Wormhole Physics

A reader writes:

I have a question that popped into my head while watching the Sci-Fi Monday marathon.

If all energy/data is one-way in a worm hole, how is it possible for an off-world team to communicate with the SGC?

Please don’t underestimate that a reasonably mature ____ year old man, who evidently doesn’t have enough things on his mind, is asking. Please don’t tell my wife!

Will do! (Or perhaps that should be, “Won’t do!”)

Happy to oblige on this question. Here’s the answer:

When a body made of matter approaches the event horizon of an active wormhole, it is instantaneously translated into patterns of energy that can only travel one way (whichever way the wormhole is flowing, to or from a particular stargate). Trying to force matter through a wormhole the wrong way results in it being disintegrated (as normal) but the resulting patterned energy stream can’t flow backwards through the wormhole and so it is never reintegrated.

(Also, wormholes normally only transmit bodies in their entirety, not parts of them, so you can pull a partially-disintegrated object back out of a stargate and have it reintegrated. It’s only when the object wholly goes within the event horizon that it is transmitted along the wormhole–assuming that it has entered the “transmitting” end of the wormhole.)

This is what happens with matter, but ordinary energy (i.e., not energy that is matter patterend by the stargate for transmission) isn’t affected by the one-way rule that applies to converted matter. As a result, normal E/M energy can travel two-ways through a wormhole, as when the M.A.L.P. communicates with Stargate Command by radio.

Got it?

MORE INFO FROM DR. SAMANTHA CARTER ON WORMHOLE PHYSICS.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

5 thoughts on “Wormhole Physics”

  1. From your link: “Heat energy, radiation, and even gravity can all be translated through an outgoing wormhole from the destination gate.”
    Ahh, he says as a light above his head turns on.
    Many thanks!

  5. I think it is government propaganda to keep the StarGate program under wraps, until Bush’s Project Prometheus is ready to fly. (He also created the NID, this is scary).
    Wormholes wouldn’t do the Star Trek matter-to-energy conversion thing. You would just have a shorter distance to travel on a Riemann surface.
    The real question is how did the Ancients blow up a microscopic wormhole into one the diameter of the Gate, without using a whole lot more power than you can get from Naquada. You’d need a planet’s worth of strange matter, IIRC.

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