Why Would A Real Wormhole Be A Total Nightmare?

It should have been a simple test.

The wormhole stretched from the moon's

orbit to an empty patch of space near

Neptune, where a welcome party was

already being arranged. It had taken

huge effort and resources to reach down

into the quantum foam and pluck a

wormhole from those depths, but general

relativity had predicted their

existence. And now here it was. With

this technology, humanity could finally

achieve the dream of interstellar

travel. And so, after the last

calibrations and tweaks, the ship and

its brave crew entered the wormhole's

throat, passing easily through the

sphere of the entrance. Onlookers could

see the retreating vessel gradually

shrinking away as it appeared to move

effortlessly to its destination, 4 12

billion km away. At the other end, the

reception party could see the ship

approaching, slowly getting larger as

the minutes ticked by. The test probe

had taken roughly 30 minutes to traverse

the distance, and the manned vessel

seemed to be on a similar track.

[Music]

But then,

there were murmurss of concern as the

ship appeared to slow down, then stall.

It looked frozen in place.

30 minutes passed and the ship did not

emerge.

Days passed, then weeks, then months.

With time, sensitive telescopes at

either end were able to determine that

the ship was still in motion, but almost

imperceptibly slowly.

Debates raged about what to do. Send a

rescue party? Turn off the wormhole

generator? Every option seemed to end in

tragedy with the fragile balance of

exotic forces maintaining the stability

of the wormhole thrown into

disequilibrium, tearing the ship and its

crew to pieces. The only safe option was

to wait.

And so they waited.

[Music]

500 years passed before what was left of

the ship finally emerged from the open

end of the wormhole. It was still

intact, but barely functioning. A broken

husk after years of exposure to the

harsh conditions within. The crew was

long dead, their remains still strapped

into the command chairs.

Finally, the wormhole was shut down.

Clearly, they had miscalculated. The

predictions of general relativity were

evidently not enough. They thought they

had solved every corner of the complex

intersection of gravity and quantum

mechanics, accounted for every possible

interaction.

But something simply hadn't worked.

Humanity looked out at the distant stars

and never felt more alone.

Wormholes are complicated.

They appear in the equations of general

relativity and the idea of them is

almost as old as the theory itself. But

unfortunately for those test pilots

heading to Neptune, relativity is just a

machine that tells us how gravity works

in various scenarios, regardless of

whether or not the universe actually

allows those scenarios.

And so what would it take to build a

wormhole? Which mechanisms allow for

wormholes? and which forbid them? And

would they transport us to the

destinations of our dreams across the

stars? Or to an early death.

[Music]

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Critics called it confusing, dense, and

absurd. But to Edgar Alan Poe, it was

his greatest work yet.

It was 1848, just one year before his

mysterious death. Having struggled as a

professional writer throughout much of

his life, his recent success from The

Raven had been a welcome financial

reprieve, which he took advantage of to

compose what he viewed as his

masterpiece, what he called the one

great purpose in my literary life.

Its title was Eureka.

The text is expansive, and today little

attention is paid to it, especially

compared to his much more famous poems.

But some statements in its tangled mass

still stand out as oddly precient. For

about 2thirds of the way through the

text, in the middle of a section where

Po discusses the expanses of

interstellar space, he declares almost

out of nowhere that space and duration

are one.

In Po's eyes, space and time were the

same.

Working nearly a century later, Albert

Einstein had no idea that in some sense

he was recapitulating the thoughts of a

long deadad New England poet. But that

is exactly what he ended up doing.

It was 1905, a year which would become

known as Einstein's annis morabilis, a

year of miracles. In that single year,

Einstein published five papers, each one

with huge implications for our reality.

And one of those papers, perhaps his

most consequential, concerned the

relationship between movement and

energy. It's in this paper that Einstein

formulated his special theory of

relativity, which showed that the

measurements of length and time were

relative to the observer. But Einstein's

former teacher, Herman Minkovsky,

thought that he hadn't gone far enough.

And so, shortly after, Minkovsky offered

an intuitive geometric formulation of

Einstein's work, presenting the universe

as a four-dimensional object. Unlike

Po's ideas, however, this new spacetime

did not mean that space and time were

identical. Instead, they were different

facets of a single unified entity. But

Einstein would learn from his teacher

once more and quickly adopted this new

idea, using it to make one more gigantic

leap in human imagination.

In 1915, Einstein unleashed into the

unsuspecting world a general theory of

relativity.

[Music]

In the language of general relativity,

spacetime isn't static. It responds to

the presence of matter and energy. The

unified fabric of spacetime bends and

warps due to matter's influence. And in

return, that bending of spacetime

influences the motion of matter. Indeed,

years later, famed physicist John

Wheeler would sum it all up with the

simple phrase, "Matter tells space how

to curve, and space tells matter how to

move."

And it's happening all around you and

within you right now.

Ripples of gravity, known as