Do Wormholes Break the First Law of Thermodynamics?

[RocketFire9]

Do wormholes break the First Law of Thermodynamics? 

Here's the problem:
Say Jeb wants to get up to the top of the VAB so he can parasail down. To do so, he takes his quad-taxi and flies up to the top. In doing so, he has increased his potential energy.
Now, Bob, trying to stop Jeb, uses a wormhole with one end on the ground and the other on top of the VAB. In doing so, he has also increased his potential energy, but because he entered the wormhole and immediately popped out on top of the VAB, I'm not sure where the energy came from. Does this break physics, or this just normal?

Edited January 11, 2023 by RocketFire9

[RCgothic]

Correct, the gain in potentially energy would need to be paid for somehow.

Most likely it would be as difficult to step through that wormhole as to climb the VAB in a few steps.

[RocketFire9]

Or the energy could come from the wormhole itself, maybe decreasing its size?

[K^2]

4 hours ago, RocketFire9 said:

Or the energy could come from the wormhole itself, maybe decreasing its size?

You can set up wormhole geometry very differently, but the conventional way is for there to be gravity either at the entrance to the wormhole or within the traversable part. Basically, what @RCgothic said. Going through the wormhole is going to require same work as climbing the ladder, but applied over shorter distance. So the force resisting you trying to go through from lower opening to the upper is going to be stronger than gravity.

[mikegarrison]

Keep in mind that "wormholes" are purely theoretical.

Also, the laws of thermodynamics are called "laws" because there is no known reason why they must be true, but it appears as though they are true in our universe. We have never found anything that clearly violated the Second Law (when the boundaries of the system were properly accounted for), but we don't know why the Second Law is true. It just seems to be that it is true.

In the novel Jumper (and later novels in the same series, especially Exo), some of the things that the protagonists can do make it clear that if you were able to form some kind of portal-like wormhole it would effectively be free energy. For example, one trick that the protagonists can do is form a portal between a point below the water and a point high above the water, which leads to an instant endless flow of water as long as they hold those portals open. If you put a turbine in the middle, it becomes clear how this is free energy and a violation of the Second Law (powered only by whatever unexplained ability the protagonists have to create such portals).

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Also, the laws of thermodynamics are called "laws" because there is no known reason why they must be true, but it appears as though they are true in our universe.

A case law.

6 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

ne trick that the protagonists can do is form a portal between a point below the water and a point high above the water, which leads to an instant endless flow of water as long as they hold those portals open.

1. Make a time machine connecting the moments when the kettle is boiled and when it yet not isn't.

2. Put a steam turbine in the time tunnel.

...

3. PROFIT !!!

[Abel Military Services]

In my opinion: 

VK-Class reality restructuring event. 

[farmerben]

More experiments on the nature of wormholes are needed to definitively answer this question.

Edited January 10, 2023 by farmerben

[kerbiloid]

They can be used as smoke pipes. (Not for smoking, but for the fireplaces and industrial plants).

Then we can produce as much carbon dioxide as we need, but this will be not our problem.

Also imagine a dark winter night on holidays. And Santa is squeezing out of the hyperdimensional fireplace....
Would be great.

Edited January 10, 2023 by kerbiloid

[farmerben]

Arthur C Clarke "The Light of Other Days".  Starts with wormholes that tap the core of the Earth for heat, revolutionizing clean energy.  It ends with (not gonna spoil it) more extreme uses for manmade wormholes.

[K^2]

21 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Keep in mind that "wormholes" are purely theoretical.

The math we have for them comes from General Relativity, which is by far the best verified scientific theory we have. If we can't rely on GR, we can rely on absolutely nothing in science, as it builds on the same foundational principles. This includes all of the quantum theory.

So while there are a lot of unknowns concerning how to practically achieve a wormhole, and even if we can possibly achieve them, there's a lot we can say with as much certainty as we have about anything scientific in so far as how they would work. How they deal with differences in potential energy is one of these things, as it falls firmly within the well established frameworks.

21 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Also, the laws of thermodynamics are called "laws" because there is no known reason why they must be true, but it appears as though they are true in our universe

I wouldn't say that either. OP asks about the second law, but the crux is really the first law, which is really just the conservation of energy. And again, within the framework of General Relativity, it is replaced by a much stronger statement: Stress-Energy is the conserved current of the Poincare local symmetry. (See: Noether's Theorem) Which is a roundabout way of saying that you can tie the space-time in a bow and wear it around your neck, and the energy and momentum are still going to be conserved quantities, although, with some caveats that account for it being relative to the coordinate system of choice.

Long story short, a wormhole is going to conserve energy whether we like it or not, adding to a long list of things that won't violate laws of thermodynamics.

And on a more general note, the second law also has some pretty strong foundation. The only part that's not firmly fixed in theory is the concept of arrow of time, primarily because it's really a whole bunch of related concepts. But in the nutshell, if the direction of flow of time is fixed to the direction of entropy increase, the rest of thermodynamics follows. And we can absolutely take an anthropocentric view of this, since memory formation is reliant on entropy increase, meaning we'll always remember states with lower entropy, considering them the past. I'm skipping over a lot of detail, but as you might imagine, "how time works," is a big topic.

[KSK]

4 hours ago, farmerben said:

Arthur C Clarke "The Light of Other Days".  Starts with wormholes that tap the core of the Earth for heat, revolutionizing clean energy.  It ends with (not gonna spoil it) more extreme uses for manmade wormholes.

I don’t remember that part. I thought they were developed essentially as remote cameras by a news mogul? It’s been a while since I read it though so I could be wrong.

Regarding entropy, I thought one deeper explanation for it came from statistical mechanics? Any given system will have far more disordered states than ordered states, so if it’s free to move between those states, it will tend towards greater disorder aka higher entropy?

 

[farmerben]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

I don’t remember that part. I thought they were developed essentially as remote cameras by a news mogul? It’s been a while since I read it though so I could be wrong.

Regarding entropy, I thought one deeper explanation for it came from statistical mechanics? Any given system will have far more disordered states than ordered states, so if it’s free to move between those states, it will tend towards greater disorder aka higher entropy?

 

Yep same story.  The ending is really great.

 

 

[RocketFire9]

21 hours ago, K^2 said:

wouldn't say that either. OP asks about the second law, but the crux is really the first law,

Sorry, yes, the title was supposed to say First Law. I was tired when I wrote that, and switched them up.

Edited January 11, 2023 by RocketFire9

[K^2]

1 hour ago, RocketFire9 said:

Sorry, yes, the title was supposed to say First Law. I was tired when I wrote that, and switched them up.

To be fair, breaking the second law is a simple way to satisfy the first. If you can absorb the ambient heat, that's a lot of free energy just sitting around.

[Bej Kerman]

On 1/9/2023 at 7:40 PM, K^2 said:

Going through the wormhole is going to require same work as climbing the ladder, but applied over shorter distance. So the force resisting you trying to go through from lower opening to the upper is going to be stronger than gravity.

Would a wormhole not simply be the same as if the roof of the VAB was right in front of you?

[K^2]

37 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Would a wormhole not simply be the same as if the roof of the VAB was right in front of you?

No, that would cause all sorts of gravitational nastiness near the sharp "edges". You want smooth transitions, so the most simple and natural shape is a sphere. Scott Manley made a video with a good simulation, linked below. The sphere would have to be large enough for its surface to be mostly flat on a scale of the object going in, so we'd be talking potentially tens of meters to be safe for a person. Not a problem for ships in space, but not convenient at all for use on Earth. You can make it more gateway-like by squshing that sphere into a thick pancake, making the main interface into a flat disk that transitions to rounded edges. Then you can set up a gangway to walk through it. Picture something like Stargate, but you can see through the face to the other side. But as you're walking trough, there is still depth to a transition, like a tunnel, much like in Scott Manley's video. And it's in that "tunnel" section that you'd have to go "uphill" or "downhill" to compensate for potential energy difference.

 

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, K^2 said:

No, that would cause all sorts of gravitational nastiness near the sharp "edges". You want smooth transitions, so the most simple and natural shape is a sphere. Scott Manley made a video with a good simulation, linked below. The sphere would have to be large enough for its surface to be mostly flat on a scale of the object going in, so we'd be talking potentially tens of meters to be safe for a person. Not a problem for ships in space, but not convenient at all for use on Earth. You can make it more gateway-like by squshing that sphere into a thick pancake, making the main interface into a flat disk that transitions to rounded edges. Then you can set up a gangway to walk through it. Picture something like Stargate, but you can see through the face to the other side. But as you're walking trough, there is still depth to a transition, like a tunnel, much like in Scott Manley's video. And it's in that "tunnel" section that you'd have to go "uphill" or "downhill" to compensate for potential energy difference.

 

Ran out of reactions, so I'll just say, fascinating stuff

[RocketFire9]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

the most simple and natural shape is a sphere.

Unlike most popular depictions of them. (Cough cough, DS9.)  Same problem with Blackholes.

Edited January 14, 2023 by RocketFire9

[TomKerbal]

From my (very restricted) understanding of wormholes no material structure can "survive" the transition through a wormhole, because everything except from masspoints is torn into pieces because of the gravitational gradient there. So they can never ever be used for something material. So this is pure SciFi for me. Perhaps we can send information through them for talking with friends in Andromeda galaxy ? I recently read an article in Scientific American concerning this, and I think they wrote that this is not possible. Not even that... bad times for wormhole traveling I think...

[farmerben]

Actually a blackhole the shape of a torus might work.  The center of the hole could be a portal, and the tidal forces would be balanced enough to be survivable.

[TomKerbal]

21 hours ago, farmerben said:

Actually a blackhole the shape of a torus might work.  The center of the hole could be a portal, and the tidal forces would be balanced enough to be survivable.

But isn't a black hole a singularity ? Do you mean a black hole with a 2D surface ? Is this possible ? Universe is full of wonder...

[farmerben]

1 hour ago, TomKerbal said:

But isn't a black hole a singularity ? Do you mean a black hole with a 2D surface ? Is this possible ? Universe is full of wonder...

A torus is like a donut.  The center is not a singularity.  It is conceivable, whether it exists or not is another matter. 

 

It would spin really fast to prevent collapsing.

Edited January 19, 2023 by farmerben

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, farmerben said:

A torus is like a donut.  The center is not a singularity.  It is conceivable, whether it exists or not is another matter. 

It would spin really fast to prevent collapsing.

Yes an collapsing star would keep its angular momentum, so you get pulsars there the equator spins at relativistic velocity for the millisecond ones, this spin can let an neutron star keeping from collapsing into an black hole.  Then the spin slows down this will happen if massive enough. 
Who raises the question that happens to the angular momentum, I assume the donut singularity solves this. 

[K^2]

22 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Who raises the question that happens to the angular momentum, I assume the donut singularity solves this.

Honestly, what's happening inside the black hole's horizon is kind of a philosophical question. It's a bit like, "What happened before the big bang." Our physics is fully disconnected from whatever's on the other side.

The mathematical model that matches up with what's going outside of the rotating black hole is the Kerr metric. If we do pretend that it describes reality inside the black hole, then the singularity of a rotating black hole is ring-shaped - that is precisely a ring of zero thickness, rather than a donut - and it contains much of the black hole's angular momentum. The rest is in the "rotating" energy of the gravitational field itself.

The interior solution is unstable from perspective of an exterior observer, however, and has a lot of non-physical properties, like permitting time travel. So, you know, take all of that with a grain of salt. From our perspective, there's an event horizon, an ergosphere just below, and whatever's inside that has a lot of mass and a lot of angular momentum, and that's all that matters to a physical world in our universe.

Edit: Though, there's an interesting caveat. Unlike discussion of time-before-the-big-bang, theoretically speaking, with sufficiently massive black hole, such as the one at the center of our galaxy, you can travel into the interior and find out what that looks like and how it works. If Kerr metric is at all a reliable guide, after passing through both the outer and inner ergospheres, if your craft survived the radiation and had enough fuel to perform the necessary maneuvers, you can get past the inner event horizon, to emerge in some sort of the interior space that should be safe to navigate, and from your local perspective, will extend to infinity. That space is yours to explore, and you can learn all of the secrets of what lies within the black hole, But there is absolutely no way to come back to normal space to let us all know, nor send a message, nor in any way influence what's going on in our universe.

So maybe, instead, I should be comparing it to the afterlife, or something like it. It's a place you can go to, but nobody can come back from, and so we can't possibly know what's there.

Edited January 20, 2023 by K^2