Wormhole physics question

[chuch]

It's mentioned several times that wormholes are not two-way, so say a wormhole is established from the SGC to Chulak, what would happen if someone on Chulak tried to walk through the wormhole?

Spoilers ahead




I can't remember the name of the episode, it's the one where Jack fakes leaving the stargate program and goes to work for Maybourne to steal alien technology. Near the end of the episode, the Asgard start beaming technology out of their base and Jack dials out to Earth and says he'll "hold the door open" he goes through and sticks his gun in the event horizon of an incoming wormhole. I just wanted to add this because it shows that something going into an incoming wormhole will not be destroyed.

[tomaso88]

yeah but the stargate doesn't transport you until the full object (your body) has passed through that event horizen so I think if he had put his whole body in and not just his arm he would have democratised or dematerialise watever the word is back to my point it was because he hadn't fully stepped in

[SaberBlade]

Jack's gun doesn't change anything. If he had thrown his gun into the gate then it would have been destroyed, but the Stargate operates by storing a whole object, then transmitting it to the other side gate. As Jack was holding the gun and he was standing beside the gate, it never stored or tried to transmit him.

If you want an example of something being destroyed by going through the wrong direction, the episode 'A Hundred Days' shows a MALP being destroyed this way.

[Gen. Chris]

I think I remember reading that it will either spit the person back out, or do the process of moving the person through the wormhole backwards...as in, turning them into energy, but not turning them back.

[chuch]

oh yeah, I forgot about the storage part of the stargate, I'm watching through the series again and it was just a random thought that popped into my mind.

Thanks for replies everyone.

[Raineman]

it would kill them. And the episode u were talking about you never see jack come through the wormhole and then put his hand back in the wormhole, maybe he didnt let his hand and gun come out of the wormhole. u will never know till the government admits their is a real stargate out there LOL

[Snowman37]

O'Neill held the stargate open with his arm, not just his gun. To disintegrate, he'd have to step back into the stargate entirely.

[escyos]

Well the only answer we got was: here. The last paragrah which includes a citation note to one of Joe Mallozzi's blog posts.

Like it or not it is the ONLY definitive answer we got.

[Quizziard]

It's mentioned several times that wormholes are not two-way, so say a wormhole is established from the SGC to Chulak, what would happen if someone on Chulak tried to walk through the wormhole?

They're 1.5 way, rather than two-way: radio waves (every show) and gravity (A Matter of Time) can travel in the opposite direction.

[Xaeden]

I used to speculate that it stored a pattern in that gate and just kept it there until the gate was dialed again and the buffer was automatically cleared. In which case, I figured that they'd be able to recover whatever was stuck in the buffer via the method used in "48 Hours" if they could get to the gate before it was used again.

[terminator]

Episode 2 the very tip of Kawalski's head is dematerialized and removed when it is held inside the event horizon and the gate is shut off. This was an outgoing wormhole rather than incoming but as others have said the entire body has to cross back through incoming UNLESS the gate shuts off and then anything inside disappears. In episode 4 I think of Atlantis "38 minutes" when the front half of ship dematerialized in space gate you actually see an entire body be pulled back through an outgoing wormhole when just the hand was the only thing that hadn't gone through. That seems a bit far fetched but is consistent with what has been said concerning things not being completely sent through until the whole thing passes the event horizon. But then this brings up an inconsistency in that the gate completely dematerialized a pair of human bodies (pilot and copilot redshirts) yet they will die according to sheoppard because the entire SHIP they are in didn't cross event horizon.

[LT. COL. John Sheppard]

It's mentioned several times that wormholes are not two-way, so say a wormhole is established from the SGC to Chulak, what would happen if someone on Chulak tried to walk through the wormhole?

Spoilers ahead




I can't remember the name of the episode, it's the one where Jack fakes leaving the stargate program and goes to work for Maybourne to steal alien technology. Near the end of the episode, the Asgard start beaming technology out of their base and Jack dials out to Earth and says he'll "hold the door open" he goes through and sticks his gun in the event horizon of an incoming wormhole. I just wanted to add this because it shows that something going into an incoming wormhole will not be destroyed.

i have a thread about that http://forum.gateworld.net/threads/83285-Event-Horizon

[SF_and_Coffee]

Well the only answer we got was: here. The last paragrah which includes a citation note to one of Joe Mallozzi's blog posts.

Like it or not it is the ONLY definitive answer we got.

They're 1.5 way, rather than two-way: radio waves (every show) and gravity (A Matter of Time) can travel in the opposite direction.

It's fanon, not canon, but just for grins I made Carter explain this to Daniel and Jack during a conversation in my fanfic All That We Leave Behind (which follows from the episode "A Matter of Time"). Daniel has been trying to figure out how the gravity from the black hole propagated through the gate to the SGC, and Carter launches into Carterspeak:

They hiked along for another couple of minutes in silence, until Daniel broke it with a question.

"Sam, there's something I still don't get."

"What's that, Daniel?"

He frowned, blue eyes squinting behind his glasses the way he always did when he was trying to visualize something just beyond his understanding. "Well, when the SGC dialed out to P3W-451, what caused the black hole's gravity field to leak back through the wormhole? I didn't even know that was possible."

Carter shook her head. "Neither did I, actually, until it happened. But as far as I can tell from my calculations, it's got to be part of the same mechanism that allows MALP telemetry and other comm signals to travel through the gate bi-directionally, even though matter transmission is strictly one-way. Conditions inside the wormhole simply affect matter and energy in different ways. The gate breaks down and reconstitutes whatever matter enters or exits, depending on whether it is in sending or receiving mode. That's part of the difference between an incoming and an outgoing wormhole. But since energy is already energy, it gets transmitted in its original state. The gate doesn't have to do anything to it, so it just passes through, regardless of what the gate itself is set to do. Gravity is energy, rather than matter, so it passed through the same way. This was the first time that we'd ever encountered a gravitational field of that magnitude, which is probably why we never noticed the effect before."

"So gate technology treats matter and energy completely differently, right?" Daniel asked for clarification.

"Well, yes. I mean, inside the wormhole, everything is energy, and exists outside of our universe in a realm where the laws of physics operate differently from what we're used to. The wormhole itself can theoretically be affected by structures in our universe projecting into this super-universe beyond, but within the wormhole, our physical laws simply don't apply, which makes wormhole physics a completely different field. Once I went back and re-did the calculations last night, I realized this was the same reason why once Colonel Cromwell had passed our gate's event horizon, the gravity and even the bomb blast would have ceased to affect him in any normal sense for as long as he remained within the wormhole. From there, it was only a matter of calculating how the energy introduced by the bomb would combine with the gravitational energy and the time dilation to affect the internal geometry of the wormhole itself, including the time it would take an energy pattern representing an object inside to complete transit from one end to the other, compared to how long it was from the time of entry until the wormhole jumped. Once we knew how far the jump was, that gave me some figures to work with that I didn't have before. The model I've constructed still isn't perfect, but it was close enough" — she waved an arm, indicating the forest around them — "to send us on a rescue mission."

Daniel was nodding now, while Teal'c looked intrigued. Carter glanced at the colonel and noticed that his eyes had taken on that glazed look he got whenever she tried to explain the science behind something.

"Care to simplify that for me, Captain? It sounds like you're saying that we're transmitted as energy when we travel through the gate, and we only become matter again as we exit. Have I got that even close to correct?"

She hid a smile. "What did you think 'molecular deconstruction' meant?"

"Carter?"

"Sir?"

"Did it ever occur to you that I've spent the past couple of years trying not to think about it?"