What is a wormhole?
So far, we have only considered ordinary “vanilla” black holes. Specifically, we have been talking all along about black holes that are not rotating and have no electric charge. If we consider black holes that rotate and/or have charge, things get more complicated. In particular, it is possible to fall into such a black hole and not hit the singularity. In effect, the interior of a charged or rotating black hole can “join up” with a corresponding white hole in such a way that you can fall into the black hole and pop out of the white hole. This combination of black and white holes is called a wormhole. The white hole may be somewhere very far away from the black hole; indeed, it may even be in a “different Universe” — that is, a region of spacetime that, aside from the wormhole itself, is completely disconnected from our own region. A conveniently-located wormhole would therefore provide a convenient and rapid way to travel very large distances, or even to travel to another Universe. M
A wormhole is a hypothetical spacetime topology, a “shortcut” that would allow travel between two points at apparently faster-than-light speeds. The name comes from analogizing spacetime to the surface of an apple, in which a wormhole is a tunnel through the apple. In reality, movement through a wormhole would not be faster-than-light, but rather moving at normal speed through folded space. Wormholes are popular in science fiction because they allow characters to travel great distances in short periods of time. In real life, wormholes probably do not exist, as they would require negative matter, an exotic substance that has never been observed and whose existence is not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Mathematical models of wormhole spacetimes show that they would “pinch off” almost instantaneously. In addition, a wormhole would have to be extremely small — most models show wormholes with openings smaller than an atomic nucleus. Wormholes have also been called Sch
I’ve seen many articles on them, but I can’t really seem to understand. Are they even real? A wormhole is like a tunnel that connects two points in spacetime. If the wormhole is “traversable” it acts as a shortcut through spacetime. Imagine you are holding a piece of paper on which you have marked a point at each end. Now bend the piece of paper in half but don’t let the ends touch. If you were to travel in normal space (ie along the sheet of paper) the trip from one of your marks to the other would be longer than if there were a tunnel or a “wormhole” connecting the two points on the paper through the empty space between them. Wormholes can connect different spots within a single universe or they can connect different universes. Wormholes arise in solutions to Einstein’s general relativity field equation, but are as of yet purely theoretical. Many of the solutions with wormholes require something called “exotic matter” or matter with negative energy density to hold the tunnel open and
