• Question: What is a worm-hole, I would really like to know!

    Asked by funkycarrot to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 18 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      I don’t know much about this sorry, probably only what you know from sci-fi and I have no idea how that transfers to “the real world”

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Ok, this is mostly from wiki so…

      As far as I can tell, the’re like short cuts through space. imagine you have a sheet of paper, bent in half. If you can only move on the sheet of paper (in 2D space), it will take a long time to get from one end to the other. If, instead, there was some kind of tunnel joining the two ends of the paper, you could travel through it and get there much faster. This requires a 3D feature to take the short cut.

      This is one of the examples of the power of mathematics. We have never observed a wormhole, ever. We have never seen any evidence that they actually exist anywhere. Where the idea comes from is the mathematics of general relativity. One of features that comes out of the maths is these objects that we call worm holes. Depending on what particular type of solution you’re looking at, you can get different types of wormholes under different conditions, like short lived wormholes at the centre of a black hole.

      Now, the first question is will we ever find or create one? Hard to say. We’ve been able to make stuff in the lab before that was predicted by mathematics, but sometimes it takes decades or longer to get there. The second question, would we actually be able to use them for any useful purpose? Would a human survive travelling through one? Or would we only be able to send light (and thus information)?

      Either way, it’s probably not like Stargate.

      Apologies to any general relativity physicists who read this, it’s the best I could do with my limited understanding!!!!! 🙂

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Hmmm my memory suggests that a wormhole is like two connected black holes, with an “in” and an “out”. Black holes just take matter in, so you’d need another one somewhere pushing things out – like an anti-black hole. Passing into a black hole completely squashes you in a tiny space and squeezes all the life out of you, so it would not be a good way to travel. Although this perfectly describes the London Underground, and people do that every day.

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