Wormholes

What are they? And how would they work?

Wormholes are very strange and complex things. They are sort of like black holes, but instead of ripping you apart, they let you through, allowing you to travel distances extremely quickly. If you saw one in real life, it would look a lot like a shimmering portal, letting you see through it. If you went through, it would be like a sudden pulling sensation, and you would be through. Most crucially, the maximum force of acceleration would not exceed 20g (or 20 times Earth’s normal gravity at sea level). Incredibly, the wormhole traveller would only experience roughly a second from one side to the other. But, sadly, anyone not travelling with them would see thousands of years go by. So how do they work, and could you create one?

What are wormholes? 

Wormholes are basically tunnels connecting two points in space. Those two points would probably be part of a thing that looks and behaves like a black hole, but it would be connected with a “bridge” across 4D space, leading to another black hole. 

Mathematically, a wormhole is “a special solution to the equations describing Einstein’s theory of general relativity that connects two distant points in space or time via a tunnel. Ideally, the length of this tunnel is shorter than the distance between those two points, making the wormhole a kind of shortcut. Though they are a staple of science fiction and have captured the popular imagination, wormholes are, as far as we know, only hypothetical. They are legitimate solutions to general relativity, but scientists have never figured out a way to maintain a stable wormhole in the real universe.” (https://www.livescience.com/what-are-wormholes) 

The simplest possible wormhole solution was discovered by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935, which is why wormholes are sometimes called “Einstein-Rosen bridges.” Einstein and Rosen started with the mathematical solution of a black hole, which consists of a singularity (a point of infinite density) and an event horizon (a region surrounding that singularity beyond which nothing can escape). According to The Physics of the Universe, they found that they could extend this solution to include the polar opposite of black holes: white holes. These hypothetical white holes also contain a singularity, but they operate in reverse to a black hole: Nothing can enter the event horizon of a white hole, and any material inside the white hole gets ejected immediately.

However, a wormhole created from a pair of black and white holes wouldn’t be very useful. For one, white holes would be unstable. If you were to drop a particle toward the event horizon of a white hole, the particle would never reach the event horizon, because nothing can enter a white hole. So the energy of the system would continue to increase to infinity, eventually blowing up the white hole, according to the University of Colorado physicist Andrew Hamilton.

Second, even if white holes could exist, the only way to enter this kind of wormhole would be to cross the event horizon of the black hole on the other side. But once an object crossed the event horizon, it could never leave. So objects could enter the wormhole but never escape.

Lastly, the wormholes themselves would be unstable. A single photon, or particle of light, passing through the wormhole tunnel would introduce so much energy to the system that the tunnel would snap apart, destroying the wormhole, according to the European Southern Observatory. 

Some wormholes may be “traversable,” meaning humans may be able to travel through them. For that, though, they would need to be sufficiently large and kept open against the force of gravity, which tries to close them. To push spacetime outward in this way would require huge amounts of “negative energy.”

The possibility of short-circuiting the enormous distances between stars makes wormholes attractive for space travel. Because the tunnel links moments in time as well as locations in space, it also has been said that a wormhole would allow travel into the past. However, wormholes are intrinsically unstable. While stabilization ideas have been proposed, there is no evidence that these can work or if wormholes are real. 

String Theory Wormholes

String theory suggests that wormholes could have appeared in the very early universe. If string theory is true, hundreds of thousands of strings appeared in the first billionth of a second, with each end of the strings turning into mini-wormholes. In another fraction of a second, the universe expands into a giant, pulling these strings light-years apart, and separating these wormholes far, far away. 

From the outside, a wormhole would look like a black hole. Some physicists think that the supermassive black holes at the centers of the galaxies are wormholes. 

There might also be a really hard way to find wormholes, creating them.

Man-Made Wormholes

To make a wormhole traversable (able to be crossed), it needs to satisfy a few criteria. First, It needs to connect two distant points. Second, it shouldn’t contain any event horizons, as that would make two-way travel impossible. Third, it should be big enough so that the gravitational forces don’t rip you apart. But the biggest problem we have is keeping the wormholes open. 

Gravity will force our wormholes closed, and we’re going to have to figure out a way to keep them open. Gravity wants to pinch it closed and leave black holes on the sides. So we need something to prop it open. Regular matter or even antimatter won’t work. We need something with negative mass, called Exotic Matter. While normal matter has a positive mass and attracts things, Exotic Matter would have a negative mass and push things away. If we put this stuff in the middle of our wormholes, we could stabilize our wormholes and make them traversable. 

If we spread out a bunch of these wormholes, space travel would become really easy! You could go between your bedroom and your bathroom instantly, or your bathroom and Mars! And if you can create wormholes that are around the Earth, it would allow for intergalactic travel.  

In conclusion, wormholes are sort of black holes, they can transport you thousands of light-years and they could be the basis for intergalactic travel one day.