Physics of Wormholes

Science fiction will often have fantastic stories about humans traversing stars at great speeds, faster than light. Vast interstellar civilizations are maintained by fleets of starships that fly from world to world in a matter of days or weeks. The truth, sadly, is far less fantastic. The universal speed limit is the speed of light, or approximately 2.998x108 m/sec. Nothing can move faster than that constant. Even at that extreme speed, it would take approximately 4 years for any spaceship to reach the closest of other stars. To make matters even worse, the energy required to accelerate an object increases exponentially as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light to the point where we cannot input enough energy to make the object actually go the speed of light. So how can we have these great galaxy spanning civilizations and expand our frontiers beyond the boundaries of our solar system? One possible solution is wormholes. This web project will attempt to inform on some of the basic theories of wormholes and how they could be used to traverse great distances and possibly even time itself.

History

Einstein first proposed wormholes in 1935. He co-wrote a paper with Nathan Rosen in which they showed that general relativity allowed for what they called “bridges.” They theorized that there could be places where space/time is folded that allowed transfer of matter from one point to another in the universe.

After this initial burst of ideas in the thirties, wormhole theory was pretty much dropped by the world of physics in general. It wasn’t until the 1980’s when Carl Sagan wished to write his book Contact was wormhole theory revisited. Sagan wanted to have his protagonist leave Earth and arrive at a distant star system in a relatively short amount of time without being completely scientifically invalid. He turned to his fellow physicist Kip Thorne to develop an at least somewhat scientifically appropriate method of faster-than-light space travel. Thorne came up with much of the modern framework for wormhole theory that is in existence today for the book, which is now a major motion picture starring Jodi Foster.

Definition

A wormhole is a tunnel in space that matter can traverse through. It works in four dimensions with time being the fourth. It connects two points in the universe. A useful analogy for how a wormhole works is a two-dimensional piece of paper with a pair of dots on it.