Set foot in a Kerr wormhole, and you will be fried to a crisp. The trick is that physics has yet to marry the classical rules of gravity with the quantum world, an elusive bit of mathematics that many researchers are trying to pin down.
In one twist on the picture, Juan Maldacena at Princeton and Leonard Susskind at Stanford proposed that wormholes may be like the physical manifestations of entanglement, when quantum objects are linked no matter how far apart they are. Einstein famously described entanglement as "spooky action at a distance" and resisted the notion.
But plenty of experiments tell us that entanglement is real—it's already being used commercially to protect online communications, such as bank transactions. According to Maldacena and Susskind, large amounts on entanglement change the geometry of spacetime and can give rise to wormholes in the form of entangled black holes.
But their version is no interstellar gateway. OK, so black holes are a problem. What, then, can a wormhole possibly be?
Avi Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says our options are wide open: "Since we do not yet have a theory that reliably unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics, we do not know of the entire zoo of possible spacetime structures that could accommodate wormholes.
There's still a hitch. Thorne found in his work that any type of wormhole that is consistent with general relativity will collapse unless it is propped open by what he calls "exotic matter" with negative energy. He argues that we have evidence of exotic matter thanks to experiments showing how quantum fluctuations in a vacuum seem to create negative pressure between two mirrors placed very close together.
And Loeb thinks our observations of dark energy are further hints that exotic matter may exist. But other physicists are not convinced. Sabine Hossenfelder at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden is even more skeptical: "We have absolutely zero indication that this exists. Indeed it is widely believed that it cannot exist, for if it did the vacuum would be unstable. The exact effects would depend on the curvature of spacetime around the wormhole and the density of the energy inside, she says.
ScienceDaily, 15 April American Physical Society. Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow. Retrieved November 14, from www. However, at these The fruit ScienceDaily shares links with sites in the TrendMD network and earns revenue from third-party advertisers, where indicated. A 3D illustration of a wormhole, a theoretical tunnel between two black holes.
Physicists have worked out a way that it might be feasible to send someone through a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels between two black holes that connect distant regions of space-time, and normally it would be impossible to pass something through them, but factoring in an extra dimension might make it possible.
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