marlon said:
Hi,
what are the latest developments on black and white hole-theory and how they can be viewed as timetravelling configurations?
I read that one should apply anti-gravity in order to make such a wormhole stable.
Please some comments on that
thanks
marlon
You might try looking at John Cramer's collected science-fact columns, from "Analog", online at
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/av_index.html
Cramer writes about a lot of topics, skip to the section on "Wormholes".
As others have commented, you don't need anti-gravity, just "exotic matter", which is matter with a negative energy density. Actually, you don't necessarily need matter, but you do need the negative energy density - gravitationally significant amounts of negative energy.
A small piece of exotic matter would fall to ground just like a small piece of normal matter if you dropped it in the Earth's gravitational field - while the exotic matter would experience a repulsive force from normal matter (F=GMm/r^2, and m has changed sign) it also has a negative inertial mass, so it would move towards the repulsive force.
A large piece of exotic matter would repel "test bodies" of both normal and exotic matter, this is the property that makes it useful and necessary to hold wormhole throats
It's still somewhat of an open question whether or not wormholes could become time machines. The mechanism for making a wormhole into a time machine is well known (just fly one around for a while at relativistic velocites, as in Robert Forwards SF novel "Timemaster"). The unknown issue is whether or not this process will destroy the wormhole. Current experts seem to favor the idea that the wormhole will self destruct if it ever attempts to cross the boudary between being "spacelike" and "timelike" because of ever-growing quantum vacuum fluctuations.