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Inside you, you popped out, in a galaxy far, far away. This is Wormhole’s incredible promise. A wormhole is a hypothetical portal through which space-time is poured into a narrow passageway that then opens somewhere else, possibly on the other side of the universe.
It sounds fantastic, but 50 years ago many people said the same thing about black holes. Black holes also include highly distorted spacetime. Imperial College London theorist Toby Wiseman said, “We are studying wormholes half for fun and half more seriously to examine the physical limits of space-time. is,” he says. “And of course, who knows, maybe someday, in the very distant future, this could become a real technology.”
Despite its mythic reputation, Wormhole isn’t particularly quirky. These are the predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, that mass creates gravity by distorting the structure of the universe. General relativity made possible the ever-expanding universe, the big bang, and black holes. Wormholes don’t seem so outlandish in this context. In fact, Einstein himself was one of the first to explain them mathematically in his mid-1930s.
“The great thing about general relativity is that you can write down any space-time and fit it into the Einstein equations to transform it into the matter you need to support it,” says Wiseman. So if you want space-time to look like a wormhole, you’ll need some kind of substance.
like what? The key is to find something that can hold the wormhole open without immediately collapsing it. In 2020, Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)…
