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Space Science

Wormholes Unstable (BBC) 403

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-it's-not-like-i-planned-to-build-a-condo-there-anyway dept.
An anonymous reader writes that "The BBC reports on recent theoretical physics research showing that wormholes may not be very useful for space or time travel. Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly. Too bad for budding time travelers and space explorers!"
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Wormholes Unstable (BBC) More

Wormholes Unstable (BBC)

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  • Am I the only one... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    who read the headline as "Windows Unstable" and thought, duh... of course it is...

    • Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)

      by stlhawkeye ( 868951 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:14PM (#12615706) Homepage Journal
      It's the blind spot of psychology. There's a spot where your retina attached to your optic nerve (or whatever), and your eye can't actually see that little spot in front of you. Luckily, your other eye covers that ground. What if you close one eye? Then you can actually detect the "blind spot" but it's not straightforward. Your brains "fills in" the missing data, and there are various tricks you can play to make this happen and observe it.

      What you've encountered here is akin to that phenomenon, only on a word-association level. You saw "W----s unstable" and your brain said, "WINDOWS!" This phenomenon is especially prevelent in males ages 9 through 120, who readily associate almost anything they encounter with their own genitals or breasts.

  • Duh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Xshare ( 762241 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:49PM (#12615291) Homepage
    Duh, that's why they have the dampener things on the stargate.

    • I felt a disturbance in the force... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as if millions of sci-fi fan boys suddenly lost their erections and started crying."
    • BAH! Star Trek established that wormholes were unstable years before Stargate!

    • Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)

      by metlin ( 258108 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:22PM (#12615815) Journal

      Yeah, but where are you gonna get the damn Naquadah from, huh?

      Huh!?! P3x742!?

    • That's old news! (Score:5, Informative)

      by DancesWithBlowTorch ( 809750 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @04:48PM (#12616966)
      I've been taught that Einstein-Rosen bridges ("Wormholes") are unstable in MSc lectures. This knowledge is at least five to ten years old. I can't find the appropriate paper at the moment, but if you try this summary [arxiv.org] of Black Hole Theory, for example, it will tell you on page 25 that Wormholes are not crossable. There are similar problems with time machines ("closed timelike curves") and other strange phenomena of Quantum Cosmology: They all sound so cool at the beginning, but the closer you look, the less interesting they get.
      • Of course they're unstable... they only stay open long enough to let the sliders through, and close before any of the heavily armed soldiers stop gawping long enough to consider following...

    • Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by eofpi ( 743493 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @05:10PM (#12617183) Homepage
      Or at least the 38-minute limit.
  • And they only take reservations millennia in advance. I hate to cancel now.

  • Oh No! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bob McCown ( 8411 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:50PM (#12615304)
    A completely theoretical and as-yet-to-be-discovered phenominon is unstable, and unusable for transportation? Say it aint so!

    • Re:Oh No! (Score:5, Funny)

      by MarkGriz ( 520778 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:00PM (#12615485)
      A completely theoretical and as-yet-to-be-discovered phenominon is unstable, and unusable for transportation? Say it aint so

      Dammit, and just as my theoretical nanotube space elevator was almost complete.
    • Let's not forget that even if these researchers are wrong and such a wormhole would be stable, opening a wormhole even 1 meter across would require [url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.07/es_wa rp_pr.html]the combined energy of the mass of the planet jupiter converted into exotic matter[/url].

      • Re:Oh No! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Gilmoure ( 18428 )
        That's still more miles/gallon than my '70 Impala.

      • Actually, it's likely much more (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Monday May 23, 2005 @04:05PM (#12616385) Homepage Journal
        I did a simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation on what it would take to keep a wormhole open.


        You need to have a net negative mass, which means that your exotic matter (or energy equiv) must be equal to the mass of the object traversing the wormhole, PLUS the mass of the wormhole itself, PLUS the mass of any other particles within the wormhole, PLUS the mass equiv of the energy that the vaccuum created naturally has.


        You also need to bear in mind that exotic matter is believed to have a very short half-life - about 10^-30 seconds - which means that it must be traversing the wormhole at high speed and must constantly be replaced at that rate.


        But that isn't all! There is a problem with wormholes in close proximity to each other - they are unstable. And quantum-scale wormholes supposedly occur everywhere in the quantum vaccuum. So, you've got to do some fairly complex stuff to exclude other wormholes from the vicinity of the one you want.


        Generating the exotic matter/energy is also a hard problem. Methods include the Casmir Effect, which requires generating fields of absolutely staggering strength to exclude all possible positive energy between two plates. The exclusion principle, combined with the requirement that a vaccuum must have a non-zero state in QM, is what forces the existance of a negative state.


        So, what you need to do is basically have gigantic Casmir Effect-based exotic matter generators, which will require vastly more positive energy then the negative energy they create.


        I think I figured out that you'd need to convert most of the galaxy into pure energy in order to move even a relatively small object via a wormhole over any kind of reasonable distance, once you take these additional requirements into account.


        The problem is, if you are capable of collecting a galaxy together to convert it into enough energy to do this, you have sufficient technology to reach anywhere in the galaxy anyway, making the wormhole method of travel totally unnecessary. Besides which, you also get the benefit of having somewhere to go.

        • "Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @06:56PM (#12618250) Homepage Journal
          This isn't exactly a response to your post, but more a question for this entire thread... but you seem like you may be a physicist or at least well versed enough in the mathematics thereof to be able to do "back-of-the-envelope calculations" about it, so maybe you can answer this question for me.

          Why is it assumed that because something has negative mass - which I would define as "the quality of being repelled from, rather than attracted to, ordinary positive mass" - it has negative *energy*? Likewise, why is it assumed that any energy (such as vacuum energy) translates directly into positive mass?

          I've always viewed it similarly to charge. Both mass and charge are a form of potential energy. An electron and a proton have the same amount of electrical potential energy as one another, only differing in the nature of that potential relative to other charges (whether it repels or attracts a positive or negative charge). But does a proton then have "positive" potential energy and an electron have "negative" potential energy? If the answer to that is no, then why does something with "negative" mass have to have "negative" energy? Is a space filled with a negative charge "less than empty vacuum"?

          I'm well aware of e=mc^2 of course, and why that would lead to a negative value for e if you have a negative value for m. But given that physics traditionally deals with only positive values for m, wouldn't e=|m|c^2 (using the absolute value of m, instead of just m) return the same results for all physics thus far, dealing with positive mass, without the counterintuitive "less than nothing" idea of "negative energy" if ever we managed to produce something with negative mass?

          • Re:"Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake? (Score:5, Informative)

            by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Monday May 23, 2005 @10:07PM (#12619650) Homepage Journal
            I'll answer this as best as I can.


            The mass/energy equivalence is actually quite important, because really mass is energy - in the early Universe, energy was all there was. What we call matter "condensed" out of that. The two are not just comparable, therefore, they really are the same stuff. Thus, E=MC^2 is true for both positive and negative masses, because negative mass must be condensed from negative energy.


            (I'm not sure if that's very clear.)


            Anyways, a negative charge is NOT the same as negative energy. An electron has a positive mass and will therefore convert to a positive amount of energy, and likewise if you were to "fuse" that energy, you would get an electron with it's attendent negative charge but positive mass.


            Nor is antimatter the same as negative matter. Antimatter and matter are largely the same stuff, but "rotated". (Matter has 720' symmetry, so if you "rotate" matter only 360', it becomes antimatter. This is covered in Professor Hawking's Brief History Of Time.)


            Negative matter has negative mass. This means that it would have negative momentum, negative gravity and all sorts of other bizare characteristics. (To give you an example, a positive massed rocket that used negatively massed fuel would fire the engines in the direction it wished to go.)


            Because the forces inside a negative mass are repulsive, negative mass is highly unstable, as all the forces are trying to blast it apart. What you would want is matter that is sufficiently distributed that the repulsive force (in this case, things like gravity) are weaker than what would be attractive forces (in this case, say, the strong nuclear force, which is normally repulsive, in positive matter).


            It is very unclear as to whether you could have complex atoms with a negative mass, simply because gravity and the strong nuclear force are not equal and therefore there would be a high degree of asymmetry in what would be possible.


            Negative mass or negative energy is required in a stable wormhole, because it forces the throat of the wormhole to stay open. Normally, a wormhole would collapse instantaneously, whenever any positive mass or energy tried to cross it, but the negative mass/energy prevents it from doing so. Provided there is enough.


            Essentially, what you are doing is creating a region of space that has such an intense repulsive force that "normal" space cannot enter into that region.


            Of course, this does beg an important question - is the force so great that NOTHING can enter? If so, then such wormholes may exist almost everywhere and we'd never know, as the normal Universe would wrap round it.

            • Re:"Negative Energy" a conceptual mistake? (Score:5, Interesting)

              by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:50PM (#12620322) Homepage Journal
              That was an intelligent answer, but I think you may have misunderstood the nature of my question, and as such have not entirely answered it.

              I was not claiming that a negative charge was negative energy, or asking for clarification about that. I was analogizing the potential energy due to charge (electrostatic force) with the potential energy of a mass (gravity). An electron and proton, ignoring gravity, have a certain amount of potential energy relative to one another just because of their charges; that is to say, if released, they would move closer together and gain velocity, and kinetic energy. A hypothetical particle identical to an electron but with a greater charge would have *more* potential energy relative to that proton, as the attraction between them would be stronger, even though their masses are the same, so it's pretty clear that the attraction due to charge counts as "potential energy" the same as attraction due to mass.

              But now, take the potential energy due to charge (again, ignoring gravity) of two electrons. As the charge of a proton and and an electron are equal but opposite, is the potential energy between them (ignoring gravity) not the same? Or would you say an electron has a negative potential energy (even considering gravity now) to another electron, since they would repel one another? In that case, the "positive" and "negative" differences of energy seem only to apply to potential, not kinetic, energy, and refer only to the direction of the force applied relative to another body.

              Furthermore, in the case of electrical charges, that attraction or repulsion is relative to not only the strength but the sign of charge of another body, in which case, how do you know that this exotic matter with negative mass, while it may have negative (repulsive) potential energy to positive mass, does not have positive (attractive) potential energy to other exotic matter? After all, we know that likes attract with positive masses, so it stands to reason that likes would attract with negative masses as well.

              Has anyone ever made or discovered particles of this "exotic matter" and measured the relative attraction of them to each other? I imagine for the extremely short lifespans you claim for it, it would be difficult to do such an experiment, especially here amongst all this positive mass, and especially to isolate the effects of gravity from electric and nuclear forces.

              This is a common area that seems conceptually vague amongst every physicist I've personally spoken with and most of the ones I've read. Einstein seemed to clarify it best in his personal layman's version of relativity. People speak of the "size" of particles, and of "matter", as nebulous concepts separate from the force-fields which define the characteristics of those particles. For example, when pressed to define "volume" as an independent quality of a particle, as when people say "atoms are mostly empty space", most people, even physics professors, I speak to fail to give any definition.

              Is it the size of an atom the radius of its outermost valence level? By that definition the entireity of space inside that valence shell IS the atom and is therefore not empty. So, scratch that idea, the space of the atom is only filled by the particles it's made out of and the rest is empty. Ok - what's the volume of an electron, or a proton? It's not clear how that should be defined - by it's mass? By its charge? How do you measure volume in units of mass or charge? Do you measure the volume by the extent that the strong nuclear force keeps other particles (of regular, non-antimatter at least) from overlapping that pointin space?

              What is the extend or nature of something devoid of any of its force-fields? Can you run into an empty shell with no mass, charge, or nuclear forces? What exactly would you be running into? People say atoms are mostly empty space - I say everything is nothing but space, and none of it is empty.

              From recollection, Einstein spoke in his laymen's book on relativity about an a c
    • When I read the headline I thought it was going to be about the latest Windows security hole...

  • hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:50PM (#12615305)
    This work obviously needs to be run by a futurologist for a second opinion.
    • Better do it quick, before he downloads himself without realizing that he's the only one that knows the encryption key.
    • Have you ever heard of a job title "Intellectrician"? I laughed when I saw the card.. :)

  • Escape (Score:3, Funny)

    by quintiusc ( 878597 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:50PM (#12615307)
    According to the article theoretically a wormhole that opens to a random place/time is still stable. It would make a great getaway. "You don't know where I'm going and neither do I. *poof*"
    • It's the place thing that bothers me. I mean, sure, that time thing is pretty worrysome, but the location...yeesh. The Universe is pretty big. What are the chances you'd even land on the surface of a planet that is hospitable to human life? With my luck (almost good, but always with some quirk that makes it very, very bad), I'd appear in the center of a star. Or worse yet, New Jersey.

    • Re:Escape (Score:3, Funny)

      by temojen ( 678985 )
      Sounds like a good idea for a subtlely cursed D&D magic item.
    • two thoughts.. what if you traveled through the wormhole at high speed - near C - could you make it through before the collapse then?

      And the obligatory "what if you made a transported the size of a pea and sent it through, then beamed through?" just thinking around the problem, my ~2 milrays

  • Of course they're unstable. (Score:5, Funny)

    by allanc ( 25681 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:50PM (#12615311) Homepage
    That's why the artificially-created stable one near the Deep Space Nine station was so strategically valuable.

  • We knew that (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:50PM (#12615315) Homepage
    Either you need the Prophets/wormhole aliens living in the wormhole, or you can only hold the StarGate open for a limited amount of time.

    Elementary sci-fi!

  • Screwed up plans (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:51PM (#12615319) Journal
    Well there goes my plans for the summer!

  • Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:51PM (#12615330)
    I suppose this makes it more like the "improbability" drive now, doesn't it?

    You wouldn't have to be in a wormhole very long to travel somewhere (sometime) else--as long as you're not counting on the return trip.
  • We all knew from DS9 that stable wormholes just don't happen in nature. That's why the one to the Dominion Empire was so unusual. It was STABLE. Very rare indeed, and it needed the intervention of an alien species to stay intact.

    Why is this considered news?
  • We all know that there's only one stable wormhole in the galaxy, near a planet called "Bejor."
  • I thought the idea was to use some exotic form of energy to hold them open.
    • Here [arxiv.org] is the abstract.

      I don't really have the background to understand the paper in detail, but from the BBC article, it sounds like they're saying that even if you had some exotic matter, you still couldn't build a wormhole stable enough to travel through, not get vaporized, and end up at a known time and place.

  • or you'll end up in the Delta Quadrant.

  • You know what's bullshit (Score:5, Funny)

    by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:54PM (#12615395)
    That they made jodie foster wear that goofy outfit when she travelled through the wormhole.. come on, I'd like to think todays audiences are mature enough to handle a little bit of nudity, seeing her hotly oiled up and sleek body slips through the cosmic threshold shouldn't dismay anyone.

    I'm going with her on the next trip, in the raw baby!

  • "Honey, call the space-time travel agent - we have to take the train to Andromeda or risk being thrown into separate tangential universes and stuff. "

    We can send a man to the moon, but we can't even get a wormhole to stick around.

  • This explains the low-attendance ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kaemaril ( 266849 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:56PM (#12615419)
    Well, no wonder the time-travel convention was a bust :)

  • Still might be useful having small ones (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Smiffa2001 ( 823436 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:56PM (#12615424)
    The real challenge was in explaining how to engineer wormholes big enough to be of practical use.
    Well, surely a small wormhole would enable radio transmissions through? Or would interference be a problem? Wavelength? Maybe a light-based comms-medium...?

    "Frankly no engineer is going to be able to do that," said the York researcher.
    And that just seems so shortsighted...
    • I remember (not sure if correctly) calculations that showed you need IMMENSE amounts of energy for everything much larger than a planck space.

      Something in the order years or sun-output for even microscopic wormholes.

      So I dont think its shortsighted.

  • Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Glowing Fish ( 155236 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:56PM (#12615426) Homepage
    From the article:

    But building a wormhole with a throat radius big enough to just fit a proton would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 30. A human-sized wormhole would require fine-tuning to within one part in 10 to the power of 60.

    "Frankly no engineer is going to be able to do that," said the York researcher.

    Well, I don't know if any engineer could do that with pencil and paper, but I am sure a computer could do it. Well, I am not sure a computer could do it, but growths in computational speed and power have certainly surprised us so far...

    • Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:4, Funny)

      by yotto ( 590067 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:05PM (#12615564) Homepage
      Yeah, I imagine 150 years from now people joking, "10 to the power of 60 ought to be fine tuned enough for anybody."
    • OTOH, we haven't yet been able to measure for example Avogadro's number (about 6x10^-23, the number of atoms in one mol). As long as we haven't been able to measure something with this precision (I don't think any other quasi-fundamental constant is known to that accuracy, either), it will sure take some time before we can control something with such precision.

    • Re:Is computational power the only thing missing? (Score:4, Informative)

      by thermopile ( 571680 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:29PM (#12615917) Homepage
      Sigh. Okay, I'll bite.

      Suppose, a few years from now, individual processors can do 100 trillion floating point operations per second. And you wire up 20,000 of these nodes in parallel. And suppose each floating point operation can magically operate one of those 10 to the 60th things-that-it-needs to (TFA didn't say *what* had to be controlled to within one in 10 to the 60th).

      That's still 10^34 years. Not counting leap years.

      I'm not holding my breath ...

      • Yes, that does seem difficult...besides of course, we can send the computational results back through the wormhole, and do those 10^34 years in a few seconds.

        But seriously...I also didn't quite understand what needs to be measured to keep the wormhole open. Perhaps the amount of "exotic matter" needed to keep the tube open? There may be some feedback mechanism that will make the entire operation less impossible. Although, the whole thing seems to theoretical, that we should perhaps just stop wondering abou
    • Even if you had a infinite capacity computer, how about CREATING anything stable to 10^30 accuracy?

      Even the mass of passing neutrinos would be like hammerblows on a eggshell in that reagard.

  • Ten years too late (Score:5, Funny)

    by Qrlx ( 258924 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:57PM (#12615442) Homepage Journal
    Man, if only we had known that wormholes were unsafe for space travel back in 1995, we could have been spared the agony of seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager

    JANEWAY: Chakotay, take us into the wormhole.

    CHAKOTY: Aye aye, Captain!

    PARIS: (aside to TORRES) Heh, she said "wormhole."

    *crunch*

  • Not true (Score:5, Funny)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @02:58PM (#12615463)
    The one I was using tomorrow worked just fine, well, it did until it broke yesterday.
    • One of the major problems encountered in time travel... is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it...

      The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

      So, (to haven so) how are you planning (howen planninged ar

  • For real, or just in theory? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:05PM (#12615566) Journal
    Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly.

    Mathematically, physics says the same thing about a stable fixed-point in a static magnetic field.

    And yet...

    I have one of those cool little-magnet-levitating-over-a-big-magnet toys sitting on my desk at home, happily violating the (human-formalized) laws of physics.


    Funny how, despite the numbers just not working well, little things like "friction" in the real world make sooooo many "impossible" things work just fine... All those nasty infinite series that would otherwise make the world very messy to calculate, eventually taper off to nothing, in a very real and practical way.
  • Exotic matter is repelled, rather than attracted, by gravity and is said to have negative energy - meaning it has even less than empty space.

    So how long before they start mining PHB's brains for Exotic matter?

  • The Worm Turns (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:08PM (#12615603) Homepage Journal
    If wormholes allow time travel, their brevity is nearly irrelevant.
  • So much for CDW's new business plan [cdw.com] ...

    (Well, it's not really new anymore, but ...)

  • Many, many remaining uses (Score:3, Funny)

    by StefanJ ( 88986 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:09PM (#12615619) Homepage Journal
    * Garbage disposal, including of Objects of Power of the sort that seemingly vanquished evil galactic overlords require for their return to total mastery.

    * Practical jokes. "Star? Your planet orbited a star? I don't see a star around here, do you?"

    * Sex toys for transcended superbeings who exist as fluctuations in the quantum foam but who have not forgotten what it was like to be carbon based, young, and in estrous on the sunny plains of Ghyr'd'tos.

  • Yeah right. (Score:4, Funny)

    by ChaosCube ( 862389 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:16PM (#12615731) Homepage
    What a load of crap. I mean, if this was accurate science regarding wormholes and time travel and such, how do you explain John Titor?

    Fools.

  • Human-compatible wormholes, not (Score:3, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:19PM (#12615775)
    I fear there are bigger reasons why people won't be traveling through wormholes. First, biologically tissues are far too fragile for the intense gravitational, electromagnetic and radiation fields that are likely to come with these phenomena. Second, biologically systems (and the attendant life support systems) are far too bulky. Creating a wormhole is uniform over the size of a person or ship will be extremely difficult. Even if the hole is big enough for a person, the center of the wormhole will likely stretch space in ways severely different from the edges of the hole. Macroscopic objects would be shredded.

  • WHAT!?!? Are there no Farscape fans on /. !?!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeadMilkman ( 855027 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:20PM (#12615785) Homepage
    Not a single John Crichton commment...Just a bunch of DS9/SG1 tripe -_- Where are the REAL nerds at!
  • Well John Titor [wikipedia.org] did it so obvisually it can be done.
  • Anybody who watched Farscape knows that already! But tell these guys to ask John Chrichton, as he's figured it all out...
  • No wonder my travel agent doesn't offer an insurance policy with a death benefit for wormhole traveling. I guess taking a black hole would be safer.
  • my bad [slashdot.org]
  • From the summary:

    "Too bad for budding time travelers and space explorers!"

    You tell me, now I'm stranded in this time! :(
    (I miss my XBOX-3D *sniff* )
  • The silicon in the average computer chip is absurdly pure - we're talking 10^-18 impurities in some cases. For comparison, I remember reading that if you covered the entire North American continent with an apple orchard of the same purity, you'd have three non-apple trees.

    This would never, ever happen naturally, but nowadays most people have a silicon chip strapped to their wrist. See if you can count how many are within five feet of you.

    If wormholes are possible at all, then we'll just have to build a

  • All you need is PART of the wormhole (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Vitriol+Angst ( 458300 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @03:55PM (#12616265)
    The wormhole doesn't have to be stable to be useful. You could create a wormhole around a ship, and allow it to break apart behind. You could also say that rockets are unstable, because they only have a stable stream of plasma for a few feet--yet they still move the rocket.

    Of course, putting limits on things that are still fiction is kind of ironic.

  • Improbabilitydrive (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fuzzums ( 250400 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @04:16PM (#12616498) Homepage
    here we come!!!!

  • I've never had much luck using wormholes (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cro Magnon ( 467622 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @05:29PM (#12617392) Homepage Journal
    Not only are they unstable, but they're way too small to travel through. But they are a nice place for the worms to live.

  • Now that is funny (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Edmund Blackadder ( 559735 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @06:37PM (#12618046)
    It is great how there is this heated discussion about whether wormholes are or are not safe for space travel (and people are actually disappointed when they turn out to be unsafe) while no-one has ever seen a wormhole to begin with.

  • Audio interview with one of the researchers (Score:3, Informative)

    by Fraser Cain ( 203191 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @01:33AM (#12620793) Homepage
    I just completed a podcast [universetoday.com] interviewing Dr. Stephen Hsu, one of the contributors to this research. He explains more about how wormholes are theoretically impossible to keep stable.

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