In popular culture science fiction television and movies, like Star Trek and Star Wars, traveling great distances in seconds is commonplace. Distances from one universe to another universe is as easy as slicing bread. But, so far throughout human history the farthest any single human has ever traveled in space has been to the moon, and realistically within the next couple of centuries or so humans probably won’t be able to travel higher distances than Mars. But what if there was a way? Theoretically there is.
Traveling through the space time continuum is theoretically possible through wormholes. A wormhole, otherwise called an Einstein-Rosen bridge is a hypothetical strategy for collapsing space and time on each other with the goal that you could travel between two places within (Cain 2015). Basically, a person be could in one place, like Earth, and within seconds they could be transported somewhere else, like another such as Mars. The idea of the wormhole came to fruition in 1916 when, Austrian Physicist Ludwig Flamm, was reviewing Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (Redd 2017). Ludwig theorized that if one could do a theoretical time reversal of a Black hole then one could create a “White Hole”, and the entrances of both could be connected through a space time conduit (Redd 2017). Later in 1935, physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen used Einstein’s theory of general relativity to further developed the idea, suggesting that there were possible “bridges” throughout space-time that could reduce time-travel and distance, this idea became known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge (Wheeler 1996). But the idea was be added to further when in 1949 physicist Kurt Gödel discovered a new solution to Einstein’s equations; that is, a new space-time allowed by the theory of general relativity (Wheeler 1996).
In the 1955, another physicist named John Wheeler would coin the term wormhole when he published a paper on the Einstein-Rosen bridges. In this paper he would go on to discuss wormholes in topical entities known as geons, and publish the first ever diagram of a wormhole (Freedman 1989). The concept of wormholes have developed throughout the past century, however wormholes still remain mostly theoretical and very basic in the concepts that they are founded on.
Theoretically the outside to wormhole would look like “in its simplest form… a spherical from the outside, that is, all approaches from all directions would look the same” (Wheeler 1996). With two holes on either side that would connect the two points that one would travel between, with both of these openings being a black hole (Redd 2017). By entering one of these holes a person would travel directly through the wormhole, without a change in direction and head straight towards the middle and then slowly head towards the other hole, again without a change in direction. Inside the wormhole would be tunnel-esque with a light from the normal space shining in on either side, however looking at the sides of the wormhole would be different (Wheeler 1996). The sides “would be oddly constricted”(Freedman 1989), with two possible explanations for this. The first explanation would be that even in the portions of the wormholes space-time areas that are a vacuum the space is curved, meaning that the light in any direction inside the wormhole would be perpendicular to the radius so the light would always end up where it started (Wheeler 1996).
Therefore, if somebody was facing sideways in a wormhole they could theoretically see the back of their head. The second reason for the constricted way a wormhole looks is because the “light might be distorted and your view very fuzzy” (Freedman 1989). The result of this would create a space of light around the wormholes traveler that would change the sideways direction that is usually perceived (Wheeler 1996). Theoretical travel through wormholes is actually much more difficult than it is made out to be in television and movies. This is primarily due to two reasons: the size and stability of the wormholes. Wormholes are hypothetically very small with a theoretical size of 10–33 centimeters, however as the galaxy expands the size of the wormholes would theoretically stretch out with the galaxy (Redd 2017).
The other problem comes from the fact that the theoretical Einstein-Rosen bridge wouldn’t be very stable
