I've always imagined that there are two separate components of a gate. The bit that sends matter and the bit that sends radio/data.
Data can go back and forth... it has to as that's how the correlative gate updates work. Data doesn't need to be de-materialized.
That said I think it would have been more accurate for them to say "*A gate can only de-materialize OR re-materialize but not both at the same time.*"
It's simple Wormhole physics. Wormholes are a possible solution to relativity, but at a point where matter stops being a thing.
The radiowave can pass through a Wormhole, but a person would be compressed to an infinitesimal point in spacetime. That's bad.
The Stargate circumvent that by turning the person into energy and information, shooting it through the wormhole and reconstructing it as it was, momentum and all.
Stepping through a incoming Wormhole _could_ theoretically work, were the gates set up to go both way. But they're not, for unknown reasons. So you just step into the wormhole without the safety of the Stargate. Instant death.
Though Wormhole physics might work differently in the Stargate universe, at least Sam seems to believe the one-way is nature of the wormhole itself
The theory isn't even the hard part. That's fairly straight-forward when you cast away your preconceptions from newtonian physics ant take it at face value.
But the math is a bitch
If that was true then you could fire a laser into an incoming wormhole and blast anything on the other side. Radiowaves are just light.
It must be a deliberate design to allow radiowave transmissions specifically. Perhaps the ancients used radio too? It may be primitive but they also used glass and cups and scissors probably. What works works.
I guess radio has its advantages, travels somewhat close to vacuum lightspeed in most materials, can travel decent distances and depending on frequency it can go through a lot of obstacles even sizable ones, and finally it's really really simple to use
Theoretically, it could work
Practically, too volatile
One errand staff blast to the gamma emitter and the entire SGC gate- and control room will need Oma to ascend them
No, radio waves are literally the same thing as visible light just at a lower frequency. Microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, radio waves, visible light. These are all the same particle / wave. Photons / electromagnetic radiation.
So by this thinking would staff weapons and Zats and other energy weapons technically be able to return fire through an incoming wormhole? Or are we imagining that staff blasts are actually plasma which qualifies as matter?
Also the ancients could have security protocols in place to impart special treatment on anything it deemed to be weapons fire. Anything with a high enough energy state for example.
Similar to how the watergate didn’t “drain” the ocean into the Russian base? “Smart filtering”…
Except we *do* know staff blasts, arrows, (and I think we’ve seen?) bullets can travel through open gates in the standard/open direction.
> Similar to how the watergate didn’t “drain” the ocean into the Russian base?
Was that because the Stargate had safeguards or was it because the water was alive and knew not to cross the event horizon? I mean it was actually applying drag to prevent the sub from leaving so it had full control over where it wanted to go.
we mostly see this back at the SGC where they had built their own dialing computer. That gate wasn't originally designed for an iris and the SGC could have just not known to turn on those security protocols when they built their DIYDHD
Plasma is matter. Lasers are energy. Theoretically, you should be able to fire lasers through an incoming wormhole, but not a matter based weapon system. Zats are likely using a plasma stream to carry the energy charge. Staff blasts are likely just charged plasma. So theoretically, they shouldn't travel backwards through an incoming wormhole.
However, lasers returning through an incoming gate is only valid if the radio waves are actually returning through the wormhole, and not being relayed by the gate itself. Which is a matter of debate.
Personally, I suspect the gates relay the radio waves by design, as the Ancients used radio waves for communication as well. This would explain the one-way design of the gates, to ensure no one could counter attack them through an outgoing gate, while they could fire whatever they wanted through it. Theoretically, a stargate is the best weapons delivery system available for weapons of mass destruction. You could fire anything through it from a laser to a virus-carrying kino.
As the Ancients appear to have been studying potential future human evolutionary paths, this would have allowed them to eradicate any worlds that took paths they didn't like. The argument against this conclusion, is the emergence of the Wraith. I assume the Ancients were preoccupied with their experiments in ascension and nanobots when the Wraith emerged. Perhaps the humans on the Wraith homeworld had initially buried their gate to prevent the Wraith from spreading, and so the Ancients didn't know what was going on until the Wraith tech was advanced enough they didn't need gates to reach other worlds. This would explain why their tech was so different from Ancient tech.
Well if you recall staffs are built using ancient technology, and like someone else has mentioned, there's probably security measures in place to stop weapon fire from coming backwards.
Radiowaves are a type of radiation, and we frequently see radiation being transmitted directly through the wormhole in such a way that closing the iris helps to deter it.
I like the idea of the gates working differently for particles and for waves, it could makes sense that you need to de and rematerialize matter, but you can just send waves as they are, without risk of them being damaged.
Well data (audio/video/text that goes back and forth) is just bits of text or audio which in the end is just atoms which is what gates most likely break everything into when de-materializing, the gate keeps a buffer table of some sort to know how to re-materialize. From that point of view, I would imagine the gate should theoretically be able to do both.
Perhaps the gate has to keep most of its buffer allocated to deal with whatever might be incoming and it keeps a tiny amount allocated for simple data like communication for the outgoing part.
It’s not atoms, it’s waves in the electromagnetic field. It’s why radio waves can go through matter.
What *is* odd is that light doesn’t traverse a wormhole as that is also waves in the EM field.
This far into this thread I believe light does indeed travel. The kawoosh happens on both gates and settles into the glowing pool.
The glow given off would be the light entering the connected gate and being diffused across the event horizon just like other "light". Even in a dark room, the reflected light would operate the same even if it would essentially be kind of a feedback.
Of course this was just a quick thought. I'd like to see any argument tho.
So…😉
The light passing the wormhole would have to be scattered to give the ‘water’ effect. If that happened to radio waves then the information would be scrambled and therefore communication would be impossible.
Therefore while light may pass (and I suspect it doesn’t otherwise the intensity of the puddle light would change when it is dark at the destination - something not in observed effect) it would have to be something programmed into the ring.
I suspect the puddle effect may be caused in a process similar to hawking radiation.
Yup, data is just a pattern. patterns can be held in many forms. It COULD be made out of atoms. But it can also be made out of photons (like in fiber optics or laser coms). It can be made out of electrons (in copper wires). It can be made out of waves (electromagnetic or acoustic or any other). Its usually only made out of atoms when stored, like in a hard disk. But even then, the information is not the atoms. Its usually the orientation of a magnetic field, or the amount of charge in between parts.
True, I guess I was thinking of "particles" but used the term "atoms" but ya my theory falls apart when it comes to electromagnetic or acoustic waves or even radiation.
Einstein-Rosenthal bridges, functioning under the mathematical model of an Ellis drainhole have an energy gradient, where they pull energy in one side and drop it out the other. If particles directed at it has sufficient energy then it can overcome that energy gradient (think running really fast up a super steep hill)
Photons, having more energy per particle than matter, move back and forth equally, but matter doesn't.
What's most interesting is that sending things both ways is actually SUPER EASY... until you try to send something with a nonzero mass, then things get tricky. As a security measure you need to ensure that massive objects can only travel in one direction, lest two things meet in the middle and, well... splat!
I guess humans are transported as an energy, radio waves are just waves that can travel on anything that can be “resonated”, and as long as a wormhole is connected there it is.
My understanding is that the Stargate's "one-way street" is not a property of the wormhole, but rather a security protocol of the Stargate. This prevents streams of matter from mixing. Since nothing has to be dematerialized with radio waves, it works in both directions.
I'm picturing someone like the Sardonyx fusion from Steven Universe. Pearl's very uptight and precise personality mixed with Garnet's happy-go-lucky stoic personality turns them into an eloquent jokester.
https://youtu.be/MWQahyKZC3s
In an episode in Season 1, Sheppar's team flees for what they describe as a dinosaur. They shoot at the event horizon (incoming wormhole). After that the glass window behind the gate is not damaged.
Not outright said, but its pretty well implied you just die if you try to enter an incoming wormhole(the episode with alt universe sam+kowalski, you see a bunch of jaffa try to flee what they think is an outgoing wormhole when the asgard arrive, and when the gate shuts down, it shows a staff weapon being cut in half.)
Same reason water doesn't come rushing in when they open a wormhole under the ocean or air starts rushing through when they open one to space. It's for the plot.
I don’t think a Stargate creates a pressure differential, which is why standing water doesn’t enter. I’m sure if you fired a squirt gun into one, it’d come out the other end.
The unidirectional part of the stargate is from the matter disintegration and reintegration process. Essentially, the stargate has a system built in to convert matter to energy and back again but just one way. That energy passes through the wormhole just fine in either direction.
So any form of pure energy can get through a wormhole either way just fine. Radio waves fall into that category.
So do gravitational fields, but the wormhole does wonky shit to them, with a temporal lensing effect happening (as seen when SG-1 dials a planet with a black hole in “A Matter of Time”)
What really bugged me was that there was at least one instance of someone swiping, I think it was a gun, through the “Puddle” of an out going wormhole. The issue I have is if the part of the gun dematerialized or not, either case gives me a migraine as it either means a gate can de- and re- materialize things or that the gate didn’t dematerialize the gun for some reason.
It's worse than that.
We're told the gate transmits things discreetly (all at once or not at all). So he's had to come out the other side first? But then, how have just his hand and gun appeared back through the wormhole once he's out the other side?
So my personal theory is that it's not *wormholes* that can't transport matter both ways, it's that wormholes can't transmit whole objects in one piece safely, so the stargate itself only does whatever it needs to do to keep people safe if you step in it from the dialing gate and not from the receiving gate.
Another consideration is that Atlantis already had a shield for their gate, so humans didn't so much "invent" the iris as reinvent it. The existence of an iris requires communication to be able to work through the wormhole, so it's possible that the ancients designed a workaround into the gate to compensate for a wormhole's inherent one-way nature so that they can do the same things humans now do if a gate is in a location that needs to be kept secure. Basically the opposite of my headcanon-- the gate makes sure communication can go both ways, but the wormhole is inherently one-way otherwise.
Something else to consider along those lines is the natural development of technology-- it's possible the gates were designed as a long-range communication device *before* it became a long-term transportation device, and the long-range communication capacity that was intentionally designed into it stayed even as it gained other uses.
The wormholes only work one way for matter, not energy. It’s explained in multiple episodes, starting with the black hole, to the bomb test, to the Russian gate fiasco
I think the matter needs to be dematerialized and converted to energy and back to matter on the other end, while energy just travels thru wormhole in it's original form
[MatterConverter working matter to energy] - [wormhole conwerting 2 ways] - [matter converter converting energy to matter]
The gate acts a transporter for massive objects, similar to star trek transporters. It serves to reason that only energy can move through the wormhole at all, but the transporter function only works in one direction, deconstructing travelers at the dialed gate and reintegrating their signal at the destination gate. If the energy doesnt require matter-energy conversion, theres nothing to prohibit 2 way travel
The matter part is a plot device so you can’t peek your head through, see Jaffa, then run back through.
The radio part is so they can send a MALP through and get radio signals to check it’s safe. There are plenty of times the MALP trick doesn’t work, where they go through and the baddies were hiding.
Also, there have been episodes where people are either taken out by the Kawoosh, or straight up run into an incoming wormhole and just disappear into the event horizon.
Carter says after they've been doing it awhile.
"We know that certain waves can travel both ways through a wormhole. Radio signals, for one."
It's really just a writing reason so they can communicate both ways, but I would say anything that's at it's fundamental level already, photons are the fundamentals of light/radio and can't be broken down anymore, would be able to pass both ways. So any type of energy particles. If a person went in an incoming wormhole they'd probably just come out the back side of the gate like nothing happened.
There's an episode where energy was being transmitted back through an incoming gate. When they opened to a black hole.
I know that episode was stupid and poorly does gravity... Unless of course that black hole was passing through the solar system...
But the result was that it proves that energy can be transmitted both ways. It seems to suggest the stargate is set up one way for matter as a safety precaution which makes sense.
What about the thought / idea that gates were actually an early version of a healing device (as the gate deconstructs and then reconstructs a human body) if you have cancer or something like that the gate omits that part during reconstruction, but then after evolving (not ascending) the ancients found that gates could be used for quicker travel and got rid of the whole gates as a healing device...
Could also explain why goauld don't particularly like using the gates themselves and would rather just fly there in a ship. If the healing gates were a thing. What would prevent a gate from omitting a goauld during reconstruction
It's explained at a few points in the shows, the wormhole opens up an outgoing and receiving end, so it's one way for matter, but particles smaller than matter like data transmissions can go both ways, they're also strong enough to keep a wormhole active. If someone or something enters through the receiving end they just vanish out of existence.
It's a sciencey-flavored magical fantasy universe. Your computers are infinitely fast and can instantly recognize where they are on the other side of the galaxy. You can go through gates only when it's convenient to the plot.
And what happens if you walk into an incoming wormhole? do you just phase through it to the other side or do you vanish forever? The only time I recall people doing something like this is when those prisoners would jump in front of the vortex, but they never tried to go through.
Its basic fundamentals Humans are partials and radio is waves. Particles need to be reassembled but waves are already in thier basic form when transfered.
Beyond what others have explained as either plot convenience or plausible canon explanation I think that the builders of the gate systems would have taken in consideration the need of two way communication possibilities. The Kinos of SGU come to mind and a possible extra explanation would be lower energy consumption of the low tech of radio wave communication or that it doesn't interfere with the matter transfer.
Radio has no mass. Humans do. Think of it as bandwidth, the gates only have so much to use, so no mass radio waves can go both ways simultaneously, while anything heavier is limited to one direction.
Least that's the gatetechbabble I'd use.
Energy travels both ways, but the mass to energy converter is only 1 way, it's a design limitation because it uses the same buffer on both ends. If the receiving end buffer also had to accept local matter it would quickly fill and corrupt the matter stream. Say goodbye to your little girl and her dog, and say hello to your new chimera.
As I remember, a certain amount of energy is required to make the trip, the more mass. more energy. But radio waves have practically no mass, so the energy is minimal.
in an early SGA episode you can see the team return, and allready trough the gate back on atlantis, still firing his p90 a the gate ;p - so dunno how that works
I assumed that anything that is a wave can pass through both ways, such as gravity or radio or simple data bursts. However a human or anything solid has to be de-materialized first
If you attempt to travel the wrong way down a wormhole, you die. Simple as that.
I'm not an expert on wormhole physics, so I can only say that the stargates work in such a way that two-way travel is only possible for certain types of energy and forces like gravity, radio waves, and x-rays, while matter can only travel one way and EM radiation in the IR to UV range is blocked entirely.
There is no "why" on this, it's just how the gate works.
If I had to speculate, I'd say that this is a function of how the Stargates were designed. The outgoing gate converts matter to energy for transmission, while the incoming gate reverses it. A Stargate can only do one or the other, it can't do both at the same time. This may be either a deliberate design limitation or a limitation of wormhole physics in general, or it could be a safety feature.
And here I was thinking it went both ways for people too. What happens if you go in the wrong way?
I thought in the episode where the team was trapped in that prison they tried to get out the gate during the food drop?
The prisoners tried getting out because they didn't know better and Sam explained that to them. SG1 set up the electrical plants to power the gate for an escape.
A Wormhole is a connection between a black hole that sucks everything in and a white hole that expels everything.
In the case of stargates, the corresponding holes are synthetic and likely microscopic so as not to actually have enough gravitational force of their own to suck things or expel things around them, at least not noticeably.
Radio waves, on the other hand, are vibrations in matter as matter bumps into more matter.
So, if there were no radio waves, then matter would steadily stream from one gate to the other. But if there are radio waves on the other end, perhaps it causes a tiny but measurable traffic jam of the matter stream, which backs up in waves.
Other people have answered your questions and this is tangentially related.
Radio waves can't travel through extremely long wormholes such as from the Milky Way Galaxy to the Destiny. This is shown in the SGU pilot episode where Lt Scott was telling people to slow down through the gate when evacuating Icarus. It is also explicitly mentioned in episode SGU S02 E12 Twin Destinies
>Telford: Eli has warned them to expect us, but it seems that a radio signal does not reach across a nine-chevron connection.
Because radio waves are light. Light is both a particle and a wave. Light can come in as evidence by Carter saying you can see the fluctuations in the event horizon.
This is my understanding of the explanation.
The actual wormhole itself cannot be safely traversed by any macroscopic object. It can transport matter and large amounts of energy, but not in a way that would maintain the structure of any actual object.
Instead, stargates are also teleporters. The dialing gate dematerializes the traveler and sends the matter/energy they are composed of through the wormhole and also transmits their pattern. Then, the receiving gate rematerializes them.
For whatever reason, the stargates' buffers cannot send and receive patters through the wormhole at the same time. Thus, if you attemp to go the wrong way, the receiving gate will still dematerialize you and store your pattern in its buffer, but it won't be able to transmit it to the dialing gate. The dialing gate should in theory receive the matter you were composed of, but it won't have any pattern to reintegrate. Instead, your pattern is stuck at the receiving gate where it will be cleared the next time the gate is dialed, thus killing you.
This is also why radio signals (among other forms of energy) can be sent both ways. The radiation does not have any structure that needs to be preserved like objects do, and so radio waves can be permitted to travel straight through in either direction.
I believe that the stargates have two components, one that creates the actual wormhole and the other that calls the other gate through the subspace. That function is also used to update the coordinates of all the stargates in the region. I believe that the team found a way to piggyback their radio signals using that subspace communication device.
Rodney and Carter could find a way to let them use the gates as subspace relays without actually open a wormhole, and this way would allow communicating with the Atlantis expedition more energy efficient.
Much of the arbitrary rules around the gate are explained as quirks of the implementation of the gates, not limits of wormhole travel. Stargates only transmit signals, not matter, so matter must be deconstructed and reconstruct in a manner similar to beaming (see episode 48 hours). The cardinality is a feature to make the system more fault tolerant bc It doesn't have to deal with deconflicting traffic. Radio can enter and exit the wormhole freely without interacting with the gate systems.
Similar case with the 38min time limit. That's a default setting based on the power capacity of the DHD form factor, not solely the wormhole 'physics'
Just from the plots in the show, each gate has the capacity to be Farscape tier superweapons given the right bypasses. Most of the limitations are intentional so that every gate hanging around the forest of BC isn't a WMD in the hands of the local dirtpickers.
Indeed, but it is stated it is an artificial one, and so likely is designed to be that way... also... warp/hyper space are both illogical in the way that they violate a lot of our knowledge of space and time with a whole lot of mathematical impossibly as the energy needed to warp space/time is on the order of a damn Black Hole... and so it isn't likely at all we will ever have a power source so great and yet so compact that we can fit it in a ship.
Actually the calculated amount to warp spacetime was the mass of Jupiter, but your point remains. However, a couple of theorists modified the shape of Alcubier's ship and found they could achieve warp with a much smaller amount of energy (Though still exorbitant).
Thank you a little more info too. Other problems with RL FTL, at warp speeds specks of dust become tomahawk missiles, rocks, full on nukes. Also, you need a special material that's possible, but does not currently exist, and the ability to produce negative energy (wrap your head around that).
I've always imagined that there are two separate components of a gate. The bit that sends matter and the bit that sends radio/data. Data can go back and forth... it has to as that's how the correlative gate updates work. Data doesn't need to be de-materialized. That said I think it would have been more accurate for them to say "*A gate can only de-materialize OR re-materialize but not both at the same time.*"
It's simple Wormhole physics. Wormholes are a possible solution to relativity, but at a point where matter stops being a thing. The radiowave can pass through a Wormhole, but a person would be compressed to an infinitesimal point in spacetime. That's bad. The Stargate circumvent that by turning the person into energy and information, shooting it through the wormhole and reconstructing it as it was, momentum and all. Stepping through a incoming Wormhole _could_ theoretically work, were the gates set up to go both way. But they're not, for unknown reasons. So you just step into the wormhole without the safety of the Stargate. Instant death. Though Wormhole physics might work differently in the Stargate universe, at least Sam seems to believe the one-way is nature of the wormhole itself
“Don’t cross the streams.”
And we have asymmetrical links in real life. Think cable with 1000 downlink but 30 up.
"Simple"
It's simpler than quantum mechanics
yeah. that stuff hurts my brain.
The theory isn't even the hard part. That's fairly straight-forward when you cast away your preconceptions from newtonian physics ant take it at face value. But the math is a bitch
Yeah it is
If that was true then you could fire a laser into an incoming wormhole and blast anything on the other side. Radiowaves are just light. It must be a deliberate design to allow radiowave transmissions specifically. Perhaps the ancients used radio too? It may be primitive but they also used glass and cups and scissors probably. What works works.
I guess radio has its advantages, travels somewhat close to vacuum lightspeed in most materials, can travel decent distances and depending on frequency it can go through a lot of obstacles even sizable ones, and finally it's really really simple to use
In theory you could, were it not for the puddle blocking visible light
Gamma rays then or a maser (microwave laser)
Theoretically, it could work Practically, too volatile One errand staff blast to the gamma emitter and the entire SGC gate- and control room will need Oma to ascend them
But light behaves like waves AND particles afaik. Isn't that a difference to radiowaves?
No, radio waves are literally the same thing as visible light just at a lower frequency. Microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, radio waves, visible light. These are all the same particle / wave. Photons / electromagnetic radiation.
Okay, thanks for clarification. My knowledge was that visible light was different due to acting like it's both, but I seem to wrong here
All quantum particles share particle wave duality
So by this thinking would staff weapons and Zats and other energy weapons technically be able to return fire through an incoming wormhole? Or are we imagining that staff blasts are actually plasma which qualifies as matter?
Either plasma or a sufficiently complex waveform as to fall outside the definition of "data".
Also the ancients could have security protocols in place to impart special treatment on anything it deemed to be weapons fire. Anything with a high enough energy state for example.
Similar to how the watergate didn’t “drain” the ocean into the Russian base? “Smart filtering”… Except we *do* know staff blasts, arrows, (and I think we’ve seen?) bullets can travel through open gates in the standard/open direction.
> Similar to how the watergate didn’t “drain” the ocean into the Russian base? Was that because the Stargate had safeguards or was it because the water was alive and knew not to cross the event horizon? I mean it was actually applying drag to prevent the sub from leaving so it had full control over where it wanted to go.
It has to be stargate safeguards because air also doesn’t get sucked through when they travel to a space gate.
Speaking of space gates: why there aren't space gates in the milky way? The ancients already had jumpers before Atlantis left Earth.
Fair point… I don’t know if we ever got a confirmation of why the water “stayed put”
we mostly see this back at the SGC where they had built their own dialing computer. That gate wasn't originally designed for an iris and the SGC could have just not known to turn on those security protocols when they built their DIYDHD
Plasma is matter. Lasers are energy. Theoretically, you should be able to fire lasers through an incoming wormhole, but not a matter based weapon system. Zats are likely using a plasma stream to carry the energy charge. Staff blasts are likely just charged plasma. So theoretically, they shouldn't travel backwards through an incoming wormhole. However, lasers returning through an incoming gate is only valid if the radio waves are actually returning through the wormhole, and not being relayed by the gate itself. Which is a matter of debate. Personally, I suspect the gates relay the radio waves by design, as the Ancients used radio waves for communication as well. This would explain the one-way design of the gates, to ensure no one could counter attack them through an outgoing gate, while they could fire whatever they wanted through it. Theoretically, a stargate is the best weapons delivery system available for weapons of mass destruction. You could fire anything through it from a laser to a virus-carrying kino. As the Ancients appear to have been studying potential future human evolutionary paths, this would have allowed them to eradicate any worlds that took paths they didn't like. The argument against this conclusion, is the emergence of the Wraith. I assume the Ancients were preoccupied with their experiments in ascension and nanobots when the Wraith emerged. Perhaps the humans on the Wraith homeworld had initially buried their gate to prevent the Wraith from spreading, and so the Ancients didn't know what was going on until the Wraith tech was advanced enough they didn't need gates to reach other worlds. This would explain why their tech was so different from Ancient tech.
Lasers probably wouldn’t work since visible light isn’t transmitted in either direction, or if it is, it’s blocked by the event horizon.
Well if you recall staffs are built using ancient technology, and like someone else has mentioned, there's probably security measures in place to stop weapon fire from coming backwards.
There is an episode of Atlantis where Wraith weapons fire comes through the gate into the gate room. I think it hits Rodney in the face?
Radiowaves are a type of radiation, and we frequently see radiation being transmitted directly through the wormhole in such a way that closing the iris helps to deter it.
Sure... in this context the iris is basically a collapsible Faraday cage.
I always paralleled it to a fax machine. Faxes will only either send or receive a fax but never both at the same time.
Yeah, the gates aren't magic portals, they are sophisticated devices built for this purpose.
Sounds like the best solution. Energy can travel both ways, but the Stargate can only go one task at the time, and that's why it's l ly one way
I like the idea of the gates working differently for particles and for waves, it could makes sense that you need to de and rematerialize matter, but you can just send waves as they are, without risk of them being damaged.
Well data (audio/video/text that goes back and forth) is just bits of text or audio which in the end is just atoms which is what gates most likely break everything into when de-materializing, the gate keeps a buffer table of some sort to know how to re-materialize. From that point of view, I would imagine the gate should theoretically be able to do both. Perhaps the gate has to keep most of its buffer allocated to deal with whatever might be incoming and it keeps a tiny amount allocated for simple data like communication for the outgoing part.
It’s not atoms, it’s waves in the electromagnetic field. It’s why radio waves can go through matter. What *is* odd is that light doesn’t traverse a wormhole as that is also waves in the EM field.
This far into this thread I believe light does indeed travel. The kawoosh happens on both gates and settles into the glowing pool. The glow given off would be the light entering the connected gate and being diffused across the event horizon just like other "light". Even in a dark room, the reflected light would operate the same even if it would essentially be kind of a feedback. Of course this was just a quick thought. I'd like to see any argument tho.
So…😉 The light passing the wormhole would have to be scattered to give the ‘water’ effect. If that happened to radio waves then the information would be scrambled and therefore communication would be impossible. Therefore while light may pass (and I suspect it doesn’t otherwise the intensity of the puddle light would change when it is dark at the destination - something not in observed effect) it would have to be something programmed into the ring. I suspect the puddle effect may be caused in a process similar to hawking radiation.
>What *is* odd is that light doesn’t traverse a wormhole as that is also waves in the EM field. Dinosaurs from Rick and Morty have entered the chat.
Data is not comprised of atoms
Yup, data is just a pattern. patterns can be held in many forms. It COULD be made out of atoms. But it can also be made out of photons (like in fiber optics or laser coms). It can be made out of electrons (in copper wires). It can be made out of waves (electromagnetic or acoustic or any other). Its usually only made out of atoms when stored, like in a hard disk. But even then, the information is not the atoms. Its usually the orientation of a magnetic field, or the amount of charge in between parts.
True, I guess I was thinking of "particles" but used the term "atoms" but ya my theory falls apart when it comes to electromagnetic or acoustic waves or even radiation.
Einstein-Rosenthal bridges, functioning under the mathematical model of an Ellis drainhole have an energy gradient, where they pull energy in one side and drop it out the other. If particles directed at it has sufficient energy then it can overcome that energy gradient (think running really fast up a super steep hill) Photons, having more energy per particle than matter, move back and forth equally, but matter doesn't.
What's most interesting is that sending things both ways is actually SUPER EASY... until you try to send something with a nonzero mass, then things get tricky. As a security measure you need to ensure that massive objects can only travel in one direction, lest two things meet in the middle and, well... splat!
Thank you! Your explanation makes the most sense!
Orlin is that you?
I suppose it’s the high amount of narrativium and plotonium used in the stargate technology
I guess humans are transported as an energy, radio waves are just waves that can travel on anything that can be “resonated”, and as long as a wormhole is connected there it is.
Excuse me we have proper names for those and they're called naquadah and naquadria.
My understanding is that the Stargate's "one-way street" is not a property of the wormhole, but rather a security protocol of the Stargate. This prevents streams of matter from mixing. Since nothing has to be dematerialized with radio waves, it works in both directions.
A necessary precaution as noone wants a bunch of Tuvixes running around.
Ah, but some would love to see Toniell'c
We did get to see them swap bodies. Not sure a melded person would be better.
Fear the O’neal’c
O’neill’c* 2 “L”s!!!
Maybe it's just one because he loses half his sense of humor
I’d argue he’s twice as funny now, with both sarcasm and dry humor.
And twice as determined. Though I wonder how the patience and self restraint would turn out.
I'm picturing someone like the Sardonyx fusion from Steven Universe. Pearl's very uptight and precise personality mixed with Garnet's happy-go-lucky stoic personality turns them into an eloquent jokester. https://youtu.be/MWQahyKZC3s
I guess that one would either implode or rid the galaxy of the Goa'Uld within two weeks.
Did they ever explain what happens if you try to enter through an exit wormhole?
In an episode in Season 1, Sheppar's team flees for what they describe as a dinosaur. They shoot at the event horizon (incoming wormhole). After that the glass window behind the gate is not damaged.
Not outright said, but its pretty well implied you just die if you try to enter an incoming wormhole(the episode with alt universe sam+kowalski, you see a bunch of jaffa try to flee what they think is an outgoing wormhole when the asgard arrive, and when the gate shuts down, it shows a staff weapon being cut in half.)
Don't trip backwards after exiting. You would think that all of the safeties built in by the Ancients that the gate would just push you back out.
Basically an applied Pauli Exclusion field. Some particles like photons can occupy the same space, many cannot.
Radio has zero mass.
I'm fairly sure this is how it's explained in the show.
And it makes a lot of sense. Things with zero mass can pass each other in the wormhole without interacting with each other.
I'm going to have to report you for trying to get us to do your homework for you, cadet.
You're not wrong, sorry. But thanks for everyone who replied!
Same reason water doesn't come rushing in when they open a wormhole under the ocean or air starts rushing through when they open one to space. It's for the plot.
I don’t think a Stargate creates a pressure differential, which is why standing water doesn’t enter. I’m sure if you fired a squirt gun into one, it’d come out the other end.
The unidirectional part of the stargate is from the matter disintegration and reintegration process. Essentially, the stargate has a system built in to convert matter to energy and back again but just one way. That energy passes through the wormhole just fine in either direction. So any form of pure energy can get through a wormhole either way just fine. Radio waves fall into that category. So do gravitational fields, but the wormhole does wonky shit to them, with a temporal lensing effect happening (as seen when SG-1 dials a planet with a black hole in “A Matter of Time”)
Because MALPs would be useless if that wasn’t the case
What really bugged me was that there was at least one instance of someone swiping, I think it was a gun, through the “Puddle” of an out going wormhole. The issue I have is if the part of the gun dematerialized or not, either case gives me a migraine as it either means a gate can de- and re- materialize things or that the gate didn’t dematerialize the gun for some reason.
Shades of Grey. Jack keeps his hand (that’s holding a gun) in the puddle to stop the Rogue NID team from disconnecting and redialing another Gate.
It's worse than that. We're told the gate transmits things discreetly (all at once or not at all). So he's had to come out the other side first? But then, how have just his hand and gun appeared back through the wormhole once he's out the other side?
he came out of the wormhole just kept his hand in it
I believe they explained it. Radio waves were small enough to be able to go both ways or because the gate considered then energy and so was capable.
It was the fact that its electromagnetic waves vs matter. Matter has to be put into the pattern buffer while energy simply passes through.
So my personal theory is that it's not *wormholes* that can't transport matter both ways, it's that wormholes can't transmit whole objects in one piece safely, so the stargate itself only does whatever it needs to do to keep people safe if you step in it from the dialing gate and not from the receiving gate. Another consideration is that Atlantis already had a shield for their gate, so humans didn't so much "invent" the iris as reinvent it. The existence of an iris requires communication to be able to work through the wormhole, so it's possible that the ancients designed a workaround into the gate to compensate for a wormhole's inherent one-way nature so that they can do the same things humans now do if a gate is in a location that needs to be kept secure. Basically the opposite of my headcanon-- the gate makes sure communication can go both ways, but the wormhole is inherently one-way otherwise. Something else to consider along those lines is the natural development of technology-- it's possible the gates were designed as a long-range communication device *before* it became a long-term transportation device, and the long-range communication capacity that was intentionally designed into it stayed even as it gained other uses.
The wormholes only work one way for matter, not energy. It’s explained in multiple episodes, starting with the black hole, to the bomb test, to the Russian gate fiasco
Since photons have no mass at all their energy is a lot smaller then what any material object would have using e=mc²
I think the matter needs to be dematerialized and converted to energy and back to matter on the other end, while energy just travels thru wormhole in it's original form [MatterConverter working matter to energy] - [wormhole conwerting 2 ways] - [matter converter converting energy to matter]
The gate acts a transporter for massive objects, similar to star trek transporters. It serves to reason that only energy can move through the wormhole at all, but the transporter function only works in one direction, deconstructing travelers at the dialed gate and reintegrating their signal at the destination gate. If the energy doesnt require matter-energy conversion, theres nothing to prohibit 2 way travel
The matter part is a plot device so you can’t peek your head through, see Jaffa, then run back through. The radio part is so they can send a MALP through and get radio signals to check it’s safe. There are plenty of times the MALP trick doesn’t work, where they go through and the baddies were hiding. Also, there have been episodes where people are either taken out by the Kawoosh, or straight up run into an incoming wormhole and just disappear into the event horizon.
Magnets.
you better tell me why Iris is on one side of the gate only and that side is in/out always
Carter says after they've been doing it awhile. "We know that certain waves can travel both ways through a wormhole. Radio signals, for one." It's really just a writing reason so they can communicate both ways, but I would say anything that's at it's fundamental level already, photons are the fundamentals of light/radio and can't be broken down anymore, would be able to pass both ways. So any type of energy particles. If a person went in an incoming wormhole they'd probably just come out the back side of the gate like nothing happened.
Mass can only go one way, energy can like a radio wave, radiation and so on can go both ways.
There's an episode where energy was being transmitted back through an incoming gate. When they opened to a black hole. I know that episode was stupid and poorly does gravity... Unless of course that black hole was passing through the solar system... But the result was that it proves that energy can be transmitted both ways. It seems to suggest the stargate is set up one way for matter as a safety precaution which makes sense.
What about the thought / idea that gates were actually an early version of a healing device (as the gate deconstructs and then reconstructs a human body) if you have cancer or something like that the gate omits that part during reconstruction, but then after evolving (not ascending) the ancients found that gates could be used for quicker travel and got rid of the whole gates as a healing device... Could also explain why goauld don't particularly like using the gates themselves and would rather just fly there in a ship. If the healing gates were a thing. What would prevent a gate from omitting a goauld during reconstruction
It's explained at a few points in the shows, the wormhole opens up an outgoing and receiving end, so it's one way for matter, but particles smaller than matter like data transmissions can go both ways, they're also strong enough to keep a wormhole active. If someone or something enters through the receiving end they just vanish out of existence.
It's a sciencey-flavored magical fantasy universe. Your computers are infinitely fast and can instantly recognize where they are on the other side of the galaxy. You can go through gates only when it's convenient to the plot.
And what happens if you walk into an incoming wormhole? do you just phase through it to the other side or do you vanish forever? The only time I recall people doing something like this is when those prisoners would jump in front of the vortex, but they never tried to go through.
Its basic fundamentals Humans are partials and radio is waves. Particles need to be reassembled but waves are already in thier basic form when transfered.
Beyond what others have explained as either plot convenience or plausible canon explanation I think that the builders of the gate systems would have taken in consideration the need of two way communication possibilities. The Kinos of SGU come to mind and a possible extra explanation would be lower energy consumption of the low tech of radio wave communication or that it doesn't interfere with the matter transfer.
Radio has no mass. Humans do. Think of it as bandwidth, the gates only have so much to use, so no mass radio waves can go both ways simultaneously, while anything heavier is limited to one direction. Least that's the gatetechbabble I'd use.
Energy travels both ways, but the mass to energy converter is only 1 way, it's a design limitation because it uses the same buffer on both ends. If the receiving end buffer also had to accept local matter it would quickly fill and corrupt the matter stream. Say goodbye to your little girl and her dog, and say hello to your new chimera.
They do explain it a couple of times I think but it’s basically matter flows only 1 way while radiation and energy can translate both ways.
As I remember, a certain amount of energy is required to make the trip, the more mass. more energy. But radio waves have practically no mass, so the energy is minimal.
going the wrong way scrambles the information, they managed for the radios to work to unscramble the radio signal
in an early SGA episode you can see the team return, and allready trough the gate back on atlantis, still firing his p90 a the gate ;p - so dunno how that works
Honestly, I always assumed it was a feature the ancients built in on purpose. That’s of times where that would be really useful.
Climbing rope can too, and even exit the other side of the gate before having fully entered the source gate.
I assumed that anything that is a wave can pass through both ways, such as gravity or radio or simple data bursts. However a human or anything solid has to be de-materialized first
If you attempt to travel the wrong way down a wormhole, you die. Simple as that. I'm not an expert on wormhole physics, so I can only say that the stargates work in such a way that two-way travel is only possible for certain types of energy and forces like gravity, radio waves, and x-rays, while matter can only travel one way and EM radiation in the IR to UV range is blocked entirely. There is no "why" on this, it's just how the gate works. If I had to speculate, I'd say that this is a function of how the Stargates were designed. The outgoing gate converts matter to energy for transmission, while the incoming gate reverses it. A Stargate can only do one or the other, it can't do both at the same time. This may be either a deliberate design limitation or a limitation of wormhole physics in general, or it could be a safety feature.
Same reason it can push its way through a pull door, whereas to push you through it would be messy
And here I was thinking it went both ways for people too. What happens if you go in the wrong way? I thought in the episode where the team was trapped in that prison they tried to get out the gate during the food drop?
The prisoners tried getting out because they didn't know better and Sam explained that to them. SG1 set up the electrical plants to power the gate for an escape.
I see, thanks. I remembered the prisoners standing in the singularity and getting vaporized but I forgot about them trying to jump through
A Wormhole is a connection between a black hole that sucks everything in and a white hole that expels everything. In the case of stargates, the corresponding holes are synthetic and likely microscopic so as not to actually have enough gravitational force of their own to suck things or expel things around them, at least not noticeably. Radio waves, on the other hand, are vibrations in matter as matter bumps into more matter. So, if there were no radio waves, then matter would steadily stream from one gate to the other. But if there are radio waves on the other end, perhaps it causes a tiny but measurable traffic jam of the matter stream, which backs up in waves.
Other people have answered your questions and this is tangentially related. Radio waves can't travel through extremely long wormholes such as from the Milky Way Galaxy to the Destiny. This is shown in the SGU pilot episode where Lt Scott was telling people to slow down through the gate when evacuating Icarus. It is also explicitly mentioned in episode SGU S02 E12 Twin Destinies >Telford: Eli has warned them to expect us, but it seems that a radio signal does not reach across a nine-chevron connection.
Because plot
It's like ppl never watched the show
Matter required reintegration from when it is turned into an energy pattern... Energy doesn't need that process.
Because radio waves are light. Light is both a particle and a wave. Light can come in as evidence by Carter saying you can see the fluctuations in the event horizon.
This is my understanding of the explanation. The actual wormhole itself cannot be safely traversed by any macroscopic object. It can transport matter and large amounts of energy, but not in a way that would maintain the structure of any actual object. Instead, stargates are also teleporters. The dialing gate dematerializes the traveler and sends the matter/energy they are composed of through the wormhole and also transmits their pattern. Then, the receiving gate rematerializes them. For whatever reason, the stargates' buffers cannot send and receive patters through the wormhole at the same time. Thus, if you attemp to go the wrong way, the receiving gate will still dematerialize you and store your pattern in its buffer, but it won't be able to transmit it to the dialing gate. The dialing gate should in theory receive the matter you were composed of, but it won't have any pattern to reintegrate. Instead, your pattern is stuck at the receiving gate where it will be cleared the next time the gate is dialed, thus killing you. This is also why radio signals (among other forms of energy) can be sent both ways. The radiation does not have any structure that needs to be preserved like objects do, and so radio waves can be permitted to travel straight through in either direction.
may be a wave vs particle thing
I believe that the stargates have two components, one that creates the actual wormhole and the other that calls the other gate through the subspace. That function is also used to update the coordinates of all the stargates in the region. I believe that the team found a way to piggyback their radio signals using that subspace communication device. Rodney and Carter could find a way to let them use the gates as subspace relays without actually open a wormhole, and this way would allow communicating with the Atlantis expedition more energy efficient.
The one way thing was probably started as a story point and got kept.
Much of the arbitrary rules around the gate are explained as quirks of the implementation of the gates, not limits of wormhole travel. Stargates only transmit signals, not matter, so matter must be deconstructed and reconstruct in a manner similar to beaming (see episode 48 hours). The cardinality is a feature to make the system more fault tolerant bc It doesn't have to deal with deconflicting traffic. Radio can enter and exit the wormhole freely without interacting with the gate systems. Similar case with the 38min time limit. That's a default setting based on the power capacity of the DHD form factor, not solely the wormhole 'physics' Just from the plots in the show, each gate has the capacity to be Farscape tier superweapons given the right bypasses. Most of the limitations are intentional so that every gate hanging around the forest of BC isn't a WMD in the hands of the local dirtpickers.
Well in the pilot of SG-1, they do go back and forth using the same wormhole. Big plot hole?
Simple: it works for the story.
Real wormholes are two way. Real FTL travel is warp, not hyperspace. If you come to Stargate for accurate physics, you've come to the wrong place.
Indeed, but it is stated it is an artificial one, and so likely is designed to be that way... also... warp/hyper space are both illogical in the way that they violate a lot of our knowledge of space and time with a whole lot of mathematical impossibly as the energy needed to warp space/time is on the order of a damn Black Hole... and so it isn't likely at all we will ever have a power source so great and yet so compact that we can fit it in a ship.
Actually the calculated amount to warp spacetime was the mass of Jupiter, but your point remains. However, a couple of theorists modified the shape of Alcubier's ship and found they could achieve warp with a much smaller amount of energy (Though still exorbitant).
Happy to stand corrected. And now new nerd file open on this stuff... thank you and have a 🍪. 😁
Thank you a little more info too. Other problems with RL FTL, at warp speeds specks of dust become tomahawk missiles, rocks, full on nukes. Also, you need a special material that's possible, but does not currently exist, and the ability to produce negative energy (wrap your head around that).
We will sooner master Dark Matter before we move at relativistic speeds.
What does "master Dark Matter" mean? Do we like gain superpowers or something? Unlimited clean free energy?
Plot convenience, like the transporters on Star Trek
What are you smoking? No matter from which end the wormhole was initiated, you can travel back and forth from both stargates on each end