clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

222 notes
hole in the middle of the spool corresponded to the wormhole, the gateway between
two regions of space. In this model, described in Physical Review, the wormhole's
boundaries are straight and can be made as distant from one another as desired. Exotic
matter could therefore be placed far away from the wormhole travelers to minimize
risks. This rectangular spool model may be more stable than the Morris-Thome
model, and gravitational tidal forces on passengers would be less of a concern. How
would the end of a Visser wormhole appear to you as it floated in space? It would look
like a dark, rectangular box. You could approach this black prism and enter it near the
center. Almost immediately, you would exit a similar dark prison constituting the other
side of the wormhole. These two prisms would be connected via the forth dimension
along the shaft of the spool that compases the wormhole's throat.
The exterior of the Visser wormhole acts like a giant mirror. Light shining on it
would bounce off as if it hit a reflecting material. Visser also proposed another
mathematical model for a wormhole that resembles two coreless apples. The inner
walls of the fruit are connected along the fourth dimension. You can read more
about this structure in Halpern's Cosmic Wormhole book or in Visser's original scientific
paper.
The Morris-Thorne wormholes can be used for space travel and time travel as
described in the paper by Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever (see Further Readings). Various
debates continue about the theoretical possibility of the wormhole time machine.
For readers interested in other discussions, see Visser's papers. In my book Black Holes:
A Traveler's Guide, I also include color graphics of 3-D versions of quantum foam and
wormholes.
2. You might try using plexiglass sheets, suspended at corners and center with knotted
strings.
3. Go is a more difficult game than chess, but extension to higher dimensions is, in
some ways, conceptually simple.
Chapter 4
1. Self-reproducing universes: Physicist Andrei Linde's theory of self-reproducing universes
implies that new universes are being created all the time through a budding
process. In this theory, tiny balls of spacetime called "baby universes" are created in
universes like our own and evolve into universes resembling ours. This theory does not
mean we can find these other universe by traveling in a rocket ship. These universes
that bud off from our own might pinch off from our spacetime and then disappear.
(For a very brief moment, a thin strand of spacetime called a wormhole might connect
the baby and parent universes. The wormholes would have diameters 10 20 smaller than
the dimension of an atomic nucleus, arid the wormhole might remain in existence for
only 10 3 seconds.) The baby universes would also have offspring, and all the count-