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To any physicists out there:
This idea came to me while I was replaying the game Portal. Basically, suppose humanity one day developed the ability to create wormholes. Would one be able to generate an infinite amount of energy by placing one end of a wormhole directly below the other before dropping an object into the lower portal (thus periodically resetting said object's gravitational potential energy while leaving its kinetic energy unaffected)? This seems like a blatant violation of the first law of thermodynamics, so I'm guessing it would fail due to some reason or other (my guess goes to weird behavior of the gravitational field near the wormhole, which interferes with the larger field of the Earth), but since I'm nowhere close to being a physicist, I thought I'd ask about it on LessWrong.
So? Any ideas as to what goes wrong in the above example?
I am just taking wormholes to mean "altered connectivity of space" and leave out the "massive concentrations of mass" aspect.
The curious thing about portals portals is that they somehow magically know to flip gravity when a object travels thourht. If the portal is just ordinary space there shouldn't be a sudden gradient to the gravity field but it should go smoothly from one direction to the other. And in additon gravity ought to work throught portals. that would mean that if you have a portal in a ceiling it ought to pull stuff through... (read more)