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ZankerH 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?
At a glance, it seems like you're asking for extrapolation from a "suppose X - therefore X" - type statement, where X is the invalidation of conservation laws.
I don't quite understand this statement. The only real premise I can see in my original comment is
(Please feel free to correct me if you were in fact referring to some other premise.)
Wormholes are generally agreed to be a possible solution to Einstein's equations--they don't, in and of themselves, violate conservation of energy. The scenario I proposed above is a method for generating infinite energy if physics actually worked that way, but since I'm confident that it doesn't, the proposed scenario is almost certainly flawed in some way. I asked my question because I wasn't sure how it was flawed. Whatever the flaw is, however, I doubt it lies in the wormhole premise.
EDIT: Also see the replies from shminux and Squark.