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Asked by anon-252013 on 28 Apr 2020.
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Julian Onions answered on 28 Apr 2020:
I think it is pretty unlikely anytime soon. Firstly wormholes are a theoretical prediction, so we don’t know if they are actually real until we make or find one. Secondly even if they are possible they seem to require some pretty exotic combinations of huge amounts of mass (many suns worth) and most calculations seem to indicate they would be very unstable.
So – never say never, but it seems we have a whole lot of problems to crack before we can consider them real and practical.
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Josh Dorrington answered on 28 Apr 2020:
I don’t think so!
Even though wormholes show up a lot in science fiction and movies, and some scientists have speculated they could exist, no evidence for wormholes has ever been found! Some people think that some special black holes might be linked together by wormholes, but you definitely wouldn’t want to fall into one of those!
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anon answered on 28 Apr 2020:
First of all, we have yet to discover a wormhole. Then we will need to figure it out. This can take a LONG time. For instance, the black holes were theorized by Einstein somewhere in the 1920-s (give or take). It took a century before a first direct observation! For now, it is just a fantasy, however mathematically grounded it may be – until an observation, an experiment, the wormholes are fiction.
That said, there are folks at NASA working on a “warp-drive” which may be the next best thing – have a look. They want to build it in a lab to test the principle as described by theory (read: math).
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Sofija Durward answered on 28 Apr 2020:
That’s an interesting question! Maybe one day in the future, people could use them to explore other galaxies or even go on a far away holiday. As of now, I don’t think anyone has found a real wormhole, and there are lots of problems like how long will one stay open? You don’t want to get stuck! If we can find one and fix these problems, then they might be useful for all sorts of travel in the future.
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Kerrianne Harrington answered on 28 Apr 2020:
I’m going to give a true experimentalist’s answer and say it’s probably not going to happen on any reasonable time scale, but perhaps a theorist could give a much more fun answer. It’s a fun sci-fi concept, and you should check out Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, which follows the laws of physics for this concept in a really educational way. It’s not possible to completely rule it out (I think?) but there’s a lot of needed unknowns that just don’t have a satisfactory realistic answer, etc.
Exploration of wormhole travel is a brilliant way of motivating learning lots of cool physics though, so don’t give up :P!
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Susan Cartwright answered on 28 Apr 2020:
Unfortunately (since it’s a nice idea) I would say no, for a number of reasons.
First, it is by no means clear that wormholes can actually exist. They appear to require very exotic conditions to be stable, including unlikely looking things like negative masses.
Second, it would be very difficult to make wormholes artificially – they require very large amounts of mass – and if any exist in nature they are likely to be rather a long way from us. This means that they don’t really solve the problem of long interstellar distances: your wormhole may allow you to traverse millions of light years in an instant, but that isn’t too helpful if the nearest one is 200 light years away!
So, in short, I don’t think wormholes are going to have practical applications withn the foreseeable future.
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Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 28 Apr 2020:
Maybe one day – as I understand it, you need “negative mass” particles to do it. We haven’t found any of those yet and there’s nothing to suggest they exist. So it could be a while away.
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Paul Saffin answered on 28 Apr 2020:
This is a lovely idea that has been around for a long time – can we take a short cut through the Universe?
Wormhole solutions to General Relativity exist, but the problem is that they need matter with negative energy to make and sustain them. Such stuff doesn’t exist in Classical Physics. But the Universe isn’t classical, it’s quantum mechanical. Maldacena, Milekhin and Popov found that one can use the negative quantum mechanical Casimir energy to create traversable wormholes! Great! The drawback is that such wormholes are longer than simply going the “usual” route. In fact, wormholes that are short-cuts violate a particular energy condition (Achronal Average Null Energy Condition) that is expected to hold even in quantum mechanics.
So, even if we did use wormholes to get to work, it would mean we were taking the long way around. -
Marios Kalomenopoulos answered on 28 Apr 2020:
Good question! I think most of the people covered how difficult this is going to be and that so far wormholes are a theoretical speculation, rather than something concrete, however I think the best place where you could possibly find something close to that is the film “Interstellar” and if you’re super interested, try to look for the book Kip Thorne wrote about the movie, where he explains in detail the physics behind it!
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