Re: WORM HOLES(where you would end up)

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
07 May 1998 11:15:16 +0200


ChuckKuecker <ckuecker@mcs.net> writes:

> Has anyone figured out how to tell if two black holes are paired with a
> wormhole? I can think of a situation where all black holes reach 'into'
> another space - so that if you pass through any entry, you can choose from
> all possible exits. Russian roulette, anyone?

Hardly. First, the wormhole into another space you get in the ordinary
Schwartzschild metric is non-traversable, it collapses (from the
travellers perspective) before anything gets through (and the presence
in the past of a collapsing star wrecks it in the first place). Things
are better in the charged (Reisser-Nordström) or rotating (Kerr) black
hole metrics, where you have not just one but an infinity of
exits. Unfortunately infinite blueshifts and other nastiness most
likely both fries you and modifies the rather unstable metric to make
it impossible to get through.

(see Lecture Notes on General Relativity by Sean M. Carrol,
http://itp.ucsb.edu/~carrol/notes/ for a good introduction to GR and
some discussion of these spacetimes)

I don't think black holes are very useful for transport; they have
emerged due to gravitational collapse, not because posthumans should
get cheap travel. If we want wormholes, we better make them ourselves
(my guess is that creating local inflation could be used to magnify
ordinary quantum wormholes; the high energy quantum gravity
engineering involved is left as an exercise for the student :-)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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