Making Stargates: The Physics of Traversable Absurdly Benign Wormholes

Extremely short throat “absurdly benign” wormholes enabling near instantaneous travel to arbitrarily remote locations in both space and time – stargates – have long been a staple of science fiction. The physical requirements for the production of such devices were worked out by Morris and Thorne in 1988. They approached the issue of rapid spacetime transport by asking the question: what constraints do the laws of physics as we know them place on an “arbitrarily advanced culture” (AAC)? Their answer – a Jupiter mass of negative restmass matter in a structure a few tens of meters in size – seems to have rendered such things beyond the realm of the believably achievable. This might be taken as justification for abandoning further serious exploration of the physics of stargates. If such an investigation is pursued, however, one way to do so is to invert Morris and Thorne’s question and ask: if “arbitrarily advanced aliens” (AAAs) have actually made stargates, what must be true of the laws of physics for them to have done so? Elementary arithmetic reveals that stargates would have an “exotic” density of on the order of 10^22 gm/cm3, that is, orders of magnitude higher than nuclear density. Not only does one have to achieve this stupendous density of negative mass matter, it must be done, presumably, only with the application of “low” energy electromagnetic fields. We examine this problem, finding that a plausible solution does not depend on the laws of quantum gravity, as some have proposed. Rather, the solution depends on understanding the nature of electrons in terms of a semi-classical extension of the exact, general relativistic electron model of Arnowitt, Deser, and Misner (ADM), and Mach’s Principle.

The negative bare mass ADM model of the electron can be modified to accommodate quantized spin.

Given some modest amount of everyday type matter, say a few hundred or thousand kilograms, all we have to do is enclose the matter within another presumably thin shell of matter wherein we can change its mass from positive to negative. It would have to become sufficiently negative to null the positive mass of the initial mass of the shell and the matter it encloses. But if we could do that, we would screen the gravitational influence of the matter in the rest of the universe on the matter within the thin shell.

Find a way to screen our electron from the gravitational potential due to the rest of the universe, the denominator would become of order unity and the exotic bare mass of the electron – 21 orders of magnitude larger than its normal mass and negative – would be exposed. Do this to a modest amount of normal stuff and you would have your Jupiter mass of exotic matter to make a traversable stargate – if the negative bare mass ADM model of elementary particles is a plausible representation of reality.

Scholarpedia – The Arnowitt-Deser-Misner energy is a universal and useful definition of energy for asymptotically flat solutions of the Einstein equations (with or without matter) having a specified asymptotic falloff —essentially that of the Schwarzschild metric. This definition was made possible thanks to the canonical formulation of general relativity as a Hamiltonian system as given by Arnowitt, Deser and Misner (1962).

Because of the equivalence principle, there is no generally meaningful local energy-density or stress tensor-density for the gravitational field. This absence was the obstacle to development of the correct global conserved quantities, namely four-momentum and angular momentum, since the corresponding special relativistic invariances under translations and rotations are only realized asymptotically. This problem can be illuminated by an analogy to the more familiar vector gauge fields, and the corresponding contrast there between the abelian—hence uncharged—Maxwell field and the non-abelian Yang-Mills (YM) system which is “charged”, namely self-interacting. Definition of color charge in the latter theory (already classically) requires a similar (but less physical) asymptotic “color flatness”; like energy density, color charge density is gauge-dependent. Indeed, a clear picture of the Yang-Mills charge was only given (Abbott and Deser 1982b) after that for energy of cosmological gravity (Abbott and Deser 1982a), where the detailed mechanism of asymptotic Killing vectors was first developed

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