Wormholes in Space

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Sindri

So we avoid the important variety of time travel by having a time jump as well as a spatial jump, is that right?

That's it.

Originally Posted by Sindri

How does this interact with multiple stops? Would it require something like a central hub that everything goes from or can you link it up more?

A central hub avoids problems with forming time travel paths (or almost forming time travel paths before at least one wormhole in the path blows up). This can be thought of as a tree-like structure, where the central hub (the root node) links up to many other destinations (branches), each of which can link up to many other destinations from sub-branches but, like a tree, you, can't form loops.

Now, there may be ways to get loops in your wormhole transit network. If you form a new-born wormhole, each mouth will initially be at the same space and time coordinates. So this wormhole has no time lag. If you take each mouth to new destinations through the pre-existing wormhole network, you will be connecting the nodes through the new wormhole in such a way that you don't get time travel.

Mostly.

You need to be careful not to move any wormhole in a closed loop network too much to avoid time dilation, or to have any one of the nodes too much deeper in a gravitational well for the same reason (including the galactic gravitational well - things closer to the galactic center experience time more slowly). This can cause time lag to build up, until you have an incipient time machine. You might be able to get around this by monitoring the time lag build-up, and if it gets too dangerous you take down a wormhole link, put one end in a cyclotron for a bit to time dilate it and re-establish a safer set of time changes.

Originally Posted by Sindri

Is travel through a wormhole instantaneous or can there be travel time from the perspective of the traveller?

To a traveler, a wormhole is just space like any other set of space. For a Visser wormhole, which is flat like a door, it would be just like stepping through a door for all local physical measurements. However, if that is too boring for your setting, you could have the wormhole have a very long throat which needs to be traversed slowly (slowly so as to avoid velocity-dependent tidal effects). Now it will take time to travel the distance of the throat.

Luke