Following the paper of Morris and Thorne on wormholes as a tool for teaching general relativity, we present the visual appearance of this simple spacetime using an embedding diagram and a raytracing program. Even if such a wormhole is not physically reasonable, we take the risk and take a short trip to an unreasonable parallel universe.
REFERENCES
1.
Carl Sagan, Contact (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985).
2.
Micheal S.
Morris
and Kip S.
Thorne
, “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity
,” Am. J. Phys.
56
, 395
–412
(1988
).3.
Matt Visser, Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking (AIP, Woodbury, NY, 1995).
4.
C. W. Misner, K. S. Thorne, and J. A. Wheeler, Gravitation (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1973).
5.
Wolfgang Rindler, Relativity–Special, General and Cosmology (Oxford University Press, New York, 2001).
6.
Alwin Gröne, “Entwurf eines objektorientierten Visualisierungssystems auf der Basis von Raytracing,” Ph.D. thesis, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 1996.
7.
Daniel Weiskopf, “Visualization of four-dimensional spacetimes,” Ph.D. thesis, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, 2001.
8.
See EPAPS Document No. E-AJPIAS-72-014407, for accompanying color figures and small animations.
A direct link to this document may be found in the online article’s HTML reference section. The document may also be reached via the EPAPS homepage (http://www.aip.org/pubservs/epaps.html) or from ftp.aip.org in the directory /epaps. See the EPAPS homepage for more information.
9.
W. H. Press, S. A. Teukolsky, W. T. Vetterling, and B. P. Flannery, Numerical Recipes in (Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, 1992).
10.
Kepler-Cluster computer, 〈http://kepler.sfb382-zdv.uni-tuebingen.de/kepler/〉.
This content is only available via PDF.
© 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2004
American Association of Physics Teachers
AAPT members receive access to the American Journal of Physics and The Physics Teacher as a member benefit. To learn more about this member benefit and becoming an AAPT member, visit the Joining AAPT page.
