Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy: full transcription

Defense Intelligence Reference Document. Acquisition Threat Support. 6 April 2010. ICOD: 1 December 2009. DIA-08-1004-004. Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy.

Prepared by: Defense Intelligence Agency. This product is one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Defense Intelligence Agency Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program.

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.

In 1985 CalTech physicists M. Morris and K. Thorne discovered the principle of traversable wormholes based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Morris and Thorne... did this as an academic exercise at the request of Carl Sagan, who had completed the draft of his novel Contact.

Explorers could deploy a wormhole-stargate near the Earth's surface, in Earth's orbit, or anywhere in the solar system they like and just pass through the "stargate" and come out the other side in remote spacetime within seconds, moving through the throat at low cruise speeds (30 mph!) and with no time dilation effects.

It is very easy to build a time machine, given a traversable wormhole. But time travel via wormhole is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that classical general relativity theory is seriously infested with time machines; the theory both allows for and demands time travel in order to preserve self-consistency of dynamic spacetime solutions for just about every problem ever studied.

It is a straightforward exercise to design a real "stargate" from wormhole physics. A stargate is essentially a traversable wormhole with a flat-face shape for the throat as opposed to the spherical-shaped throat of the Morris and Thorne wormhole... A traveler going through a stargate will simply be shunted into another remote spacetime region within our universe or into another universe.

This means that a traveler encountering and going through such a wormhole-stargate will feel no tidal gravitational forces and see no exotic matter threading the throat. A traveler stepping through the throat will simply be shunted into another remote spacetime region or into another universe (note: the Einstein field equation does not fix the spacetime topology, so it is possible that wormholes are inter-universe as well as intra-universe tunnels). Therefore, one can construct a stargate by generating a thin shell or surface layer of exotic matter much like a thin film of soap stretched across a loop of wire.

If a small wormhole (three or more dimensional) were to begin to appear or even bump into our local space, one would perceive this process as the occurrence of an unusually bright spot in the sky. Blue and red Doppler shifting of this bright spot would manifest when the intersection of the wormhole with our local space grows or recedes, respectively.

This is unfounded since all the energy condition hypotheses have been experimentally tested in the laboratory and experimentally shown to be false - 25 years before their formulation. Further investigation into this technical issue showed that violations of the energy conditions are widespread for all forms of both "reasonable" classical and quantum matter... So the condition that [ordinary energy conditions] must be obeyed by all forms of matter in nature is spurious. Violating the energy conditions commits no offense against nature. Negative energy has been produced in the laboratory.

The exotic (energy condition-violating) fields that are known to occur in nature are: Static, radially-dependent electric or magnetic fields... Squeezed quantum vacuum states... Gravitationally squeezed vacuum electromagnetic zero-point fluctuations... Casimir effect, i.e., the Casimir vacuum in flat, curved, and topological spaces.

One knows how to make small quantities of negative energy in the lab. But one does not know if it is possible to make large quantities of negative energy... After being alarmed by the magnitude of the results, one should note that [the required mass] is not the total mass of the wormhole as seen by remote observers.

[Table 2 of the report gives specific figures]: a wormhole throat 1000 meters wide requires negative mass equivalent to -709.9 times the mass of Jupiter. A throat 1 meter wide requires -0.71 times the mass of Jupiter. A throat 0.01 meters wide still requires negative mass equivalent to -2.3 times the mass of Jupiter.

More than 40 years elapsed between the late 1890s when the Curies first identified radioactive substances in their laboratory and when a neutron-catalyzed fission chain reaction - the world's first nuclear reactor - was demonstrated at the University of Chicago in 1939 by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard. Six more years would pass before the world's first nuclear bomb was successfully tested in New Mexico. The progress of science and technology is rapid, but highly dependent on adequate and sustained focus, effort, and support. On this basis, it is possible that a traversable wormhole can be demonstrated in the laboratory as long as there is a focused, sustained level of long-term research support.

If one "zaps" a region of empty space with a beam of negative energy, will a traversable wormhole appear? One doesn't know. Maybe one has to poke a hole in space with an intense beam of negative energy, or maybe we have to use the negative energy to inflate a quantum spacetime fluctuation (allegedly in the form of a "geometric foam"). Theoretical studies need to be implemented to address this question and the author believes that empirical studies will be necessary to find the answer once we develop an intense source of negative energy.