in time that the original now occupies</b>. You cannot travel back before the wormhole/timepath was established. So the furthest back in time you can travel is the present for the tail end.

You can travel forward in steps the amount of time of that set amount, but only for the amount of the future the wormhole stays stable and established. If it is ever removed or destroyed in the future, then that is as far as you can go forward in time. And you only move in set increments, not any time within that window you want. That set increment is determined by how fast you accelerated that end away from the first, and the time dilation, but it is a set increment.

Now all of that assumes there is a way to make or find a stable wormhole that is large enough to travel through, that you have a way to direct, move, accelerate one end of that wormhole at will, and that there is nothing <i>within</i> the wormhole that disrupts life and prevents you from using it as a passage.

Of course if you can find <i>two</i> of these wormholes, there is then the need to establish that you could in fact pass one through another one without disrupting either.

Enjoy!

3

I still don’t get it. So you move the other end of the wormhole at close to the speed of lite and bring it back. It would not be in the future it would just be younger than the other end. Because it traveled at close to light speeds means that it didn’t ‘age’ at the same rate as the other end. How is the end that moved now in the future?

4

You do realize, of course, that you have gone so far beyond what we know as legitimate science that we could just say that Glinda the Good Witch might just take us on a ride in the Yesterdaymobile to the Land Of WHATWAS, and the science involved would be just as accurate.
Trying to use a science-fiction concept to explain how another science-fiction concept might really work just doesn’t hold water, folks.

5

Quite right, this is purely theoretical, but it does actually hold together. Or so the experts I’ve read say.

But even they often say they expect this being consistent indicates the theories are still incomplete. If the theory was complete and correct, this sort of thing would be impossible. Either that, or causality isn’t consistent. Scary, huh?

It’s from heraldry. The proper heraldic term for things like the “Cross of St. Patrick.” Look it up.

6

Having posted the previous disclaimer, now I’m going to continue the thread. I’m enjoying it, so who cares if it’s meaningless. And maybe it isn’t, who knows?

The way this works is that the ends are the only parts of the wormhole that contact the ‘normal’ universe. The ‘tube’ of it isn’t really in the same place (to be very vague about it). So they can sort of travel independently through spacetime.

So, the two ends you have after the acceleration phase are not technically connected to each other. One is connected to an end in the past, and the other is connected to the future. By time-dilating part of the system, you end up with two ends of different wormholes. Or actually, two different ages of the same wormhole. Which, when you think about it in a space-time way, counts as two different wormholes.

It’s from heraldry. The proper heraldic term for things like the “Cross of St. Patrick.” Look it up.

7

Of course, the idea of MOVING a wormhole’s end, as if it were a cabbage, seems overly optimistic. If a wormhole is a distortion in space (or “space-time”) itself, then you need something that can manipulate space, not just move matter within space. The one cosmic force we know of that seems to do that is gravity. There might be others, but we don’t even know what they are. So–massive gravity to create the wormhole, then some flux(???) in that gravity to move part of it–never gonna happen, and if it did, the gravitic force would tidally rip apart mere matter AS it ripped space.
So say we find a force now beyond our ken, that can hugely distort space (and that’s what we’re talking about) without using the gravity of huge masses. And say we learn to control it–relatively cheaply, by which I mean it can be put into practice without burning off a planet. Great! It’d be like synthetic gravity! And it would probably still generate serious tidal effects. You might send atoms–mass–through the wormhole, but their structure would be lost.
There may be some hope for transtemporal radio-communication in this scenario, but not for sending you and me–unless you can build a vessel with an internal gravity- or tide-nullifier (which may require another exotic force no man yet knows).

8

Well, maybe, IF you can get a detailed radio signal through, and IF you can use that signal as a blueprint to reconstruct a material object, you could have a clone of yourself in the other time, or a robot programmed by your directives, and “live” vicariously through that, but you’d still REALLY be on the side you started on. I’m not sure about this idea, but it occurred to me as a way to “go through”.

9

graet thoughts, but what about passing a wormhole through another?

10

Sorry for letting the thread wander, k2dave.

I don’t see why you couldn’t pass one wormhole through another, assuming you can reshape spacetime enough to make the first one. But it I don’t think you could avoid the high speed trip that way. The 'hole that went through the other wouldn’t gain any time difference just by passing through. Unless the one it went through was already out of sync, I guess.

So I don’t think your trick would help you. But I’m outside the sphere of knowledge of the reading I’ve done.

“If you prick me, do I not–leak?” —Lt. Commander Data

11

They’re no experts in that case.

A wormhole much bigger than an atomic nucleus would be very unstable. And if anything were to pass through it, it would collapse immediately.

Voted as: The poster you’d most like to meet.

I demand a recount.

12

WallyM7, the expert I’m feeding off of is Jim al-Khalili, a theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey. The book is “Black Holes, Wormholes & Time Machines” Institute of Physics Publishing, 1999. It’s a good read for any layman interested in this way-out cosmology and its chronological possibilities.

al-Khalili didn’t actually put forth these ideas. Mostly he’s drawing off Kip Thorne of Caltech. Cecil mentioned the paper in his column.

Basically, Thorne and his collaborators started out with a group of properties for a traversable wormhole. It needed to be large enough for people to pass through, it needed to be stable and constantly open, it couldn’t have event horizons, singularities, or fierce tides, and it needed to be abitrarily short through the wormhole for an abitrarily long distance through normal space.

They found that the existance of such a wormhole was consistant with the present theories of spacetime, though the creation of it may not be. So they just ignored the problem of making it, and studied its theoretical properties.

Now there are a number of physicists that study these possible but improbable items. Basically, it is a rarified exercise in the mathematics of general relativity.

Matt Visser of Washington University has even written a textbook on the subject.

By the way, one of the hardest parts of the wormhole to theorize was the stability and keeping it open. It requires matter of negative mass. One thought is that this exotic matter might exist in cosmic strings, though they are a theoretical fantasy themselves.

Nevertheless, these people are surely more expert than you or I.

“If you prick me, do I not…leak?” --Lt. Commander Data

13

For those that are enjoying this, there’s another thread related to this column here.

“If you prick me, do I not…leak?” --Lt. Commander Data

14

I don’t understand how time travel is possible. Someone explain to me how you go back to something that is gone. After something has happened, it is gone. Time is impossible to get back. Once it has happened, its gone. You can’t get it back. So how do you travel to somewhere that doesn’t exist? If someone knows how please tell me.

15

click on the link provided it tne 1st post on this topic. The master will explain how it might be possible