From Stargate to Interstellar, via Contact, Sliders or Star Trek, science fiction mobilizes wormholes to make heroes travel through space-time. But is it really plausible?
Imagine two cities located on opposite sides of a mountain. To visit each other, the inhabitants of these towns will probably have to drive around the mountain. But if they want to go faster, they can tunnel through the mountain to create a shortcut. This is the idea of a wormhole.
A wormhole can be described as a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that reduces travel time from one place to another. Instead of traveling for millions of years from galaxy to galaxy, one could theoretically, under the right conditions, use a wormhole to reduce travel time to hours or even minutes.
As wormholes represent shortcuts through spacetime, they could even act as time machines. You might come out of one end of a wormhole at a time before you entered.
Although scientists have no evidence that wormholes actually exist in our world, they are good tools to help astrophysicists think about space and time. They could also answer very old questions about the constitution of the universe.
Wormholes: Fiction or Reality?
Because of these intriguing features, many science fiction writers use wormholes in their novels or movies. However, scientists have been just as enthralled by the idea of wormholes as artists.
Although researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, wormholes are solutions to important physics equations. Solutions to the equations underlying Einstein’s theory of spacetime and general relativity include wormholes. This theory describes the shape of the universe and how stars, planets, and other objects move through it. Because Einstein’s theory has been tested countless times and proven correct every time, some scientists expect wormholes to exist somewhere in the universe.
But other scientists think that wormholes cannot exist because they would be too unstable.
The constant pull of gravity affects all objects in the universe, including the Earth. Gravity would therefore also have an effect on wormholes. Scientists skeptical of them believe that after a short time the middle of the wormhole would collapse under its own gravity, unless a force pushing outward from within. comes to thwart this force. The most likely way to do this is to use so-called “negative energies”, which would oppose gravity and stabilize the wormhole.
But from what scientists know, negative energies can only be created in amounts far too small to counter a wormhole’s own gravity. It is possible that the Big Bang created tiny wormholes with small amounts of negative energies at the beginning of the universe, and that over time these wormholes expanded as the expansion of the universe.
While wormholes are interesting objects to consider, they are still not accepted by most of the scientific community. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Black holes, which are now proven to exist, were not accepted when scientists first suggested their existence in the 1910s.
Einstein first formulated his famous equations in 1915, and German scientist Karl Schwarzschild found a way to mathematically describe black holes just a year later. However, this description was so peculiar that leading scientists at the time refused to believe that black holes could actually exist in nature. It took 50 years for people to start taking black holes seriously – the term “black hole” wasn’t actually coined until 1967.
The same could happen with wormholes. It may take some time for scientists to come to a consensus on whether or not they exist. But if they find solid evidence of their existence – which they could do by observing the strange movements of the orbits of stars – this discovery will influence the way scientists see and understand the universe.
Dejan Stojkovic, professor of physics, University at Buffalo
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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