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TRAVERSABLE WORMHOLES: SOME IMPLICATIONS

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Guyfolan
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« on: December 21, 2010, 01:04:29 am »

2. FAILED FTL

What stops faster than light travel? According to relativity as an objects accelerates towards the light-speed barrier its mass increases asymptotically, slowing its acceleration with constant thrust. Ship time slows down, which also reduces thrust (eg for a photon driven ship the frequency of the beam red-shifts). Both make effects make light speed an insurmountable barrier.

Since the advent of relativity there have been a number of approaches to travelling faster than light:

   1. Tachyons: Faster than light particles compatible with relativity. They never have to cross the lightspeed barrier because they are posited to be created already travelling at over the speed of light. No general consensus on whether they would permit the transmission of information. However none have been detected, so things look bleak either way.
   2. Superluminal quantum effects: EPR, quantum teleportation and all that. Relies on transmitting information via the posited collapse of the wavefunction. Often relies on an accompanying classical sublight signal as well. People argue passionately above the reality of the wavefunction and whether it collapses. Until this is settled we can't expect too much here. No quantum superluminal laboratory effect been demonstrated either.
   3. Spinning black holes: Things looked hopeful for a while that spinning or charged black holes might permit travel into other regions of somewhere. More recently people have become doubtful. It seems the passage of anything through a black hole sets off a feedback process that crushes the traveller to death. Also infalling radiation blueshifts to infinity [10] and fries the traveller, if tidal forces don't shred her first.
   4. Non-traversable Wormholes: First developed in the form of Einstein-Rosen bridges. An Einstein-Rosen bridge connects two otherwise widely separated regions of space. Unfortunately they are very short-lived and pinch off so quickly that only tachyons (if they existed) could travel through them and get out the other end without getting caught in the singularity needed to create them. But if you could travel faster than light you wouldn't need a wormhole- Catch-22!

For all the above reasons the conventional wisdom is that faster than light travel is the 20th century's analog of the alchemist's dream of transmuting lead into gold or flying to the moon. Or living for ever. They seemed impossible dreams at the time....
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