17 ms·
A few thoughts: 1. The possibility of wormholes isn't new. 2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what they're talking about. 3. They'r
by wearywanderer 5y ago
A few thoughts:
1. The possibility of wormholes isn't new.
2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what they're talking about.
3. They're stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits: And because entanglement is a standard feature of quantum physics, it is relatively easy to create. “It’s really a beautiful theoretical idea,”
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago> stretching the words 'relatively easy' to ludicrous limits I take it they mean "easier than supplying 1000 galaxies-worth of energy" or similar
- wearywanderer 5y agoRight. It's 'easy' relative to the utterly impossible. But it's 'utterly impossible' relative to anything any reasonable human might consider easy.
- thereddaikon 5y agoThen they are using the term right. They said relatively easy, not absolutely easy.
- wearywanderer 5y agoI agree that it's not flat wrong, it's just a huge stretch. Compared to what they propose, a commercially viable fusion power plant is "relatively easy."
- judge2020 5y agoIt’s not helpful to the reader, though.
- fnord77 5y agocommunication through them should be possible, though, no?
- libria 5y agoIf you haven't had any messages sent to you from Future fnord77, suffice it to say we won't have figured out how to do that in our lifetime.
- lumost 5y agoThe physics of interacting with your previous self are undefined with many plausible solutions. It is entirely plausible that the universe limits your interactions with your past causal self to a small range, allows arbitrary overlapping world lines, blocks all causal violations entirely, or has disastrous consequences for time loops. My personal bet is that the universe has no reason to care that you've interacted with your past self given a consistent proper time worldline. This however removes conservation of energy and momentum in the universe, which General Relativity also does not preserve. Of course this does allow for misuse of causal loops to generate arbitrarily large/infinite amounts of energy without any bounds on observability.
- firebaze 5y agoIf we'll figure this out, we'll (very) probably also have figured how out to calculate the effects of communicating with the past. So, no. This doesn't tell us anything about the possibility, it merily tells us, even if it _was_ possible, we're collectively to stupid yet to deal with it without destroying our future which would've led to inventing such a device.
- m3kw9 5y agoEvery thing is easy relatively to impossible
- nawgz 5y ago> 2. You still need to be thinner than spaghetti I understand this is some form of hyperbole, but would what they propose be sufficient to transport masses of some raw elements around? Let's say some advanced civilization sent out mining expeditions, and desired a way to transport back that material FTL for example
- wearywanderer 5y agoFrom my reading of the PDF, they're talking about wormholes with a radius less than 10^-21 meters. The Bohr radius is 10^-11.
- teeray 5y agoI’d be more interested in sticking one end into the sun’s corona and getting an infinite rocket engine
- jimmygrapes 5y agoPlease use somebody else's sun
- mLuby 5y agoI wouldn't expect an exhaust plume passing through a wormhole to move the wormhole itself (or the heavily curved "portals" at its ends) any more than a plume would move "flat"/"normal" spacetime. Separately, Kurzgesagt did a video on stellar engines (which can be much less exotic than wormholes); sounds like what you're describing: https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU
- _Microft 5y agoThe last link in the article is to a paper called "Humanly Traversable Wormholes". Here is an excerpt from its conclusion "In fact, it allows for solutions where the wormholes are big enough that a person could traverse them and survive. From the outside they resemble intermediate mass charged black holes. Their big size comes from demanding that a human traveller can survive the tidal forces.", from [PDF] https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.066007 https://journals.aps.org/prd/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.066007
- echelon 5y agoSending matter probably isn't important. Data, though. That's valuable.
- dataflow 5y agoI really want to think that was a pun. Relatively easy, just quantumly hard.
- slver 5y agoThey're saying tunnels are possible. They didn't say people (or any organic life on Earth) would travel through them. Honestly just encoding any communication through them successfully would turn our world upside down. That said, wormholes are a bit of the pet crackpot theory of the scientific community right now. Black holes are definitely a thing. White holes are pure conjecture based on extrapolating math in very hand-wavey ways. And wormholes (i.e. the idea of black/white holes where information can travel between them) are even less plausible.
- grishka 5y ago> You still need to be thinner than spaghetti to go through what they're talking about. Uh, so no stargates anytime soon? That's disappointing.