Wormholes

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Consider the following: you have a wormhole opening close to the earth's surface, and another somewhere up in space. You put stuff through the surface portal and it pops up in space, having gained potential energy. Send it down to the surface and harvest the energy or just let it transfer heat to its surroundings, repeat. Energy is very blatantly not conserved, so how do you solve this problem?

You can replace gravity with any other force field, it doesn't matter.

My idea is that the force permeates the "tube" connecting the two portals, so as it's entering the bottom one and coming out through the top one the geometry of gravity experienced in the tube results in going against the force of gravity to raise it in the potential well.

Discuss.
 
Consider the following: you have a wormhole opening close to the earth's surface, and another somewhere up in space. You put stuff through the surface portal and it pops up in space, having gained potential energy. Send it down to the surface and harvest the energy or just let it transfer heat to its surroundings, repeat. Energy is very blatantly not conserved, so how do you solve this problem?

You can replace gravity with any other force field, it doesn't matter.

My idea is that the force permeates the "tube" connecting the two portals, so as it's entering the bottom one and coming out through the top one the geometry of gravity experienced in the tube results in going against the force of gravity to raise it in the potential well.

Discuss.
I think I've actually done this problem or something very similar in my General Relativity class last year.

I think what would actually happen is that in order to form the wormhole, the topology of the area around the hole would have to create a strongly distorted gravity, which would mean that 'travelling' through the wormhole would require the loss of energy gained by falling from one entrance to another.
 
I've considered this as well.

It may be that energy isn't conserved. Wormholes haven't been detected or made; it's not hard to violate physical laws with pencil-and-paper constructs that can't happen in the real Universe. Even if one was, the "law" of conservation of energy is, like all physical laws, subject to revision. I've a feeling it may simply come as a consequence of other physical laws in the assumption of a wormhole-free spacetime.

But I think the idea that the force is felt "through" the wormhole mouth is plausible. Especially given I believe that what consideration has been done suggests that a transitable wormhole would have to have quite a wide mouth. (The Orion's Arm project has gone into some detail.)
 

November Blue

A universe where hot chips don't exist :(
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How exactly would this work? AFAIK you can't store potential energy in an inanimate object.
 
AFAIK you can't store potential energy in an inanimate object.
The roof of your house stores gravitational potential energy. It could release it if you knock down the walls. It also stores chemical potential energy, which can be released if you set it on fire. The roof of your house is definitely an inanimate object.
 

cookie

my wish like everyone else is to be seen
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I think I've actually done this problem or something very similar in my General Relativity class last year.

I think what would actually happen is that in order to form the wormhole, the topology of the area around the hole would have to create a strongly distorted gravity, which would mean that 'travelling' through the wormhole would require the loss of energy gained by falling from one entrance to another.
Is this distorted gravity a consequence of the wormhole being in a gravitational field?

To elaborate on my suggestion you can use as an analogy a flat sheet with an electric charge in the middle, with an electron on its surface. A wormhole here would be analogous to picking the electron up and placing it elsewhere, moving it through the 3rd dimension. Energy is still conserved because the electric field affects it in 3 dimensions, and similarly in the higher dimension through which you'd travel via wormhole would be similarly affected by gravity.
 

Destiny Warrior

also known as Darkwing_Duck
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If you like to be overly pedantic, law of conservation of energy isn't true for mass-energy conversions, since energy is lost/gained from the universe and converted to/from mass.

Back to the topic, for a wormhole to exist, we need space to exist in such a way that 2 points which are actually not adjacent from view to be adjacent. This can be simulated in a 2D space by folding paper and creasing it and holding the 2 halves together, meaning each point in the paper is now linked to additional points.

Like this, along a 4th dimension, universes must be "folded" for the wormhole to exist.

For the implication of this, it might appear to be a violation of the law of conservation of energy since we view this construct from a 3 dimensional point of view, but it is possible that a fourth dimension exists, in which case, from a 4 dimensional point of view, this wouldn't violate the law of conservation of energy.

My 0.02 $
 
To expand on what Destiny Warrior said:
As everyone else explained wormholes are literally a fold in spacetime. The diagram from A Wrinkle in Time illustrates it adequately; what you're doing is bringing two different sections of space together, from what I understand.

Now I'm going to have some fun and get into a bit of particle physics.

Cookie, you mentioned that we can replace gravity with whatever other field force we want, so in order to create a slightly simpler explanation I'm going to replace it with the electromagnetic force since it's simpler to describe in terms of particles.

So if we shot light through a wormhole it appears at the other side nearly instantly right? What light is is a wave/particle thing which is a photon when viewed as a particle. So this means it's quite simple to shoot photons through a wormhole and get one out at the other side. Well, according to the field of quantum electrodynamics, the electromagnetic force is just the interaction of the exchange of virtual photons between charged objects. In other words, it's that objects with electric charge send out photons between each other to create this field force that we call the electromagnetic force. So if instead of gravity, we place a strong electromagnetic force next to the wormhole, then the field will logically extend out and hit the wormhole. The virtual photons (again basically what the force is) that comprise the field force go through the wormhole, meaning that the force is carried with them. TL;DNR: The way that field forces work on a small level they should be able to leak through a wormhole and come out the other side relatively undisturbed. Thus whatever part electromagnetic field that hits the wormhole gets sucked through and pops out at the other side with whatever strength or intensity it had. So if we were to throw a charged object through this wormhole that is next to our electromagnetic field, on the other side the object will still feel the exact same force as it would if it were sitting right where the entrance to the wormhole is.

As gravity is a field force, even though its exact mechanisms are vastly different from our conventional idea of a field force, I imagine that its field of influence should leak out through the wormhole the same way as the electromagnetic force, meaning that if we throw our object through the wormhole then on the other side it shouldn't have gained or lost any potential energy. Thus some kind of perpetual motion machine is out of the question. Since the object is still in some kind of gravitational field at the other side of the wormhole, even if it's far from earth, it won't have gained any potential energy (D:). So if you guys's explanation for the loss of energy the object should gain from the sheer distance is right, this would maybe explain how it's conserved.

If we were to then grab our object on the other side and pull it further out away from the leaking gravitational pull, it would require energy to move it away the same way it requires energy to escape gravity's pull here.

Edit:


You can kinda see what I'm talking about if you imagine some kind of gravitational or electromagnetic or other field right next to the bottom end of the wormhole in this picture. The way the field works, it would naturally "leak through" and the field would come out the other side in the same direction it was going relatively undisturbed, as though nothing had happened at all. The explanation MrIndigo had that there is a loss of energy is shown in that diagram as well (all the "negative energy" I suppose).
 
I am personally skeptical that a wormhole large enough for this to work would even be possible. What is the largest recorded? Also, they have a high amount of volatility and movement as I understand it. Fun thought experiment though.
 
I doubt it could ever be done in practicality. No one can (possibly ever?) know what happens inside of a black hole. This is all theoretical, based on principles of relativity. The final call is by experiment and there's not a whole lot of experiments you can do with an object that's quite this enormous, voracious and almost certainly deadly.
 
worm holes =/= black holes
Not quite but close, from what I understand. The idea of a wormhole is two black holes or similar objects which connect space time at two different locations.

Thus a wormhole is more a pair of black holes or whatever else there is that may rip a hole in spacetime.
 
that's so unconfirmed though, as we don't even know anything about what happens within a black hole. Mind you, wormholes ARE hypothetical as stated above. Man sometimes I think theoretical physics is insane.
 
I've considered this as well.

It may be that energy isn't conserved. Wormholes haven't been detected or made; it's not hard to violate physical laws with pencil-and-paper constructs that can't happen in the real Universe. Even if one was, the "law" of conservation of energy is, like all physical laws, subject to revision. I've a feeling it may simply come as a consequence of other physical laws in the assumption of a wormhole-free spacetime.

But I think the idea that the force is felt "through" the wormhole mouth is plausible. Especially given I believe that what consideration has been done suggests that a transitable wormhole would have to have quite a wide mouth. (The Orion's Arm project has gone into some detail.)
Actually, I think the topological description of wormholes we were given assumed energy conservation; so the topology already had that built in, as indeed it has to for General Rel to remain consistent.


Another idea I just had; if you were at the top of a wormhole, you wouldn't fall out of it. The energy gradient travelling through the wormhole to the bottom would be steeper than falling down the normal way. Hence you'd be unable to get out of the wormhole without expending energy.
 
Is this distorted gravity a consequence of the wormhole being in a gravitational field?
Not as such. Gravity is distortion of spacetime. The way I like to explain it is if you lay a heavy object on a mattress; a bowling ball mass, for instance, distorts the flatness of the spacetime around it, so nearby objects will move towards it. Gravity isn't a 'force' so much as the effect of this distortion on the laws of motion.

A wormhole is a similar distortion of spacetime as a heavy mass. You can describe the topology with metrics and so forth. The wormhole metric would therefore have it's own 'gravity' that would prevent the totally free passage through the tunnel, so while you'd gain energy 'falling in' at the bottom, you'd lose it on the rise out the other side.
 

cookie

my wish like everyone else is to be seen
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So essentially the gravity of the wormhole is unrelated to the earth's gravity, so you could theoretically just place the wormhole portals at the top and bottom of an arbitrarily large potential.
 
that's so unconfirmed though, as we don't even know anything about what happens within a black hole. Mind you, wormholes ARE hypothetical as stated above. Man sometimes I think theoretical physics is insane.
We have a good idea about what happens inside the event horizon. What we don't know is what happens very near the singularity. Or indeed, what the "singularity" actually is. Our current theories predict a point of infinite density, which is generally taken to mean our current theories are inadequate to describe the central regions of black holes. An improved theory of gravity should be able to predict what is at the centre of a black hole and come up with something with finite properties.
 
So essentially the gravity of the wormhole is unrelated to the earth's gravity, so you could theoretically just place the wormhole portals at the top and bottom of an arbitrarily large potential.
Right. The gravitational potential is defined by the topology you create. If you have a wormhole, the topology is correspondingly different and hence the influence of gravity will be different too.

It's not so much that there is the two separate gravities, but that the potential of the entire system, wormhole and planet included, give rise to the gravitation of the entire system, thus moving through the wormhole wouldn't gain anything because it would just be moving as normal through the topology.
 

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