An interactive computational exploration of traversable-wormhole physics — the Morris–Thorne / Ellis metric, geodesics through the throat, wave propagation in curved space, and the exotic-matter problem that makes the whole thing impossible to actually build.
🌲 Part of the Brokenbranch Lab — one human and a cluster of AI agents shipping strange software in public. This is one experiment among many; the front door lists them all.
This is NOT peer-reviewed research. It is an exploratory tool for understanding the mathematics of wormhole spacetimes and for sharpening questions. The geometry it models is mathematically consistent; the engineering it implies is impossible with known physics. Where that matters, this README says so explicitly.
- Open
index.htmlfor the landing page and results, or double-clickplayground.htmlfor the interactive simulator. It runs straight off disk (file://) — no build step, no dependencies, no server, no network fetches. - In the playground: drag the hero view to look around, scroll to dolly the camera along the throat axis, and click any pixel to re-integrate that exact ray on the CPU and read off its impact parameter, deflection, and winding. Use the header buttons to Send Doughnut 🍩 (watch the mascot cross the throat), Traverse (fly through), or take the Tour. A startup self-test chip reports whether the physics passes its assertions.
- For the deeper numerical experiments, run the Python scripts (see Scripts).
| Concept | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Traversable geometry | Φ=0 Ellis drainhole metric ds² = −dt² + dl² + (l²+r0²)dΩ² with an open throat |
| Gravitational lensing | Per-pixel geodesic raytracer — every pixel RK4-integrates a real null geodesic in a WebGL2 shader, so the Einstein ring, ghost-image winding, and the window into a second universe emerge from the integration; nothing is painted on |
| The two universes | Procedurally distinct skies (cool/blue side A, amber/alien side B) sampled in-shader at ray exit — zero texture fetches |
| Particle traversal | Doughnut mascot crossing the throat on a real timelike geodesic, gravitationally lensed and tidally deformed (radial stretch / lateral squeeze) by the Ellis tidal tensor — small throat ⇒ spaghettification, with an honest survival verdict for the doughnut (ξ=0.1 m) and a human (ξ=2 m) |
| Camera traversal | Traverse flythrough — fly the static-metric camera through the throat; drag to look back mid-flight |
| Ray inspector | Click any pixel to re-integrate that ray on the CPU and read its impact parameter, deflection, winding count, and destination universe |
| Wave mechanics | Curved-space wave equation with the corrected potential V = ℓ(ℓ+1)/r² + r0²/r⁴; the m-mode shell renders both as a glowing volume in the raytraced scene and as a 1D plot |
| Stability | Dynamic throat evolution — cutting exotic matter visibly pinches the throat shut (pedagogical toy; the static Ellis throat is genuinely unstable) |
| Exotic-matter ledger | Live "Jupiter counter" computing the negative-energy requirement from the closed form and scrolling past the orders-of-magnitude Casimir gap (both kg/m³ and J/m³) |
| Formation | Attempt to create a throat from flat spacetime (Python scripts) |
playground.html is no longer a slider dashboard — it's a single hero view of a
real spacetime. A WebGL2 fragment shader RK4-integrates an actual null geodesic of
the Ellis metric for every pixel, so what you see — the Einstein ring, the
multiple ghost images winding the unstable photon orbit at the throat, the amber
sky of a second procedurally distinct universe glimpsed through the opening — is the
solution, not a painting of it. Drag to look, scroll to dolly along the throat axis,
and click any pixel to fire the same ray on the CPU and read back its impact
parameter, deflection, and winding count: awe on the left, the equation on the right.
The house mascot does the science. Press Send Doughnut 🍩 and a glazed torus falls through the throat on a real timelike geodesic — lensed as it rounds the Einstein ring and tidally deformed (stretched along its path, squeezed across it) by the exact Ellis tidal tensor. The HUD reports, honestly, whether the doughnut and a human survive the tides at the current throat radius; shrink the throat and watch "SPAGHETTIFIED" appear. Traverse flies the camera all the way through; the m-mode wave packet renders as a luminous shell that sails through for m=0 and piles up against the centrifugal barrier for m=5; cutting exotic matter pinches the ring visibly shut; and the live exotic-matter ledger scrolls you past the Casimir gap one Jupiter at a time. A Guided Tour walks all five verdicts in order, an optional sonification lets you hear a wave packet cross to the far side, and a startup self-test chip proves the physics matches its reference values before you touch a thing. Everything renders the exact Φ=0 solution — spectacle that visualizes real geodesics and never fakes them. Falls back to the Canvas-2D panels if WebGL2 is unavailable, and stays ≥30 fps on a 4K window via a dynamic-resolution governor.
| Result | Verdict | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Geodesic traversal | ✅ Works | Particles cross cleanly for zero angular momentum |
| Angular-momentum filtering | ✅ Robust | m=0 passes freely; higher-m modes reflect off the centrifugal barrier at the throat. Pure geometry. |
| Stability | Stable configs exist only with continuously sustained exotic matter. Remove it → collapse. | |
| Formation from flat space | ❌ Impossible (classically) | Exotic matter can deform spacetime but cannot change its topology. Creating a wormhole needs new physics. |
| Exotic-matter budget | ❌ 60-order gap | A 1 m throat needs ~10⁴³ kg/m³ of negative energy density; the Casimir effect gives ~10⁻⁴ J/m³. |
The honest bottom line: the mathematics is beautiful and internally consistent, the physics is self-consistent, but the engineering is impossible with anything we know how to build. The exotic-matter requirement is the fundamental barrier — not an engineering detail.
From the sibling Kozyrev Mirror experiment: a chiral spiral boundary generates angular momentum from zero. Here, a wormhole throat filters angular momentum, blocking high-m modes. One creates, one selects — and both effects are purely geometric, needing no material properties. That symmetry is the prettiest thing in this little suite.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
playground.html |
Interactive simulator (zero dependencies) |
traverse.py |
Particle traversal through the Ellis throat |
field_propagation.py |
Wave-packet propagation + angular-momentum filtering |
stability.py |
Dynamic stability analysis and phase space |
formation.py |
Formation-from-flat-space attempts (single / dual / pulsed) |
spacetime.py |
Shared metric / geometry helpers |
CONCEPT.md |
Original design document and the physics background |
python traverse.py # see particles cross
python field_propagation.py # see waves propagate and filter by m
python stability.py # see the stability map
python formation.py # watch formation fail to change topology- Morris, M.S. & Thorne, K.S. "Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel." American Journal of Physics, 1988.
- Ellis, H.G. "Ether flow through a drainhole." Journal of Mathematical Physics, 1973.
- Maldacena, J. & Susskind, L. "Cool horizons for entangled black holes" (ER=EPR). Fortschritte der Physik, 2013.
- Lentz, E.W. "Breaking the warp barrier." Classical and Quantum Gravity, 2021.
- Bobrick, A. & Martire, G. "Introducing physical warp drives." Classical and Quantum Gravity, 2021.
A collaboration between human scientific curiosity and Claude (Anthropic). Part of the Coherence Lab physics playground.
This repo is the source of truth. The live copy at
brokenbranchdevwebsite/lab/wormhole is a separate tree that carries prod-only
edits (injected SEO/OG/JSON-LD in the HTML <head>). Sync runtime changes with:
scripts/sync-to-prod.sh # dry run (JS only); --apply to write
scripts/sync-to-prod.ps1 # PowerShell equivalentIt copies the js/*.js payload by default and refuses to overwrite the HTML +
README unless you pass --force-html, so prod's SEO head survives. The script
only touches the local website working tree -- it never commits or pushes; review
and deploy through the website repo's own workflow.
MIT License. See LICENSE.
See CONTRIBUTING.md. Negative results are welcome and valued.
"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose." — J.B.S. Haldane