Analog SFF, May 2012 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines

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Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE CHINK IN EINSTEIN'S ARMOR

by John G. Cramer

I chaired the “Exotic Science” session at the DARPA/NASA sponsored 100 Year Starship Symposium, held in Orlando, Florida, September 30 to October 2, 2011. There, the propulsion experts pulled out all the stops in attempting the design of a starship that might reach the stars in a human lifetime, and they essentially failed, even when invoking nuclear or antimatter energy sources. The stars are very far away. Reaching them is a very difficult problem with no easy solutions . . . except, perhaps, for one partially baked idea that was introduced in my column in the May 1990 Analog. Looking back at my old column, I realize that it had a few mistakes and could have been presented better. So, in the new DARPA context, let's revisit the idea here.

First, let us assume, following the lead of Thorne, Morris, and Yurtserver, that we can snatch microscopic wormholes from the quantum foam and stabilize them. If we keep a wormhole mouth microscopic in mass and size, it behaves much like a fundamental particle with a very large mass, perhaps somewhat in excess of the Planck mass of 21.8 micrograms. For the purposes of calculation, let us assume that we can produce a stabilized microscopic wormhole with a mass of 10 Planck masses or 218 micrograms. Could such an object exist? Visser has described wormhole solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity that are flat-space wormholes stitched together across a cut and co-stabilized by a tiny loop of negative-tension cosmic string. A wormhole like this might occur naturally in the aftermath of the Big Bang and might have the size and mass described above.

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Next we take the two wormhole mouths of this object and thread lines of electrical force through them, until we have passed about 20 coulombs of charge through the wormhole. This can be done, for example, with a 20-microampere electron beam passing through the wormhole for about 12 days. The result is that the wormhole mouth will now have the same charge-to-mass ratio as a proton and will behave like a proton in the electric and magnetic fields of a particle accelerator.

Now we transport what we will call the “traveling wormhole mouth” to Meyrin, Switzerland near Geneva and put it into CERN's new Large Hadronic Collider (LHC) there. The other wormhole mouth remains in our laboratory, along with various stabilizing and steering equipment. We assume that by the time we are able to do this, the LHC will have achieved its full design capacity and will be able to accelerate each of its colliding proton beams to 7.0 TeV (7.0 x 1012 electron volts). We use the LHC to accelerate the wormhole mouth to the same energy per unit rest mass as a 7-TeV proton, extract the beam that contains it, point it at a star of interest, and send it on its way. (Presumably, we would do this in an operation with

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