Wormholes???

[herpguy]

Will someone please explain to me what a wormhole is, how they work, where they can go to, and how big they are. Also, please give me any basic facts that an 11 year old kid can understand. Thanks.

 

-Herpguy

[RyanJ]

Will someone please explain to me what a wormhole is' date=' how they work, where they can go to, and how big they are. Also, please give me any basic facts that an 11 year old kid can understand. Thanks.

 

-Herpguy[/quote']

 

Ok, I'll do my best but let me first say that it is not even known if wormholes actually exist

 

A wormhole is basically a connection between two points in space time, one could be here and the other could be in another galazy or on the other side of the universe. Traveling through the wormhole you'd cover all that distance while only moving a few meters say

 

Ihave no idea how they work, they act like a tunnel through space time, if you really want the answer to this have a look at a book called The Fabric Of The Cosmos - its really good and easy to understand too

 

As I have said it is not even known if wormholes exists so my answers here are based on some speculation on the subject.

There maybe quantum level wormholes in the actual fabric of space its self but these aremuch too small for anything to go through them. Size again, lik everything in the quantum world is determined by a probability so it would be impossible to say and average size

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[herpguy]

I think i get it now.

Wormholes are a shortcut between two places of the univers with only a short distance in between. They may not exist but if they do they may be to small for anything to go through.

Thanx

-Herpguy

[RyanJ]

I think i get it now.

Wormholes are a shortcut between two places of the univers with only a short distance in between. They may not exist but if they do they may be to small for anything to go through.

Thanx

-Herpguy

 

Right on!

 

The tunnel annalogy does not always work though, its better to consider them as a shortcut between two points in subspace

 

Here is a great image to show what I mean:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wormhole-demo.png

 

Also, a link for you incase you are interested

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[AI_Interface]

Wormholes are like black holes. They look identical from outside their event horizons and under normal circumstances the gravitational stresses inside the event horizon would kill a human being. However if a wormhole was stablized using exotic matter, it is theoretically possible to compress journeys of thousands of light-years to journeys of a few kilometers.

[eruheru]

i thought they were a glitch in the time and space continuim

[ecoli]

Just because wormholes opened up in random places in Hitchhiker's, doesn't mean their glitches.

[RyanJ]

Just because wormholes opened up in random places in Hitchhiker's, doesn't mean their glitches.

 

Indeed. The really small ones created by quantum fluctuations could be considred an integral part of the spacetime fabric, it is not even known if they exist on larger scales but in the probability worls of the really small they should exist!

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[softdragonz]

There maybe quantum level wormholes in the actual fabric of space its self but these aremuch too small for anything to go through them

 

Well...Its just my own imagination....but dont you think at if humans move into a wormhole at high speeds (....closer to light) they could get inside it

 

Reason : Because the speed of human is close to c w.r.t the wormhole, it will observe the size of the human to be decrease (....length contraction)....perhaps then he can get into it

[Ferdinand]

In the meantime, fold a piece of paper in half(don't make a crease otherwise space-time will not restore itself), poke a hole through it with a pen, and then unfold it....I think the navigators in Dune would be impressed.

[reyam200]

if you could make a "crease" in the fabric of space/time than that would make a permanent wormhole, right? even if it wasn't big enough to travel through you could still comunicate with anything on the other side. that would be an awsome first contact.

[Morbid Steve]

herpguy

 

How a worm hole works (metaphor):

 

Think about taking a sheet of paper (9x11, in this exacmple). Now, if you want to get from the top middle part, as shown here:

 

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It would take you -exactly- 9 spaces between the two, lets say meters, to get there. So, you would have to walk 9 meters to get to the other side. But now, lets think about this as the word 'wormhole' means it to be implied; as if you had to go 9 million miles. If you had to travel, at any speed achievable today, that far, how long would it take? Years.

 

So a -theory- has arrived, many years ago, not sure by who, though; it says that a wormhole is the folding of the material making up the universe, and therefore you can get from point N1 to point N2 (N1 is initial point, N2 final) in a fraction of the time. Specifically, the time it takes to actually warp the cosmos and -walk- through it.

 

Steve

[Sisyphus]

That doesn't seem like a theory so much as a sci fi plot device. Whether wormholes exist is not known. But even if they did, how in the world would you create one?

[CanadaAotS]

first of all, they may just naturally exist. Even tiny wormholes that existed at the begginning of the universe would be expanded (with the universe) to large sizes.

Or black holes.

The Casimir effect can create negative matter / energy, you make enough of that and it could open up a wormhole.