Defense Intelligence Reference Document Traversible Wormholes Stargates And Negative Energy

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Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy
I. Summary
Implementation of faster-than-light (FTL) interstellar travel via traversable
wormholes generally requires the engineering of spacetime into very
specialized local geometries. The analysis of these via Einstein's General
Theory of Relativity, plus the resultant equations of state, demonstrates that
such geometries require the use of "exotic" matter. It has been claimed that
since such matter violates the energy conditions, FTL spacetimes are not
plausible. However, it has been shown that this is a spurious issue. The
identification, magnitude, and production of exotic matter are seen to be a key
technical challenge, however. These issues are reviewed and summarized, and
an assessment on the present state of their resolution is provided.
In 1985 CalTech physicists M. Morris and K. Thorne discovered the principle of
traversable wormholes based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity
(published in 1915). Morris and Thorne (Reference 1) and Morris et al.
(Reference 2) did this as an academic exercise at the request of Carl Sagan,
who had completed the draft of his novel Contact. This little exercise led to the
development of two new cottage industries in spacetime physics research: the
study of traversable wormholes and the study of time machines. Wormholes
are hyperspace tunnels through spacetime connecting either remote regions
within our universe or two different universes; they even connect different
dimensions and different times. Space travelers would enter one side of the
tunnel and exit the other, passing through the throat along the way. The
travelers would move at :s: c (c is the speed of light, 3 x 108 m/s) through the
wormhole and therefore not violate Special Relativity, but external observers
would view the travelers as traversing multi-light-year distances through
space at FTL speed; Figure 1 illustrates this effect. A "stargate" is a special
class of traversable wormhole solutions to Einstein's general relativistic field
equation that possesses very simple physics and flat entry and exit openings.
Traversable wormholes are unlike the well-known, non-traversable Einstein-
Rosen Bridges or Schwarzschild wormholes that are formed from collapsed
stellar matter (that is, black holes) or spherically symmetric vacuum regions.
Black holes are collapsed stars that have all their mass concentrated at an
infinitesimal point where the induced gravitational field crushes all matter and
spacetime. However, even Einstein-Rosen bridges can be made traversable by
an infinitesimal tweaking of their spacetime metric. In the case of black holes,
the singularity of collapsed matter, along with its crushing gravity field, totally
blocks the way through the tunnel. A traversable wormhole does not have a
singularity blocking the tunnel or any crushing gravity field. Explorers would
enter one side of the tunnel, travel through the throat, and exit the other side.
Traversable wormholes also do not possess an event horizon, a region of high
gravitational field strength separating the inside space surrounding the black
hole's singularity from the outside universe. Once you go through a black
hole's event horizon, you can never come back out because you will have to
attain FTL speed to escape it. Not even light can escape from an event horizon.
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