Re: SCI: existance -vs- non-existance

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
03 Dec 1997 19:04:09 +0100


If you stand in a wormhole, you are in a certain (very weird) place,
possibly with parts sticking out at the "entrance" and "exit". There
is no real paradox here, you are in one place at a time (or strictly
speaking a locally connected volume of places).

The "non-existent" gap cannot be entered, since by definition it does
not exist. But there is a "throat" in the wormhole, where it is most
narrow; in a spherically symmetric wormhole this is a spherical
region. From the outside, a wormhole in space would look like a
distortion of the stars behind it, with a distorted ball of stars in
the center (they are stars seen through the wormhole throat). If you
move through it, you will see the star-ball in front of you expand,
until it fills half of your sky and the more and more distorted
universe behind you fills the other half; you will also see a
distorted "reflection" of yourself along the seam between the
starfields created as light rays from you circumnavigate the
throat. As you emerge, the starfield in front of you will become less
distorted, and the stars of the place you left will become a ball
inside the other wormhole distortions. In a small wormhole this
transition is of course very quick.

I really wish I could draw it, but email currently doesn't support the
kind of multimedia I would like (imagine being able to create
"applets" showing how you visualize a certain phenomenon!).

At no point in the traversal have you left spacetime, you have just
moved through a more exotic region than we are used to. It is possible
to get from point A to point B faster than a straight light ray by
taking a wormhole shortcut, but at no place is there a violation of
the lightspeed limit locally.

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