There’s a formula for jumping across wormholes in space. There’s a webpage called “Tranversable Wormholes”, and it’s URL is:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hall/5803/tra.html
Information about this scientific formula can be found there. However, does anyone know what the variables in the equation represent?
Do you advise reading the book Contact, or renting the film Contact?
By all means, read the book. Rent and view the film. If you were located nearby I would loan you the book. Good but not great Sci-Fi.
Just be sure to cross the wormhole while it is stable.
Look, this is GQ, not CS. Has anyone every actually proven the existence of wormholes? Or are they just something some physics equations predict the existence of, like magnetic monopoles?
No wormhole has ever been observed, directly or indirectly. It is suspected that submicroscopic wormholes exist throughout space, and it is conceivable that one might be enlarged to a macroscopic scale. However, even such a hypothetical wormhole could not be rendered traversible without the use of exotic matter with negative mass, and such exotic matter has also never been observed, directly or indirectly.
The equation the OP is asking about is one possible way to write the metric for a traversible wormhole. Basically, a metric gives you a way to calculate the distance between two points. ds is the infinitesimal element of proper length, e is the exponential base (2.71828…), c is the speed of light, t, r, theta, and (lower case) phi are coordinates used to label points in space (analagous to the spherical coordinates which use the same symbols), and b® and (capital) Phi® appear to be arbitrary functions of r.
Note that the fact that we can write down a metric for a wormhole, by itself, says nothing whatsoever about whether wormholes are actually possible. In fact, using Einstein’s equations for GR, we can calculate from that metric exactly how matter would have to be distributed to produce that curvature, and that distribution does, in fact, require negative mass.
This is a concept that was never covered when I studied physics in high school – what is “negative mass”? Does it have negative intertia?
Negative mass is a construct of this particular mathmatical model, required when you’ve decided you want your answer to be “wormhole”. It has no reality, that has been observed. If such an idea were ever realized and consciously observed, I’d postulate (without grounds) that a subsequent revision of our models would somehow yield (conceptually at least) simpler terms.
What’s the connection between wormholes and black holes? I read somewhere in a popular book on physics (can’t remember which one) that it might be possible to fly into a black hole, “miss” the singularity, and somehow end up in a wormhole. What does this really mean? Also, has Hawking’s answer to the black hole information paradox done away with this possibility?
Would protons and electrons not be considered magnetic monopoles? If not, what is the difference between those particles and the things that go by that name?
If you want to visit Strange Worlds, go to Canada.
Or San Fransisco, in some neighborhoods. 
Derleth – protons and electrons are electric monopoles, or point sources. Moving them creates a magnetic field. Because it’s easy to write electromagnetic field equations so that the electric and magnetic components are symmetrical, people have imagined the symmetric equivalent of (real, existing) electric point sources. These imaginary particles with a magnetic charge (that would presumably produce an electric field when moved) are called magnetic monopoles.
The book In Search of the Edge of Time by John Gribbin adresses the posibility of wormholes, and how they would be created. I know enough physics to generally understand the book, but can anyone tell me if John Gribbin is considered a reputable scientist or if his books are considered hogwash.
If people say that his work can be trusted, I’d recommend this one if you’re interested in wormholes.
and are magnetic dipoles. That is, they have a north and a south magnetic pole, just like a bar magnet (or the Earth). A magnetic monopole would be either a north pole by itself or a south pole.
Negative mass has everything that regular mass has, just opposite sign, you might say. It has negative energy. It repels massive objects. It bends light away from itself.
Since we don’t know where inertia comes from, I’m not sure if there’s an answer to the question of whether it has negative inertia. Chronos would know better than me, obviously, so I’m interested in his answer to that question, too, if he cares to give it. What I have read is that a chunk of negative matter can be used to warp space in the vicinity of a massive object such that you can kind of take the mass of that object out of the equation, so to speak. I guess this means the negative mass negates the inertia of the mass, but if that is the same as saying the negative mass has negative inertia itself, I don’t know. Logically, I don’t see how one could interpret the situation any differently, but again, with no good theory of inertia, I don’t know if the logic necessarily follows.
Pardon.
Subscribing to thread.
This is very interesting.
Y’know, it’s thinking about things beyond my intellectual capacity that keep my lying awake at night. Perhaps the gravity experts can help…
Let’s just say everything about negative mass is opposite. Now, if a negative mass has negative inertia (who cares where inertia comes from, we just assume it’s negative), and I push against it, it ought to…er, move towards me? Can that be possible? How could I move it away from me? By not pushing on it? I mean, if negative inertia is just the opposite of all inertial properties, then…a negative object at rest tends to stay at rest unless not acted upon by a force? That’s absurd; at least I think it is, isn’t it?
Assuming the equivalence principle holds for negative mass, and it has the weird qualities I suggest above…let’s see: Let’s say we’ve got a -kilogram here on Earth. It feels a force pushing it away from the gravitating object, right? It would be equal but opposite to what a kilogram of regular mass would feel. So it moves away. Err, but wait, if it’s behaving the same as an object being pushed by a force away from the mass, is this the equivalent of having the pusher push from above, causing it to move away from the Earth, or the equivalent of having the pusher push from below, causing it to move toward the Earth?
Aw, nuts, now my head hurts.
Uh, what? How can a proton, say, have a negative pole? Or an electron have a positive one?
I simply don’t understand that at all.
Electrons and protons have a property referred to as “quantum spin”, a weird, intrinsic property which can be thought of as a constant, quantized form of angular momentum.
So, just as an electrically-charged sphere (be it negative or positive) would have a magnetic dipole moment, so does a charged particle (though it’s not correct to think of a particle like an electron as a tiny sphere; it’s an analogy with limited applicability).
I’m not sure how one would construct a magnetic monopole. Any electrically charged object in motion sets up a magnetic field with opposite poles, so I don’t see how one can get one pole without the other.
Inertia is an exact synonym for mass, at least in General Relativity or any theory related to it. So an object with negative mass would have negative inertia. If you put a force directed away from you on a negative mass, that would cause the mass to accelerate towards you. A negative mass object would have a gravitational field pointing away from it, not towards it. And a negative-mass object in the gravitational field of a normal object would, indeed, accelerate towards the normal object, because the negative signs cancel out. For a real mindbender, the normal mass object will at the same time accelerate away from the negative object, which would cause them to just zip off across the Universe, if they were equal in mass.
Electrons, meanwhile, don’t have an electrical positive pole, but they do have a north pole (with a south pole to match it). You can’t make a single magnetic monopole out of any combination of familiar particles, because magnetic charge (if it exists) is conserved, just like electric charge. All of the familiar particles have zero magnetic charge (though many of them have magnetic dipoles or other higher magnetic moments), so any combination of them must also have zero magnetic charge. It is conceivable, however, that you could produce magnetic monopoles in pairs, and then somehow separate the components of the pair.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
The equation the OP is asking about is one possible way to write the metric for a traversible wormhole. Basically, a metric gives you a way to calculate the distance between two points. ds is the infinitesimal element of proper length, e is the exponential base (2.71828…), c is the speed of light, t, r, theta, and (lower case) phi are coordinates used to label points in space (analagous to the spherical coordinates which use the same symbols), and b® and (capital) Phi® appear to be arbitrary functions of r.
Do you know what those arbitrary functions are?
Of course not; they’re arbitrary. There’s probably some constraint on them that they go to zero at positive and negative infinity, and they might have to go to zero quickly. And you’d probably want to use a symmetric function. But you could use any function at all which met those constraints, and you would end up with a wormhole solution. They’d just be wormholes of different shapes.