http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/W/wormhole.html"Interest in so-called traversable wormholes gathered pace following the publication of a
1987 paper by Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Uri Yertsever (MTY) at the California Institute of Technology. This paper stemmed from an inquiry to Thorne by Carl Sagan who was mulling over a way of conveying the heroine in his novel Contact across interstellar distances at trans-light speed. Thorne gave the problem to his Ph.D. students, Michael Morris and Uri Yertsever, who realized that such a journey might be possible if a wormhole could be held open long enough for a spacecraft (or any other object) to pass through. MTY concluded that to keep a wormhole open would require matter with a negative energy density and a large negative pressure ? larger in magnitude than the energy density. Such
hypothetical matter is called exotic matter.
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"We aren't saying you can't build a wormhole. But the ones you would like to build - the predictable ones where you can say Mr Spock will land in New York at 2pm on this day - those look like they will fall apart," Dr Hsu said.
- Stephen Hsu, University of Oregon, May
2005Well, I'm afraid it's the problem that I mentioned earlier. When I step out of the pub and into the wormhole, I want it to take me home, not into the barmaid's bedroom (as it were).
And, of course, there's that little detail about getting hold of some of that hypothetical exotic matter.
MM, do you have any idea of the magnitude of the total energy required to perform a traversal of this hypothetical wormhole?
