Hey!  I know a shortcut!  Go to the center of the Milky Way, take a left, go into the funny dark circle, and you’ll pop out somewhere else.  Okay, the existence of worm holes puzzles even the most experienced of astronomers and physicists leading to skepticism of their existence and function.  Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which, in simple terms, describes how space and time covers the universe, and that objects and location can change and warp the “fabric” of space time.

Many like to think of this using an example of fabric or a trampoline with something heavy on it, which, if enough force exists, will tear the fabric, or cause it to contact another part of space time fabric.  If these special solutions of contact of the theory of relativity allow for the joining of two sheets of space time, a wormhole may emerge.  Doing so would allow whatever goes into the hole to go somewhere faster than a particle of light, which must continuously travel the entire distance between the wormhole’s entry and exit along the spacetime fabric.

Several types of wormholes exist, each with their own caveats.  The earliest theories proposed were those like the Einstein-Rosen bridge, where a super dense particle with unthinkable amounts of mass curved space time until it gets so dense, space time itself collapses into a black hole.  Anything (or anyone) that goes into the black hole will become trapped and unable to go out the same way and might end up at a super dense core, or out a white hole, which is a region of spacetime that matter can only exit from.  Some believe that the white hole is in another universe similar in type to ours, but everything appears mirrored, and time runs backwards.  Unfortunately, these types of worm holes would be highly unstable, and the path that spans between the two pieces of fabric would quickly get stretched to the point of being shut.

In addition to other types of black holes, like the cosmic string theory, some theorize that building our own worm holes will be the best option.  To do this, we would have to get our hands on so called exotic matter, which has negative mass and repels regular matter.  Doing so would prevent gravity from closing the worm hole, as it is constantly pressing on it to cut it.

Sadly, scientists have not proved the existence of wormholes beyond reasoning and as solutions on paper to the general theory of relativity.  Remember, everything I introduced, and frankly everything that science comments on, uses models that can predict behavior very accurately in some situations, but fall apart during others.  True and complete perception of the universe is remarkably difficult and probably impossible.  Considering the scale of the universe, knowing everything as humans probably exceeds our capacity and must be satisfied with not knowing.  Finally, even if we could control space time, are we exploiting something meant to be untouched?  How would toying with it change our purpose in the universe?