Science in Sci-Fi – Wormholes

Science fiction is as the name suggests the fiction of science. I thought it would be a fun, interesting and at times mind bending idea too look at the science behind some of the technology in science fiction and look under the hood to see what’s required to make it work or what barriers are in the way.

The worm hole or the ‘Einstein Rosen Bridge’ as it’s officially called is an object that comes right out of the maths from general relativity. The concept being that becasue of the curved nature of spacetime a shortcut between 2 places could be reached with a womhole cutting down the travel time and distance between 2 places.

Not only is this a much talked about subject in sci-fi but scientist themselves hotly debate and research the possibility of wormholes being not only possible mathematically but physically and the real crux – how could we crate and take advantage of them?

How does the a Wormhole Work?

There seems to be 2 fields of thought on this – the first is that a wormhole is created using a huge as in utterly monstrous amount of energy that bends and folds the fabric of spacetime to create a wormhole.

The second way is based on the theory that if a black hole as in an object that sucks in matter an energy exists then it’s opposite, a white hole can exist that spews matter and energy into the universe can exist and a wormhole could exist between them.

As a bonus to these 2 – my previous post Science in Sci-Fi – Quantum Entanglement Communication talked about the path that exists between 2 paired particles. This pathway has been supposed *could* be a wormhole.

What are the Challenges?

So the challenges with the wormhole are rather extreme, as if all the others weren’t this is really extreme. In the energy method the wormhole created is very small like sub atomic particle small and very unstable – even another particle going through it would make it unstable and collapse.

The black hole/ white hole way doesn’t get easier either – basically to enter it the traveler would need to pass the event horizon of the black hole. This would mean that they would be spaghettified by the gravitational stress on the body and while this happened time outside would race by and the universe would end before they got to the other side.

Oh and another thing – white holes don’t seem to exist… nothing major.

Piling all these factors into one sticky mess of facts, it seems that wormholes at least ones that we can pass through at least, won’t be arriving anytime soon to make the trip to Alpha Centauri easy for us.

© Simon Farnell 2013 – 2022

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