clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

SATAN AND PERPENDICULAR WORLDS 75
tiny quantum wormholes must connect every part of space to every other part!
The other use of the word "wormhole" refers to a possible zone of transition at
the center of a rotating black hole.
To fully realize a wormhole, Morris and Thorne calculated various properties
of matter required to form the wormholes throat. One property of interest
to them was the tension (i.e., the breaking strength) of matter needed to keep
the wormhole open. What they found was that the required tension would be
very large. As Paul Halpern in his book Cosmic Wormholes notes, for a throat
that is four miles across, the quantity offeree needed is 10 33 pounds per square
inch. This would be more than the pressure of a trillion boxes, weighing a trillion
tons each, placed in the palm of your hand. Larger wormholes with wider
throats would have more reasonable values for throat tension.
In additional, Morris and Thorne found another difficult situation to overcome
when considering the matter needed to form the gateway. The tension
required for keeping the wormhole open must be 10 17 times greater than the
density of the substance used to build the wormhole. According to current science,
there is no matter in the universe today having breaking tensions so
much larger than their densities. In fact, if the tension of a piece of matter were
to rise above 10 17 times its own density, physicists feel that the material would
begin to possess strange attributes, such as negative mass. Because of these
unusual characteristics, the type of matter needed to keep wormholes open has
been called exotic matter. Matter of this type may exist in the vacuum fluctuations
of free space. To make wormhole construction easier, it may be possible
to construct the entire wormhole out of normal matter and use exotic matter
only in a limited band at the throat. 1
Hyperdimensional Chess Knights and Monopoly
Let's have some real fun in these last sections. Not only is it interesting to speculate
about the fourth dimension in mathematics and physics, but the fourth
dimension also provides a fertile ground for extending puzzles and games. As
an example, let's consider chess.
Chess is essentially a 2-D game in which pieces slide along the surface of the
checkerboard plane. Playing pieces usually can't jump up into the third dimension
to get around one another. The Knight, however, is a hyperdimensional
being because it can leave the playing board plane to leap over other pieces in
its way. (The Knight is "hyperdimensional" in the sense that it can exploit the