![]() Wormholes that could be crossed in both directions, known as traversable wormholes, were thought to be possible only if exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them. The first type of wormhole solution discovered was the Schwarzschild wormhole, which would be present in the Schwarzschild metric describing an eternal black hole, but it was found that it would collapse too quickly for anything to cross from one end to the other. Development "Embedding diagram" of a Schwarzschild wormhole Schwarzschild wormholes For example, in Enrico Rodrigo's The Physics of Stargates, a wormhole is defined informally as:Ī region of spacetime containing a " world tube" (the time evolution of a closed surface) that cannot be continuously deformed (shrunk) to a world line (the time evolution of a point or observer). Geometrically, wormholes can be described as regions of spacetime that constrain the incremental deformation of closed surfaces. If a Minkowski spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R × Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of the nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form ∂Σ ~ S 2, and if, furthermore, the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasipermanent intrauniverse wormhole. Formalizing this idea leads to definitions such as the following, taken from Matt Visser's Lorentzian Wormholes (1996). From a topological point of view, an intra-universe wormhole (a wormhole between two points in the same universe) is a compact region of spacetime whose boundary is topologically trivial, but whose interior is not simply connected. Wormholes have been defined both geometrically and topologically. Charles Misner and John Wheeler in Annals of Physics Modern definitions where there is a net flux of lines of force, through what topologists would call "a handle" of the multiply-connected space, and what physicists might perhaps be excused for more vividly terming a "wormhole". This analysis forces one to consider situations . ![]() Īmerican theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (inspired by Weyl's work) coined the term "wormhole" in a 1957 paper co-authored by Charles Misner: In 1928, German mathematician, philosopher and theoretical physicist Hermann Weyl proposed a wormhole hypothesis of matter in connection with mass analysis of electromagnetic field energy however, he did not use the term "wormhole" (he spoke of "one-dimensional tubes" instead). In this way it would be much easier to traverse the distance since the two points are now touching. The sheet of paper represents a plane in the spacetime continuum, and the two points represent a distance to be traveled, but theoretically a wormhole could connect these two points by folding that plane ( i.e. Īnother way to imagine wormholes is to take a sheet of paper and draw two somewhat distant points on one side of the paper. For example, instead of circular holes on a 2D plane, the entry and exit points could be visualized as spherical holes in 3D space leading into a four-dimensional "tube" similar to a spherinder. An actual wormhole would be analogous to this, but with the spatial dimensions raised by one. In this case, a wormhole would appear as a hole in that surface, lead into a 3D tube (the inside surface of a cylinder), then re-emerge at another location on the 2D surface with a hole similar to the entrance. Visualization Wormhole visualized in 2Dįor a simplified notion of a wormhole, space can be visualized as a two-dimensional surface. Some physicists, such as Kip Thorne, have suggested how to make wormholes artificially. In 1995, Matt Visser suggested there may be many wormholes in the universe if cosmic strings with negative mass were generated in the early universe. Theoretically, a wormhole might connect extremely long distances such as a billion light years, or short distances such as a few meters, or different points in time, or even different universes. Many scientists postulate that wormholes are merely projections of a fourth spatial dimension, analogous to how a two-dimensional (2D) being could experience only part of a three-dimensional (3D) object. ![]() Wormholes are consistent with the general theory of relativity, but whether wormholes actually exist remains to be seen. Ī wormhole can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime (i.e., different locations, different points in time, or both). A wormhole is a hypothetical structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations. ![]()
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