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falenas108 comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong
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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?
You can probably think about it as the lines of a gravity field also going through the wormhole, and I believe the gravitational force would be 0 around the wormhole.
The actual answer involves thinking about gravity and spacetime as a geometry, which I don't think you want to answer your question.