What is a Wormhole & Shortcuts in Space Time

Worm holes, the first thing that springs to mind is science fiction, Star Wars and Star Trek with their portals and time travel. This field of science is actually far from fiction. Worm holes, assuming millions and billions of light years away are actually all around us. The only problem is they are far too small to see. They occupy tight areas of space-time. When you look around, everything seems like a flat surface, the road, the wall, a computer screen, a chopping board. Look a little deeper and much closer into these objects and you will find in the crevices, canyons, cliff like structural surfaces appearing on these items you first believed to be completely flat. After seeing this, which is in the 3 Dimensions that we know of, XYZ, actually also occurs in time too. In the smallest of scales, even smaller than an atom, or even a sub atomic particle. Deeper and deeper still, till you come to this special, “Quantum Foam”, on the planks scale you will find the home of the worm hole. Back roads, short cuts and bypasses through space and time, form, collapse and reform again within these small areas of space. Being able to connect between two points in space, and also two different points in time. But these “holes” are far too small for anything anywhere near the size of a human to pass through. Since these holes are billions and billions and billion times smaller than a centimetre (1cm). 

Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which everyone today heralds as a powerful theory allow worm holes to exist in space. Einstein and a colleague of his, Nathan Rosen explored worm holes and their mathematics, which was later to be called, the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Worm hole theory in itself is hypothetical, no physical application has ever been performed, since the idea is so abstract, little realistic interest is shown other than an academic pursuit. Regardless of the mathematical prowess Einstein had, it still left it a far fetched idea and an untapped field. 

  

Fig.1 Wormhole and curved space 

Credit: Scientific American

The general theory is, with the worm hole, two points in space-time would be joined, to form a sort of egg timer formation. Wide at both ends but connect at the thinnest point, but this would only be for a brief time. Leaving a very small connection between these two holes. This “Bridge” would only be open for a limited time only, not seconds or minutes, but milliseconds, nano-seconds or even smaller. Additionally, anything trying to get itself through would be crushed due to the sheer gravitational forces that would be present in such an event. Scientists have toyed with the idea of trying to theoretically sustain a worm holes Einstein-Rosen bridge for an indefinite time and make the hole big enough for normal size objects (relative to us) to pass through. What we have found, is that we would need some special type of exotic matter which would possess negative mass, it has been dubbed the name “Negative Matter”. This matter does not exist in today's physics, but if it were to exist it would posses anti-gravitational properties which would allow scientists to perform almost magical experiments. 

This leaves us in a tricky situation, if we were able to utilise these “worm holes”. We would be able to theoretically travel across the galaxy, traversing millions of light years in a matter of seconds. Which would take billions of years normally. But a lot is not known about worm holes, they exhibit the same gravitation forces as a black hole does. Does this mean that it cannot absorb or emit light? Leaving it completely dark and never being able to directly observe them. I doubt within our life time, that these questions would be in dire need of answering, but perhaps in the next 300 – 30,000 years, we might stand a chance.

Feynman