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IN YOU go and out you pop – in a galaxy far, distant. Such is the unbelievable promise of the wormhole, a hypothetical portal during which space-time funnels into a slender passage solely to open up someplace else, presumably on the opposite aspect of the universe.
It sounds fantastical, however 50 years in the past many stated the identical about black holes, which additionally contain extremely warped space-time. “We study wormholes partly for fun and partly, more seriously, to see what is physically allowable for space-time,” says theorist Toby Wiseman at Imperial College London. “And of course – who knows – perhaps one day, in the very far future, this could be an actual technology.”
Despite their mythic repute, there’s nothing particularly outlandish about wormholes. They are predictions of Albert Einstein’s common concept of relativity, which says that mass creates gravity by warping the material of the universe. General relativity has allowed for an ever-enlarging universe, the massive bang and black holes. In that context, wormholes appear no extra far-fetched. In truth, Einstein himself was one of many first to offer a mathematical description of them, within the mid-Thirties.
“The great thing about general relativity is that you can write down any space-time you want, plug it into the Einstein equations and translate it into what matter you would need to support it,” says Wiseman. So if you need space-time to appear to be a wormhole, you need a sure type of matter.
What kind? The trick is to seek out one thing that can prop open a wormhole with out it collapsing right away. In 2020, Juan Maldacena on the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) …