Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIA-08-1004-004), dated 6 April 2010, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports from FY 2009. It reviews the general relativity physics of traversable wormholes and flat-faced "stargate" solutions for faster-than-light travel. It also covers the exotic negative energy these would need, proposed lab methods for generating it such as the Casimir effect and squeezed vacuum, and the constraints involved.
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adequate Coulomb repulsion. 9 Equation (8) shows that a 1 km radius throat will require
a cavity plate separation of 1.28 x 10-16 m (smaller than a nuclear diameter), which
gives pEc = -1.62 x 10 36 J/m 3 for this configuration. In contrast, a wormhole with a
throat radius of 1 AU will require a plate separation of 1.57 x 10-12 m (or 35% smaller
than the electron's Compton wavelength), which results in an energy density of -7.14 x
1019 J/m 3 . 10 There is no technology known today that can engineer a cavity with such
minuscule plate separations. In addition, such minuscule plate separations are
unrealistic because the Casimir effect switches over to the non-retarded field behavior
(~ J-3) of van der Waals forces when plate separations go below the wavelength("' 10
nm) where they are no longer perfectly conducting (Reference 58). This scheme will not
be considered any further. However, future work will be necessary to elucidate whether
the various quantum field analogs of the Casimir effect can provide a more reasonable
technical solution to this problem.
IV. Constructing a Traversable Wormhole is not Easy
A. NEGATIVE ENERGY REQUIREMENTS AND ENERGY CONDITION
VIOLATIONS
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. It was pointed out
in Section III that one, some, or all of the classical energy conditions must be violated
in order to build a traversable wormhole. And it was also cautioned that this was not a
showstopper because the energy conditions have all been violated by nature or by lab
experiment prior to their formulation. However, the reader should be forewarned that
there are a number of published claims that the energy condition violations can be
avoided. These claims are just semantic games whereby investigators universally
invoke the following scenario: divide the total stress-energy into weird matter plus
normal matter, push all the energy condition violations into the weird matter so that
the normal matter does not violate the energy conditions. Given that the energy
conditions are not absolute, such rearranging approaches are not necessary.
Traversable wormhole throats violate the NEC (or ANEC). So how big a violation is
required? The answer is that there is only need to calculate the amount of negative
energy that will be needed to generate and hold open a wormhole throat. A simple
formula for short-throat wormholes using the thin shell formalism gives this quantity in
terms of the equivalent mass (note: the energy density derived from the general
relativistic field equation is too complex to use for this mass comparison) (Reference
3):
9 In a detailed analysis the electrostatic energy required to support the Coulomb repulsion between the plates
would be considered separately.
10 Mean Earth-Sun distance, 1 AU = 1.50 x 10 11 m.
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 42 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.