So there’s this ‘Youtube’ channel called ‘Kurzgesagt‘ that makes a ton of well-researched and thorough educational videos. I was watching one recently about wormholes, and I fell into a rabbit hole of physics equations and quantum fluctuations. Now, to be honest, some of the stuff went over my head.
Before we really delve into the science behind wormholes, I think it’s important to explain what a wormhole truly does. Wormholes are pretty much a sci-fi dream. They would allow interstellar travel beyond our greatest imagination, we could travel through time and find out history’s best kept secerts. So a wormhole (in theory) can let us travel faster than the speed of light! Now you may be thinking: “I though we couldn’t travel faster than light.”. With wormholes we can! Wormholes are essentially short cuts. They can connect locations in space and create a “bridge” that we go through. While light has to go the entire route, us humans may be able to cut our time. Now let’s get into it!
First up are Schwarzschild wormholes. Before we truly go into these pretty useless wormholes, we need to talk about spacetime.
Spacetime is the “stage” on which our Universe exists. This “stage” is VERY flexible, that’s why most of the time spacetime is described as “fabric”. Spacetime can easily be warped by what’s on it. The greater the mass, the more warped spacetime becomes. This principal is crucial to Schwarzschild wormholes.
Now that we have discussed spacetime, we can talk about the thing you guys are here for, Schwarzschild wormholes! Schwarzschild wormholes (they are also known as Einstein-Rosen Bridges) theorize that every blackhole has a “bridge” to a distant part of the Universe (they may even be able to connect two different Universes together!)
Black holes have A LOT of mass, therefore, they warp space time to an insane degree. They may be able to bend space time so much so that they might connect two very distant locations (for reference look at pic 3). In this type of wormhole, the black hole wouldn’t have a singularity, rather they have bridges that would connect to a white hole! A white has the opposite properties of a black hole, instead of trapping matter and light, they spew matter and light. Also, this white hole could lead to a place where time runs backward!
Before you get too excited, these wormholes aren’t traversable :(. First of all, all black holes have an event horizon, meaning two-way travel isn’t possible. Secondly, just the gravitational force at the horizon would tear anyone apart. Even if you are okay with never coming home, and you survive the gravitational force; these wormholes are simply to unstable for travelling. The bridge formed between these would close immediatly, since gravity apparently hates interstellar travel. The only way these wormholes could be traversable is if we had exotic matter, which we’ll touch on later. Oh and even if had exotic matter, it takes an infinite amount of time to cross these wormholes.
If string theory is true, we may already have an immense amount of wormholes! Quantum fluctuations (at the Planck length) may have resulted in tiny wormholes that have a short life. If string theory is the correct description of our world, these wormholes may be able to be kept open by cosmic strings that would have negative mass (repels normal matter). Exotic matter and cosmic strings essentially the same thing as they both repel normal matter. Both exotic matter and cosmic strings have exert an enormous amount force against gravity.
Wormholes are still just a bunch of math; we haven’t found any proof of them (yet!) If they do exsist, it would be a real fun time (though we would need to make laws on how to use them so there aren’t any time paradoxes). I really hope you enjoyed this blog post (I sure enjoyed writing it). Please feel free to look through the sources below and comment your thoughts. Bye!
*Sia
Siasway 