Wormhole 'no use' for time travel

[Dover]

Wormhole 'no use' for time travel
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter

For budding time travellers, the future (or should that be the past?) is starting to look bleak.

Hypothetical tunnels called wormholes once looked like the best bet for constructing a real time machine.

These cosmic shortcuts, which link one point in the Universe to another, are favoured by science fiction writers as a means both of explaining time travel and of circumventing the limitations imposed by the speed of light.

The concept of wormholes will be familiar to anyone who has watched the TV programmes Farscape, Stargate SG1 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

The opening sequence of the BBC's new Doctor Who series shows the Tardis hurtling through a "vortex" that suspiciously resembles a wormhole - although the Doctor's preferred method of travel is not explained in detail.

But the idea of building these so-called traversable wormholes is looking increasingly shaky, according to two new scientific analyses. ...cont'd

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4564477.stm

[tridim]

1. "Man will never be able to fly like the birds"

[Deja Q]

2. A wormhole connects 2 points in space. It is not temporal.

And until we can traverse one, we won't know how true the former theory is.

A bridge connects 2 points. It can't time travel either.

[phantom power]

5. If you move one endpoint of a wormhole at

relativistic speeds, and then bring it back next to it's other endpoint, you end up with a situation where one endpoint is at a different point in time (or, space-time). It is a true time-machine, although it does NOT allow any travel to a time prior to that wormhole's creation.

But that assumes you can keep the thing stable, and large enough to pass objects, etc. Which appears to be the problem.

[MisterP]

3. too much squeezing, eh?

bet that'll also bring down my governator

[rzemanfl]

4. So we are just trapped here in Bushworld? Shit!. n/t

[Dudley_DUright]

6. Link to PDF of original paper

for all you general relativity junkies (like me :-) )

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0504/0504003.pdf

[benburch]

7. Not to mention...

That you'd have to be the size of an electron or smaller to pass through one...