You’ve got yourself a fancy new spaceship and you want to start on a five-year tour of the galaxy. But there's a problem: Space is big. Really big.

How to build a wormhole in just 3 (nearly impossible) steps

submited by

Style Pass

2022-05-16 12:30:04

You’ve got yourself a fancy new spaceship and you want to start on a five-year tour of the galaxy. But there's a problem: Space is big. Really big. And even at the fastest speeds imaginable, it takes eons of crawling across the interstellar voids to get anywhere interesting.

A shortcut. A tunnel. A bridge through spacetime that lets you skip through all that boring space travel and speed to the fun stuff. It’s a staple of science-fiction, and it’s rooted in science-fact. How difficult could it be?

The first step is to understand that wormholes are totally legit in the mathematics of general relativity (GR). We’re using GR because that’s our language of gravity, and Albert Einstein’s brilliant mathematical engine is relatively straightforward. Einstein realized that while we experience gravity as a force, it's really just the sensation we feel as we’re forced to navigate the bumps, wiggles, and undulations of spacetime. Those same bumps, wiggles, and undulations come from the distribution of matter and energy in that same spacetime.

If we want to build a tunnel in spacetime—a wormhole—we need to discover some arrangement of matter and/or energy that bends spacetime just so, ensuring that a tunnel will appear. With general relativity as a guide, we need to find a solution to its equations that permits the existence of a wormhole.