Bigger On The Inside

Samloyal23 · Jan 9, 2019

The transdimensional McGuffin, a box, bag, house, or spaceship that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, is not used that often, but is common enough to be easily understood. My question is, in the realm of actual physics, is it theoretically possible? Will some future shopper take a real Bag of Holding to the bodega? Will people have mansions inside something the size of an outhouse? Hmm...

Dioltach · Jan 9, 2019

I don't know about the physics, but after last Christmas dinner I definitely felt that I was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Janx · Jan 9, 2019

Aurellio Voltaire has a song called Bigger on the Inside. It is about Dr. Who and NSFW.

Umbran · Jan 9, 2019

Samloyal23 said:
My question is, in the realm of actual physics, is it theoretically possible?

Hm... Um, possibly?

Will some future shopper take a real Bag of Holding to the bodega? Will people have mansions inside something the size of an outhouse? Hmm...

Unlikely. If the mechanism I'm thinking of (basically, the same thing that might make a wormhole work) can do it, the energy requirements would be... excessive. And exotic.

doctorbadwolf · Jan 9, 2019

Umbran said:
Hm... Um, possibly?

Unlikely. If the mechanism I'm thinking of (basically, the same thing that might make a wormhole work) can do it, the energy requirements would be... excessive. And exotic.

Unlikely, within a period of time worth speculating on, at least. Barring a paradigm changing breakthrough, as always.

In a thousand years? Ten thousand? After finding the ruins of lost civilizations and meeting extant ones? We quickly reach a point where any speculation is too wild to be anything but fantasy.

Umbran · Jan 9, 2019

doctorbadwolf said:
In a thousand years? Ten thousand? After finding the ruins of lost civilizations and meeting extant ones? We quickly reach a point where any speculation is too wild to be anything but fantasy.

I can't say that something is *impossible*. But, to be frank, it is not "fantasy" to think that there are limits. Warping space requires energies on par with the mass-energy of a thing that would produce similar warping. Individuals carrying around a power-pack equivalent to the mass-energy of mountains and small planets? Highly unlikely. The darned thing would be prone to collapse into a singularity.

It annoys my wife when she loses a lipstick in the bottom of her purse. Losing it down a black hole? Not an improvement

But then, interstellar travel is itself highly unlikely, so the finding lost civilizations and meeting extant ones? Similarly unlikely.

In the past (like, when Flash Gordon was first a comic series), we thought of flying cars, flying belts, death rays, and all - all of these things required revolutions in *energy* to make happen. And none of them did, because we didn't get an evolution in energy, we got a revolution of *data*. And there's probably physical reasons for that. The energy densities available to beings made of normal matter are... limited.

Mustrum_Ridcully · Jan 9, 2019

I recently watched a talk for novices on black holes. An interesting aspect is that it could be that when a black hole is growing, it might be that it's only growing inward, since for the observer outside, everything that falls into the black hole looks as if it's basically stopping in time just as it hits the event horizon and never really gets inside the black hole. (Of course, any light you get from it will also be extremely redshifted, so to the naked eye, you probably wouldn't see anything.)

Beyond that, I guess with exotic energy or "negative mass", space time might also get curved in a manner like that.

Richards · Jan 9, 2019

I always thought it would be cool to buy a plot of land, build an underground house, and have the main entrance be an elevator to the surface whose exterior looked like the TARDIS.

Johnathan

Aeson · Jan 9, 2019

It would be a hellava episode of Lassie if Timmy fell into a portable hole.

Think of the things you could do with this technology. A wallet that could carry millions in singles. A makeup compact that could carry the whole makeup counter at Macy's. Pokeballs! One of those little Smart cars that could actually seat two people.

Shasarak · Jan 10, 2019

Samloyal23 said:
The transdimensional McGuffin, a box, bag, house, or spaceship that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, is not used that often, but is common enough to be easily understood. My question is, in the realm of actual physics, is it theoretically possible? Will some future shopper take a real Bag of Holding to the bodega? Will people have mansions inside something the size of an outhouse? Hmm...

I think that it would be easy enough to make a house that "appeared" to be bigger on the inside then on the outside.