What the F*ck is a Wormhole?
Wormholes have been a beloved aspect of dozens of different science fiction novels, TV shows, and movies. If you’ve watched or read anything science fiction, you’ve probably heard of them. They’re typically portrayed as just a door or tunnel, that when stepped through, you simply “arrive” at the other side, often times many thousands of light-years away. Not only do they sound pretty f*cking neat, wormholes actually have a fair amount of mathematical support behind them.
Ever since wormholes were officially introduced into the scientific community in 1957 by John Wheeler and Charles Misner, scientists have been thoroughly tinkering with their fascinating and also terrifying possibilities. Despite the fact they seem too good to be true, Einstein’s field equations permit a traversable wormhole to actually exist in our universe. The ability to use wormholes would make traveling to otherwise unreachable areas of the universe a real possibility. So, instead of traveling from point A to B in a typical linear fashion—which in terms of space travel usually means many lifetimes—a wormhole is just a shortcut.
Here’s a nice Wikipedia photo since the description of my bank account is equal to my artistic ability—not so good. It vaguely illustrates how a wormhole connects two points together by manipulating spacetime.
A wormhole is sort of like plugging a Game Genie into the universe. Just plug the Game Genie in, open up the cheat menu, and well, it might cause glitches, but f*ck it—let’s just create a whole separate dimensional plane in which to travel through and call it hyperspace. In all seriousness, this dimensional plane is literally known as hyperspace (all hail sci-fi nerd scientists). Hyperspace is the where the actual “tunnel” of the wormhole exists. Sound like some sci-fi bullshit right? Well, it’s not.
Around 1985, Caltech professor Kip Thorne, with his graduate student Mike Morris, set out to design a fully traversable wormhole. But they had to iron out a few rather glaring snags preventing theoretical travel through a wormhole.
A traditional wormhole has two “mouths” that tend to open and close with a flicker. They close with such speed and force that it would be impossible to traverse through without something to “hold the mouths open.” This makes safe traversing somewhat problematic. Without something to prop it open, it would collapse on you with the collective pressure of a neutron star (which, in case you were wondering, is a ridiculously goddamn high amount of pressure— you’d be f*cked into another dimension).
In order to avoid being f*cked into another dimension, they needed something to keep the wormhole open artificially. Thorne conceived a “recipe” to solve this rather glaring problem—negative, or exotic, matter. Negative matter is just normal matter, but in reverse. Normal matter is damn sexy (attracts), and negative matter is ugly as hell (it repels). The repulsive gravitational field generated by negative matter would be enough to keep the “mouth” of both ends of the wormhole open long enough to travel through, or to keep it open indefinitely.
Thorne, among other scientists, have speculated that an advanced enough race could develop a method to easily manipulate negative matter as they please—allowing effortless travel through the cosmos.
Fun fact: Thorne worked out much of the scientific details of his wormhole to help Carl Sagan with his novel, Contact.
Thorne (and many many other scientists) believe a wormhole could potentially act as a bridge in time. For the sake of simplicity, I won’t go in to the entire complex nature of this hypothesis. Though the more you delve into it, the trippier it gets. For a small taste, here’s an example from Igor Novikov I simplified: say two clocks, with the same time, are at either end of a wormhole, but one end is within the gravitational field of a neutron star (the pace of time depends on the strength of the gravitational field). Stepping through would essentially send you to the past. You could even see yourself about to enter the wormhole if you waited long enough. So, you could potentially see yourself from a different point in time. F*ck, my brain hurts. This example just keeps getting more complex depending on the gravitational field, the amount of observers and their locations, and the amount of times you step through. There are also a vast number of paradoxes that can occur from even a simple example like this one. Trying to shit on times comfy, linear home is a dangerous game to be played, as illustrated in numerous science fiction tales.
I’ll delve deeper into wormholes and other mathematical curiosities which would permit time travel in a future article!
For now, unfortunately, wormholes are still just a mathematical curiosity. They have never been directly observed quite yet. But the universe is sort of a clusterf*ck of crazy things happening, so the possibility of a bridge in spacetime existing is no longer just science fiction.
For the sake of brevity I’ve cut out a great deal of additional content about wormholes. Wormholes that can be conjured up from “quantum foam,” wormholes without event horizons, the Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole which functions without exotic matter (they were the first ever to publish a paper on a traversable wormhole), etc.
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Would you like to see a part 2? Think this article was garbage? Think it was great? Think I’m a shill for Thorne, and that the Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole is the truly proper wormhole? Let me know in the comments/re-blogs :)
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References: The Future of Spacetime, How To Build a Time Machine, The New Time Travelers.
Image Credits, from top to bottom: Corvin Zahn (wormhole illustration), Panzi (Source), Les Bossinas (Advanced spacecraft)
All other sources or references used are linked to in the article :)
