Sometimes, when we pass a hard test or ace a quiz, we feel on top of the world. Sometimes, we learn or hear about things that make us want to rip our hairs out, punch a wall, or even question our own sanity. And yet those very questions that push us to our limits are somehow the most captivating, including the theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge, more commonly referred to as the wormhole.
Part of the reason I’m so interested in space is because of the absolute insanity of it all. A hole in which we can hop in and appear somewhere else in the universe, not unlike magic? A cosmic doorway in which we can travel to a parallel universe and experience the events of Avengers: Endgame? A way to travel back and forth between the seemingly binding restrictions of time? Count me in! Of course, it’s not as simple as that.
First and foremost, wormholes are only theoretical. We don’t know for sure if they exist or not; for all we know, they might only exist in our wildest imaginations and not at all in reality. But even if wormholes don’t exist, they are forever etched into history by way of the film industry. Movies like Interstellar depict wormholes as ways for characters to traverse great distances in the blink of an eye, but unfortunately, that might be all the wormhole is good for. A plot device for the big screens. Even if wormholes do exist, they will most likely never be a way for humans to blink across the cosmic plane. According to Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology, a major reason for such unfortunate news has to do with the wormhole’s instability. Thorne stated that wormholes require a large amount of negative energy, otherwise the walls of the wormhole will simply collapse too fast.
Even if wormholes remain speculation for the rest of time, their existence is still fun to think about. According to Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, spacetime could become so warped that two points in space can end up sharing the same physical location. It sounds crazy, and probably is, but just think about it: A distance normally millions of light years apart can be traversed in under a minute. Maybe one day all physics as we know it will turn up incorrect, and wormholes become the preferred method of travel for humanity’s intergalactic civilization, or maybe the very idea of wormholes become so obsolete they are hidden away in the lines of some history book. Personally, I much prefer thinking about the former. Life becomes much more interesting that way.