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Science Fiction > Science > Re: Musings On ...
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Re: Musings On Wormholes

by Luke Campbell <lwcamp@[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Feb 3, 2008 at 01:53 PM

On Feb 2, 8:52 pm, George W Harris <ghar...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>         Also, if both mouths of the wormhole are in the
> same vicinity, they will both undergo an acceleration of
> magnitude G*m/d^2 (where G is the gravitational
> constant, m is the mass of each wormhole (positve for
> one, negative for the other), and d is the distance
> between them) and the vector pointing from the
> negative-mass wormhole to the positive-mass wormhole.
> This acceleration will be constant, so they will quickly
> reach relativistic velocities.

If they are not of exactly equal mass, one will experience a greater
acceleration than the other and the mouths will separate.  Even if
they are of equal mass, the arrangement will be unstable with respect
to any external perturbation.  This can be seen by considering both
wormholes as a single zero mass object.  Any outside force will lead
to an infinite acceleration on the net body.  Since each mouth has a
finite mass, this means that there must be an infinite force acting
between the two mouths, which will necessarily overcome anything
keeping the mouths from drifting apart (or together).  This will lead
to the wormhole mouths acquiring separate trajectories where, unless
they collide,  the gravitational acceleration will quickly become
minuscule (what happens if they collide is an interesting and, at this
point in our knowledge of wormholes, unanswerable, question).

For my own sanity, in my settings I assume that wormholes destabilize
and collapse if the mass difference between the mouths gets too large,
preventing the mass of either mouth from ever becoming negative.
While there is no reason this should occur using a general
relativistic description of wormholes alone, it seems that quantum
effects will be necessary to sup****t wormholes by providing the
negative energy fluctuations that allow stable wormhole geometries.
Quantum mechanics places certain restrictions on the magnitude,
duration, and extent of negative energy regions  that seems to forbid
isolated regions of space with a net negative energy.  This suggests
that negative mass wormhole mouths are, in fact impossible, although
the argument I gave is by no means rigorous.

Luke
 




 6 Posts in Topic:
Musings On Wormholes
George W Harris <gharr  2008-02-02 02:18:12 
Re: Musings On Wormholes
Robert Martinu <invali  2008-02-02 10:58:32 
Re: Musings On Wormholes
George W Harris <gharr  2008-02-02 23:52:11 
Re: Musings On Wormholes
Erik Max Francis <max@  2008-02-02 22:10:50 
Re: Musings On Wormholes
George W Harris <gharr  2008-02-03 02:28:27 
Re: Musings On Wormholes
Luke Campbell <lwcamp@  2008-02-03 13:53:08 

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tan12V112 Thu Dec 4 0:10:30 CST 2008.