[Stalky]

K, i have to admit, this question came to me after watching a few too many episodes of stargate. The problem that for a galaxy as interconnected as that one to exist it appears you would have to violate one of the main rules of general relativity that nothing, no message, photon, or alien lifeform, should be able to exceed the speed of light.

Small scale wormholes might exist, but they are of little consequesnce because nothing can pass through them, so no message can be carried faster than light speed, but a large scale traversable wormhole would provide a real problem in that i could fire a lazer beam at you from 200 Ly away, and warn you about it the next day giving you 199y and 364 days to get out of the way of something you should never know was coming.

Is there any physics impedement, besides the limit which the speed of light places upon the transferance of a message, to events like that occurring?

Does this circumvention of the speed of light, and thus time itself, possibly exist? Why can or can't it?

[Max™]

Given recent concepts that I've been working on, I'm going to go ahead and say this: If a wormhole is a hole or tunnel in space, we could not traverse it.

If you take a sheet and spread it on your bed, you can crumple up a bit of the sheet, and then by unfolding and refolding it, move it around.

If there is a hole in the sheet, how do you move a crumpled up bit of it through there?

[Farsight]

Originally Posted by Stalky K, i have to admit, this question came to me after watching a few too many episodes of stargate. The problem that for a galaxy as interconnected as that one to exist it appears you would have to violate one of the main rules of general relativity that nothing, no message, photon, or alien lifeform, should be able to exceed the speed of light.

Violating the speed of light isn't actually a problem. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything can go faster than light. But I wouldn't rule it out totally. The important thing is this: if you go faster than light, you don't go backwards in time.

Small scale wormholes might exist, but they are of little consequesnce because nothing can pass through them, so no message can be carried faster than light speed, but a large scale traversable wormhole would provide a real problem in that i could fire a lazer beam at you from 200 Ly away, and warn you about it the next day giving you 199y and 364 days to get out of the way of something you should never know was coming.

What's the problem? I could fire a missile at you, then ring you on your mobile saying you've get ten seconds to get out of the way.

Is there any physics impedement, besides the limit which the speed of light places upon the transferance of a message, to events like that occurring?

The impediment is that electrons, protons, and the stuff of matter is "made of light". See pair production and annihilation for evidence. And light doesn't go faster than light.

Does this circumvention of the speed of light, and thus time itself, possibly exist? Why can or can't it?

The circumvention of the speed of light possibly exists. (I can envisage a "shock wave" that travels faster than a transverse wave, light being a transverse wave). But the circumvention of time does not. We don't travel forward in time at the rate of one second per second. That's just a figure of speech. Things move through space, and we calibrate and record these motions using seconds which are calibrated on the motion of light. We assign a time "dimension" to this, but we can't move through it, just as we can't literally climb to a higher temperature. So we can't travel backwards in time.

All of this is totally in line with Einstein. I am the author of RELATIVITY+. PM me if you want a copy of the draft.