By highly relativistic, do you mean luminal speeds (99.9% of c), or do you mean superluminal speeds (+c)?
By highly relativistic, do you mean luminal speeds (99.9% of c), or do you mean superluminal speeds (+c)?
From the paper analogy it seems obvious that we eventually strike a limit where we cannot add more wormholes wherever we want without stretching, tearing, self-intersecting, or some other violent action that changes the intrinsic geometry of the paper itself.Yes, I realise that for a flat universe in that particular case, but for a network of wormholes it seems impossible to retain unless the configuration of the mouths exactly mirror each other, which would be less useful. An if the network isn't properly planned from the beginning, there will easily be all kind of bending to bring new mouths together without breaking existing pairs. It seems very hard to do this and maintain the flat shape, certainly from the paper analogy.
Yes, there's the other problem with wormholes. Imagine a call for proposal for a public transport connection between New York and Los Angeles. Amongst the proposal we might find a regular railroad, maglev, and more fringe ideas like a hyperloop. And then the lunatic proposal to bend and fold the entire continent so that New York and Los Angeles meet and travel between them can be done by a short elevator trip.
This seems absurd only because of the analogy. "Folding up the space" to form wormholes may just as well be trivial. In ER=EPR for example, the connection is made automatically through entanglement. The difficulty then isn't in how to fold up space, it's how to maintain entanglement between two large systems as you collapse them into a pair of black holes.
That seems reasonable. In the sheet analogy we can easily make one wormhole and retain the flatness of the paper. Now, if we want to make another wormhole and find it impossible to bend the paper in 3D and preserve the flatness, we instead make a simple flatness preserving 4D bend as we did in 3D. And we can keep on going.
Near luminal. Since time dilation could be countered by time travel. And then you would effectively travel at superluminal speed.
Well, perhaps in principle yes, but many things may be trivial at one scale and completely ridiculous at another.
Yes, we shouldn't forget that the old movie trope of the folded paper is an analogy, a good one maybe, but not indicative of reality in an objective sense.
Only to outside observers, to the wormhole travelers their subjective time would pass 'normally' (at a rate of a year passing for every light year traveled). Really only outside observations done by observers far away would conflict with the timelines, and even then they are separated by space. An outside observer would receive information (presumably by wormhole) that the travelers reached their destination, but if they looked at the destination with, say, a telescope, then they would not observe the travelers.
Absolutely. Continuing with ER=EPR example, forming a large enough entangled system to make black holes out of which do not immediately evaporate, or even large enough for tidal effects not to ruin your day, and not ruin the entanglement in the process, seems absolutely ridiculous. But I don't know that there is any law of physics that forbids it. If there is, then it seems very non-obvious. So I think we have worm-holed ourselves back to the idea that it isn't arguments of absurdity or difficulty that allow us to easily dismiss certain situations with wormholes. It's rather what they would allow us to do if they existed.
The truth is stranger then fiction. So typical for this amazing universe...
If string theory is correct, there can be universes of 4 and 6 dimensions (including time), would "the bulk" include all the dimensions in all the universes, or would it be a completely different layer with its own?From the paper analogy it seems obvious that we eventually strike a limit where we cannot add more wormholes wherever we want without stretching, tearing, self-intersecting, or some other violent action that changes the intrinsic geometry of the paper itself.Yes, I realise that for a flat universe in that particular case, but for a network of wormholes it seems impossible to retain unless the configuration of the mouths exactly mirror each other, which would be less useful. An if the network isn't properly planned from the beginning, there will easily be all kind of bending to bring new mouths together without breaking existing pairs. It seems very hard to do this and maintain the flat shape, certainly from the paper analogy.
However, we have made a weak assumption. Constructing wormholes in paper, we're folding up a 2D manifold in 3 dimensions. Why only 3? Well, we live in 3 dimensional space. But if we allow wormholes to be made in an N dimensional space, and therefore assume there is a higher dimensional bulk, there's no reason to assume the bulk must be only N+1 dimensional. It might as well be infinite dimensional! In that case there is no limit to the number of connections we can make, or where we might make them. And the intrinsic geometry of our manifold would still be unchanged with any number of those connections.
Of course, if that bulk exists, bulklanders must still think our activities absurd.
There is probably also no explanation anywhere for how all this extra-dimensional folding would actually work to make the wormholes where we want. I don't know of anything in our universe that would allow us to manipulate how it is embedded in the bulk. Gravitational wave measurements suggest that if the bulk even exists, then gravitational waves don't care. Wild idea: maybe entanglement does. That's essentially the basis of ER=EPR.
That's hard to say. Attributing one cause (or a collection of related causes) to an extinction event in a incomplete geological record is a messy affair and not something we can assert any confidence in, especially the farther back one looks at the fossil record. There are other possible causes for the O-S Extinction, many of which are statistically more likely to occur then the solar-system happening across the path of a relatively rare and directionally focused event like a gamma-ray burst from a nearby hypernova. Certainly some evidence seems to point towards a gamma ray burst effecting Earth, and the results of which could be mixed in and mistaken with other events during that period, as the paper you linked to concluded.
Given our lack of knowledge regarding the life cycles of supermassive late sequence stars like Betelgeuse and its exact mass and characteristics (despite studies attempting the contrary, many of which have yielded some amazing results - like the star rotating 150 time faster then expected and the fact that it may have eaten a companion solar-mass star) we don't know when Betelgeuse will go nova, but current theories suggest it will between ~500'000 to ~5 million years in the future approximately. Its effects on Earth will be very minor, since it's so far away that the charged particles accelerated unidirectionally will significantly lose their power when they reach our solar-system, and not even ionize our atmosphere. It would be quite a show for us astronomers though. Similar supernova were thought to have exploded no more then ~300 light-years away (half the distance between Sol and Betelgeuse), with no direct harm becoming of Earth's ecosystem during that time.
Yes. It is well known that the impact of large asteroids can cause extreme weather patterns directly related to the impact event and in connection to disrupted atmospheric cycles, earthquakes and high volcanism due to crustal disturbances. I had a graph saved somewhere that showed the direct relation between the kilojoules of energy released per asteroid mass compared to the Richter scale of subsequent Earthquakes, but alas I have lost it. Suffice to say that there has been various studies linking the two: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331282769_The_eruptive_tempo_of_Deccan_volcanism_in_relation_to_the_Cretaceous-Paleogene_boundary
These are interesting, but as I have said earlier, it is difficult for us to state with scientific certainty that extinctions follow a tempo like this. The holes in the cyclic apocalypse theories include actual holes the geological record, in addition to those periods of Earth's history wherein we find without much doubt due to pristine preservation conditions that the predicted extinction did not occur, such during the Hauterivian stage of the Early Cretaceous ~130 million years ago, 60 million years before the K-T extinction, nor during the Sinemurian stage of the Early Jurassic 60 million years before then.Some evidence for periodicity:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... 284E9CAA3F
https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4393
https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1804
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature03339
Many seemingly casual events can be linked to many seemingly miraculous ones. We fool ourselves into thinking there are patterns where there are none for the sake of satisfying esoteric preconceptions about life in this universe.