Time inside wormholes

Harlequin said:

Stupid question(s) alert!

wormholes are probably impossible, but assuming they weren't (shush y'all), can two objections travel through it at different speeds at the same time?

what happens to time while inside a wormhole?

How does that figure with SF which uses jumpgate tech/tropes, where the travel looks instantaneous?

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Why do you feel wormholes are impossible? Seem pretty possible to me, and I'm not arguing with Einstein, personally.

There's no different speeds though, as I understand wormholes -- things inside wormholes move at the speed of light, presumably, or some other instantaneous slip through space-time by way of quantum entanglements *I are not a physicist, I just like to read stuffs* So time is either as would be during speed-of-light travel or nonexistent?

The travel looking instantaneous is due to presuming wormholes exploit tears, or are built in some way around singularities, or whatever, I believe. I dunno, there are actual hard science people lurking.

If you want to understand the real physics involved in wormholes I would recommend reading "black holes, worm holes and time machines" by Jim Al Khalili. (He's a professor of physics and also very good at explaining complex stuff to non-physicists.)

Wormholes tend to be used like a magic door to other times/places in science fiction, without really explaining much about how they work*. They link one point in spacetime with another point in spacetime, therefore you can quite literally travel to another time through them. Most descriptions in books you can see the other time through the wormhole (like looking through a window) and step through like a window. This is all conjecture though, because currently they've only made teeny tiny wormholes that are big enough for sub atomic particles to get through and making one big enough for humans to get through is, well, theoretically possible (as in one could exist without any laws of physics being broken) but impossible on a practical level with the technology we have. Which gives science fiction writers a lot of leeway with the finer details.

*with the obvious disclaimer that hard science fiction is different because you have to get the physics right, while non-hard (is that the term for it?) science fiction that focuses more on other things like human/alien/etc interaction, society and the like, you don't need to explain how stuff like this works so much.

I've got wormholes in a story I'm writing. It's aimed at children aged 8-10 so doesn't go deeply into the physics!

In wormholes there is no spacetime as we know it, so we can't "get squished", and it takes no time to travel through (as seen in SG-1). (Technically, you travel at the speed of light, but since the entangled elements are right next to each other essentially only a small fraction of a fraction of a femtosecond is required to move that short distance in subspace). Wormholes were created by entanglement of higgs field elements at the big bang. As spacetime expanded so did the higgs field, but the entangled elements, tho now seemingly very "far" away, remain entangled and are actually right next to each other within the foam of subspace (of which we know nothing), hence a "wormhole". When unobserved, wormholes are minute, but once observed they appear quite large; however, with apologies to Schrodinger's cat, they are both large and minute at the same time. There are rare instances when branes collide where higgs elements of different universes become entangled. In these rare cases wormholes between universes come into existence. It is also true that natural wormholes can be traveled from either direction.

Now that you believe this, I also have a bridge (which either exists or doesn't) in NYC I'd like to sell you.

Good luck!
DrDoc

DrDoc said:

In wormholes there is no spacetime as we know it, so we can't "get squished", and it takes no time to travel through (as seen in SG-1). (Technically, you travel at the speed of light, but since the entangled elements are right next to each other essentially only a small fraction of a fraction of a femtosecond is required to move that short distance in subspace). Wormholes were created by entanglement of higgs field elements at the big bang. As spacetime expanded so did the higgs field, but the entangled elements, tho now seemingly very "far" away, remain entangled and are actually right next to each other within the foam of subspace (of which we know nothing), hence a "wormhole". When unobserved, wormholes are minute, but once observed they appear quite large; however, with apologies to Schrodinger's cat, they are both large and minute at the same time. There are rare instances when branes collide where higgs elements of different universes become entangled. In these rare cases wormholes between universes come into existence. It is also true that natural wormholes can be traveled from either direction.

Now that you believe this, I also have a bridge (which either exists or doesn't) in NYC I'd like to sell you.

Good luck!
DrDoc

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You should write sci fi

Interstellar is such a fucking mess of a film. Contact has wormholes, sensibly. Star Trek does a few places, not necessarily by name, but it's more a shorthand device than clearly used -- in Contact it matters greatly.