Re: Wormholes?Posted by slowpez on November 22, 19100 at 12:35:35: In Reply to: Re: Wormholes? posted by Brian on November 20, 19100 at 10:38:58: Pretending to no expertise on this issue whatever, I can offer a couple of basics gleaned from such reputable scientific journals as Popular Mechanics: Generally a wormhole is depicted as a structure that results when the spacetime curvature induced by an extreme gravitational object, such as a black hole, creates a connection to some distant region of spacetime or perhaps to another universe. I have never seen a description of a wormhole that did not require such an extreme object. Sometimes exotic (unobserved, highly hypothetical) matter is invoked to create the extreme conditions necessary to cause spacetime to curve back and connect to itself at some point. I believe a wormhole could be any "size" that a black hole could be: i.e., gigantic to microscopic. Small ones would not be expected to last any longer than small black holes, whose longevity is limited at least by the process of Hawking radiation and possibly other mechanisms, as well. The horizon of a wormhole, like that of a black hole, would be (roughly) spherical. The spinning required to make a black hole form a wormhole would probably make the wormhole somewhat oblate. One end of a wormhole probably would resemble a black hole, with a very noticeable tendency for things to fall into it, as opposed to coming out of it. At the other end, the opposite would be true. That is, the opposite end would appear as a "white hole" that things came out of, but nothing could fall into. Thus a wormhole provides at best a one-way ticket. I've never encountered a description of a two-way wormhole, though I'd be delighted to learn that such a possibility exists--at least to the small extent of the possibility that any wormhole can exist.
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