Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes
James F. Woodward
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In one page
James Woodward is an adjunct professor of physics and an emeritus professor of the history of science at Cal State Fullerton, and this 2013 Springer book is where he gathers three decades of his own work into a single argument. It begins with Mach’s principle: that a body’s inertia — its resistance to being pushed — is not something the body owns, but the sum of its gravitational relationship with all the other matter in the universe. If that is right, Woodward argues, then a body whose internal energy is changing while it is being accelerated will have its mass fluctuate, briefly and slightly. Those fluctuations are his Mach effects, and they are the whole point: cycle the energy in step with the acceleration and you get a steady push with nothing thrown out of the back. The book runs in three parts — the relativity needed to follow the prediction, the bench experiments testing whether the effect is real and usable, and, most speculative, what physics would be required to build a wormhole a person could walk through.
Why it matters hereChapter 8 is about getting thrust by changing what a craft weighs rather than by ejecting mass, and this is the fullest single statement of the one such proposal that has been built, run, and retested by other laboratories on another continent. Chapter 4 gets the far end of the same argument: Woodward’s route to a traversable wormhole runs through the same mass-fluctuation term, driven hard enough to swing negative.
What it claims
01The book’s foundation is that inertia is gravitational in origin: the reaction force you feel when you push an object is the object’s interaction with all the rest of the matter in the universe, which is Mach’s principle taken as physics rather than as philosophy. Part I sets out the relativity needed to state that prediction properly before using it.Part I, chapters 1 and 2, The Principle of Relativity and the Origin of Inertia, pages 3 to 27, and Mach’s Principle, pages 29 to 64
What to watch02From that foundation comes the prediction the whole programme rests on: an object whose internal energy density is changing while it is being accelerated undergoes a transient fluctuation in its mass. These are the Mach effects, and Woodward first published the derivation and a bench test of it in 1990.Part I, chapter 3, Mach Effects, pages 65 to 86; the underlying paper is Woodward, Foundations of Physics Letters 3, 497 (1990)
Published and peer-reviewed03The engineering consequence is a thruster with no propellant. If the mass fluctuation is made to swing in step with the motion of the mass — heavy on the push, light on the return — the cycle leaves a net force behind, so the craft accelerates without a reservoir of fuel to blow out of a tailpipe. Springer’s own framing of the book puts that goal first: accelerating a spaceship without having to carry the propellant.Part I, chapter 3, Mach Effects, pages 65 to 86; publisher’s description of the book
On the bench now04Part II is the experimental half, and it is written as an open question rather than a result: do the predicted effects exist, and can they be applied to propulsion? Two long chapters, ninety pages together, set out the apparatus, the measurements and the ways a small force can fool you.Part II, chapters 4 and 5, Getting in Touch with Reality, pages 89 to 132, and In Reality’s Grip, pages 133 to 179
On the bench now05Part III asks what a wormhole would actually cost. A traversable one needs mass-energy of the wrong sign holding its throat open, so Woodward devotes a chapter to where exotic matter might be found and another to the classical point-charge electron of Arnowitt, Deser and Misner — the standard model in which the observed mass of an electron is what is left after a negative bare mass is combined with a divergent electromagnetic self-energy. His case is that negative mass-energy is already an ordinary ingredient of physics, not an exotic import.Part III, chapters 6 to 8, Advanced Propulsion in the Era of Wormhole Physics, pages 183 to 206; Where Do We Find Exotic Matter?, pages 207 to 223; Making the ADM Electron Plausible, pages 225 to 234
What to watch06The book ends by designing the thing in its title. Making Stargates asks how one would actually build an absurdly benign wormhole — Morris and Thorne’s name for a throat whose exotic material is confined to a thin shell, so that a traveller passing through feels almost nothing — and The Road Ahead names the work that would have to come first. What to watch is the experimental question Part II leaves open: a Mach-effect thrust that survives being measured on someone else’s balance, at the predicted scaling, is what would move the whole programme forward.Part III, chapters 9 and 10, Making Stargates, pages 235 to 257, and The Road Ahead, pages 259 to 267
Designed, not yet built
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5623-0SOURCE NOT READ IN FULL. This is a copyrighted trade-scientific book, sold by Springer as an eBook and a softcover, and no open version exists; the Crossref deposit carries only Springer’s text-and-data-mining terms, which are not a reuse licence. NO TEXT OF THE BOOK IS REPRODUCED HERE, and nothing below is quoted from it. WHAT THE SHEET IS WRITTEN FROM. Springer’s own description of the book and its author, its list of keywords, and its complete table of contents with page ranges, read on 2026-09-08 from an archived capture of the publisher’s page (the live page answers a bot challenge), and cross-checked chapter by chapter against the Crossref deposits for the ten chapter DOIs 10.1007/978-1-4614-5623-0_1 through _10, which carry the same titles and the same page ranges. The chapters and their pages are: Part I — The Principle of Relativity and the Origin of Inertia, 3 to 27; Mach’s Principle, 29 to 64; Mach Effects, 65 to 86. Part II — Getting in Touch with Reality, 89 to 132; In Reality’s Grip, 133 to 179. Part III — Advanced Propulsion in the Era of Wormhole Physics, 183 to 206; Where Do We Find Exotic Matter?, 207 to 223; Making the ADM Electron Plausible, 225 to 234; Making Stargates, 235 to 257; The Road Ahead, 259 to 267. Locators below therefore point to a chapter and its page range rather than to a read passage, and the substance of each claim is drawn from the publisher’s description of the three parts together with Woodward’s own peer-reviewed papers on the same argument, which are on this site. AUTHOR. Springer records James F. Woodward as professor of history emeritus and adjunct professor of physics at California State University Fullerton, with degrees in physics from Middlebury College and New York University and a doctorate in the history of science from the University of Denver, 1972.
How to cite it
James F. Woodward (2013) Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5623-0
Where it sits in the curriculum
Inertial mass reduction and transmedium craftThe metric, warp drives and wormholes