Wormhole

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A wormhole, officially known as an EinsteinRosen bridge, is a hypothetical topological

feature of spacetime that would fundamentally be a shortcut through spacetime. A wormhole is


much like a tunnel with two ends, each in separate points in spacetime.
For a simplified notion of a wormhole, visualize space as a two-dimensional (2D) surface. In this
case, a wormhole can be pictured as a hole in that surface that leads into a 3D tube (the inside
surface of a cylinder). This tube then re-emerges at another location on the 2D surface with a
similar hole as the entrance. An actual wormhole would be analogous to this, but with the spatial
dimensions raised by one. For example, instead of circular holes on a 2D plane, a real
wormhole's mouths could be spheres in 3D space.
Researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, but the equations of the theory of
general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Because of its robust theoretical
strength, a wormhole is one of the great physics metaphors for teaching general relativity. 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. Wormholes that
could be crossed in both directions, known as traversable wormholes, would only be possible if
exotic matter with negative energy density could be used to stabilize them.
The Casimir effect shows that quantum field theory allows the energy density in certain regions
of space to be negative relative to the ordinary vacuum energy, and it has been shown
theoretically that quantum field theory allows states where energy can be arbitrarily negative at a
given point.[1] Many physicists, such as Stephen Hawking,[2] Kip Thorne[3] and others,[4][5][6]
therefore argue that such effects might make it possible to stabilize a traversable wormhole.
Physicists have not found any natural process that would be predicted to form a wormhole
naturally in the context of general relativity, although the quantum foam hypothesis is sometimes
used to suggest that tiny wormholes might appear and disappear spontaneously at the Planck
scale,[7][8] and stable versions of such wormholes have been suggested as dark matter
candidates.[9][10] It has also been proposed that, if a tiny wormhole held open by a negative-mass
cosmic string had appeared around the time of the Big Bang, it could have been inflated to
macroscopic size by cosmic inflation.[11]
The American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler coined the term wormhole in 1957;
the German mathematician Hermann Weyl, however, had proposed the wormhole theory in
1921, in connection with mass analysis of electromagnetic field energy.[12]
This analysis forces one to consider situations... 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".
John Wheeler in Annals of Physics

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