An Inquiring Mind Wants to Know

[margot77]

Hello, all!

I am new at this, so please bear with me. I wanted to know if a wormhole would theoretically pull a ship towards it.


Margaret

[fatty_ashy]

Well, I believe what you might be looking for is a black hole. Black holes have a rather strong gravitational pull provided, of course, if they really exist. I don't think wormholes have any sort of gravitational pull...I could be wrong.

[dgeake]

A wormhole is sometimes described at a connection between a black hole and a white hole.

A black hole, of course, is an immensly dense object from which nothing, not even light can escape, once it has passed it's event horizon. Many suspected black holes have been located in the visible universe.

A white hole is a mathematical prediction from the imaginary number solution of the calculation for a black holes event horizon. (One example of an imaginary number is the square root of negative one.) There are no suspected candidates for these. Apparently there are reasons to not suspect quasars might be white holes. This is an object which repells anything close to it. Nothing can enter a white hole, not even light.

A workhole is the connection between these two features. Black holes almost certainly exist, white holes and wormholes probably do not exist.

So the short answer to your question is: an object would be attracted gravitationally to one end of a wormhole (the black hole) and would be gravitationally repelled from the other end (the white hole.)

Check this out...
http://www.crystalinks.com/wormholes.html

[fatty_ashy]

I would disagree with you, dgeake. True enough, the website has mentioned a wormhole is a link between a black hole and a white hole.
HOWEVER, we should not rely on one single source of infomation. Many other books and websites have mentioned different types of wormholes. Wormholes can also be two way.
I am not sure if a blackhole is a tear in space time. I'm not even sure if such a thing exists. Read everything with an open mind, don't be too quick to accept everything you read at once.

The dictionary definition of a wormhole is
"A theoretical distortion of space-time in a region of the universe that would link one location or time with another, through a path that is shorter in distance or duration than would otherwise be expected. "

Well. Anyway, i need to aplogise margot, wormholes DO have a gravitational pull. That is why exotic matter stabilises it, the anti-gravitational pull (push?) from negative mass will prevent it from collasping.

[dgeake]

I did say "is sometimes described" etc. I did not go to a single sorce, or even just to sources on the internet. I just cited a URL which I thought margot would find interesting, because I did.

Unless there is such a thing as a white hole, you would never be able to exit a wormhole. There are many other things which almost certainly make wormholes unacceptable for travel even if they do exist, such as the stability of the conduit, it's dimensions, the incredible tortous warping of spacetime. They do make interesting subjects on which to speculate on however.

1. Perhaps white holes do exist, but in some other universes with different natural laws.

2. Some have theorized that a wormhole could be used as a timemachine.

3. We do not have a quantum description of gravity yet, so we know that our speculations at extremely small dimensions and high degrees of spacetime warping are actually wild guesses at present. Reliance on exotic matter is an interesting device, but just that currently, a mathematical device, as is true for almost any discussion about wormholes.

[Tormod]

dgeake and fatty, you are both right. There is always a need to consider more sources. Britannica.com, for example, does not even have an entry for white holes, and a search through their entire database gives no results.

Here is another source, with lots of illustrations:
White Holes and Wormholes

It has a very interesting statement:

A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Tormod