Space The Final Frontier

Essay by Balthasar Indermuehle

181934@swin.edu.au

Instructor Dr. Bryan Gaensler

bgaensler@cfa.harvard.edu

Swinburne University of Technology Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing P.O. Box 218 Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia

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Space - The Final Frontier Balthasar Indermhle C:\data\MSc\Essay HET605 - Wormholes #2\WormHoles.doc 5/1781/9143 67 13.04.2002 23:36

Abstract
We could travel to the edges of the universe by forcefully bending space-time into a loophole structure until two surfaces of the space-time fabric connect wed be creating a wormhole. The energies involved in the creation of such a portal make it highly unlikely that well ever be able to use it as a means of getting from A to B faster than the speed of light taking the straight line. There are theories which in principle explain how this may be physically feasible, but no solution has been found on how to keep the gates open using the required exotic matter or how to prevent the Wormhole from collapsing into a singularity and thereby disassembling the unfortunate space farers into their subatomic particles.

Introduction
Wormholes are hypothetical tubes of space that create a shortcut between distant points in spacetime. If they exist they can be used as time machines - people passing through the wormhole and returning home via normally bent space, could get back before they left1. They can also be used as shortcuts, and thus to travel seemingly faster than light. But how would such a loophole look like, how could we travel through such a piece of bent piping in space-time? Several scientists have started theoretical work regarding Wormholes and the associated Paradoxes. People who have worked on the issue include Kip Thorne and his colleagues from Caltech. The famous Stephen Hawking and many others have also worked on the problem, including the father of General Relativity Albert Einstein himself. He discovered in the 1930s while working in Princeton with Nathan Rosen that his equations of a black hole actually represented a bridge between two regions of flat space-time. That phenomenon thus became to be known as an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky (ERP) bridge. According to the theory, any object massive enough to create a singularity would also create an ERP Bridge and thus connect two places in the space-time fabric. This also gave rise to the theory that there may be White Holes, the opposite of a black hole, where matter spontaneously appears. While the latter has not been found and in fact been dismissed by theorists since. The problem with the ERP Bridge is that the same force that warps space to create and sustain the phenomenon would crush anyone who tried to enter it via the black hole. It was thus believed that using a Wormhole created by a black hole could not be used as a shortcut when travelling. But in 1963, Roy Kerr, a New Zealander mathematician, came up with an interesting solution for a survivable Wormhole transport: He found that if a black hole is spinning rapidly, a singularity still forms but rather as a ring instead of a point. It was believed that in principle a particle may be able to fall towards the singularity but if at some point it moved through the ring instead of the hole the particle may

not be lost forever. More modern work published in 1998 by Tsvi Piran and Shahar Hod2 has preliminarily ended this idea. Using complex computer simulations, they studied how an electrically charged black hole might form and how the singularity would behave. They showed that a process known as mass inflation violated the Kerr hypothesis. When particles move towards the black hole, the singularitys apparent mass increases to infinity. This is as if the singularity was distributed throughout the entire system, it doesnt leave any space where matter may pass. Sir Roger Penroses idea formulated in 1965 that some matter falling inwards behind the event horizon may miss the singularity, shoot by and exit into a different place in space-time has thus been overthrown as well. Not everyone believes Piran and Hod are correct though. Some believe that adding an electric charge to a black hole provides a second field of force which could act as an antigravity force. The arguments for this concept claim that electric charges of equal polarity repel each other, trying to blow the black hole apart. Spin has the same effect, so that in either case there is a force that opposes the inward pull of gravity. Even though an electric field, or rotation, may hold an ERP Bridge open, turning around to go back would require travelling faster than light because the singularity could warp space-time around itself. The problem arises due to the fact that an accelerating object, according to General Relativity, generates ripples in the fabric of space-time known as gravitational waves. Gravitational radiation itself, travelling into the black hole at the speed of light, could be amplified to infinite energy as it approaches the singularity inside the black hole, warping spacetime around itself and shutting the door on the object moving into the singularity.3 These findings do not help us feel optimistic about our future travel plans. However, in a highly theoretical field such as this one, imminent change may be just around the corner. Galileo postulated a moving earth 500 years ago, and he was to be confirmed in his beliefs. He also invented the first flying machines, which have become a common means of transportation today. With the oncoming of

new technology and material sciences its impossible to predict what will be feasible or not. The main problem has been briefly touched before: An accelerating object generates gravitational waves which could trigger warping of space-time around the singularity. This in turn might shut the door on the advancing object theres our potential showstopper. Even if a naturally traversable wormhole exists, it appears to be unstable to the slightest perturbation, including the disturbance caused by any attempt to pass through it. The keyword here was natural, why only focus on naturally occurring Wormholes?

Casimir effect. The Casimir effect produces a small attractive force, which acts between two close parallel uncharged conducting plates. It is due to quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Casimir realised that between two plates, only those virtual photons whose wavelengths fit a whole number of times into the gap should be counted when calculating the vacuum energy. The energy density decreases as the plates are moved closer which implies there is a small force drawing them together. This could be the opposite force to gravitation required. Thorne and his team also pointed out that a straightforward electric or magnetic field threading the wormhole is right on the borderline of being exotic; if its tension were infinitesimally larger . . . it would satisfy our wormhole-building needs. In the same paper, published in 1987, they concluded one should not blithely assume the impossibility of the exotic material that is required for the throat of a traversable wormhole.5 An exact solution for two open universes connected by a Wormhole has been presented by Li-Xin Li.6 Its interesting to note that his solution represents a true solution to the Einstein equations, while most other Wormhole calculations are assuming a geometry. It looks like were living in an open universe; we could in fact even be living in one of the universes he describes. Its not too far fetched in this case to expect natural Wormholes to exist. Detecting them by searching for Microlensing events as presented by Safonova7 et al. is an interesting proposition, wed observe different lensing effects8 of light due to negative mass, wed even see that the mass induced Shapiro delay is replaced by a positive time gain. Cramer9 et already proposed in 1994 to search for gravitationally negative anomalous compact halo objects (GNACHOs) and as such recommends we examine MACHO search data for GNACHOs. To this day, no such objects have been observed or positively identified.

Creating Wormholes
The team around Kip Thorne of Caltech went the other way round, tried to construct a mathematical solution to a traversable wormhole and then used the equations of the general theory of relativity to work out what kind of matter and energy would be associated with such a space-time. They came up with this solution: The exact Kerr solution of the Einstein Field Equations harbours an internal tunnel, which is unstable. The slightest perturbation would seal it off and convert the tunnel into a physical singularity through which nothing can pass. Theoretically, the perturbations could be controlled by a process known as negative feedback, in which any disturbance in the space-time structure of the wormhole creates another disturbance which cancels out the first disturbance, analogous to the well known noise cancelling techniques in use today. Wed need a system that can play back a set of gravitational waves that will exactly cancel out the disturbance before it can destroy the tunnel. Their findings are easy to understand: Gravity as an attractive force pulling matter together tends to create singularities. As such, gravity also clamps the throat of a Wormhole. The equations imply that in order for an artificial wormhole to be held open, its throat must be entrenched by some form of matter or a field that exerts negative pressure and has antigravity associated with it. Antigravity sounds like the stuff Spaceman Spiff is using to power his transmogrifier when Calvin is trying to evade homework4. Negative pressure is not something we encounter in everyday life, and exotic matter cannot exist in the real Universe. Or can it? The key ingredient to making antigravity has been found in 1948 by a Dutch physicist, Hendrik Casimir. He worked from 1942 onwards in the research laboratories of Phillips, an electrical company in Holland, and it was while working there that he observed what would become to be known as the

Closing Remarks
There are two remaining problems that should keep us busy for a while: We need to find a way to make a wormhole large enough for people to travel through and we need to keep the exotic matter out of contact with any such travellers. So far no suggestions have been posted on how to circumvent these two issues. As with all borderline science subjects, theres a lot of nonsense published on the internet by self proclaimed New Age Einsteinss. If a scientifically serious approach is to be taken, the books and articles by Kip Thorne and Michael Morris provide a well founded groundwork to establish a solid

understanding for the basic problems on an issue where much research is yet to be done.

References
1

http://www.newscientist.com/ns/980321/features.h tml
2

Mass-Inflation in Dynamical Gravitational Collapse of a Charged Scalar-Field, Tsvi / Piran, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9803004 http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/

3 4

Watterson, Bill, Calvin and Hobbs: Something Under the Bed is Drooling, 1992 Michael S. Morris and Kip S. Thorne, "Wormholes in Spacetime and Their Use for Interstellar Travel: A Tool for Teaching General Relativity," American Journal of Physics, 56, 395-416 (1988). Li-Xin, Li, Two Open Universes Connected by a Wormhole: Exact Solutions, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0102143 Safonova M., Torres D.F., Romero G.E, Microlensing by natural wormholes: Theory and simulation, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0105070 Torres D.F., Eiroa E.F., Romero G.E, On the possibility of an astronomical detection of chromaticity effects in microlensing by wormholelike objects, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0109041

Cramer J.G., et. Al. Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses,http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astroph/9409051

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