Is there any way to make a working, even fun, wormhole, instead of a terrifying portal to inevitable destruction? And you can die-miserably-as you careen into the singularity. If someone else jumps in, you can meet them and have some tea together. You can watch light from another patch of the universe filter in from the opposite side. Inside a black hole event horizon, you have only one destination: singularity town, the place of infinite density and soul-crushing gravitational forces. ![]() It doesn't matter if there's a wormhole tunnel inside it-you don't get to leave. The very definition of an event horizon-their very cosmique raison d'etre - is that once you enter them, you don't get to come out. The entrance to the wormhole-the "throat"-sits inside the event horizon of the black hole. Well, for one thing, traveling down such a wormhole would really, really suck. Death by wormholeīut that doesn't stop anybody from playing a fun game of "what if." What if white holes could naturally form, or be constructed? What if we could stabilize them? What if we could attach a white hole's singularity to a black hole and make a wormhole? What if? What if? What if? Oh, yeah, and the mechanism for making black holes the collapse of massive stars-also automatically prevents the formation of a symbiotic white hole.Īnd even if they did form (and they don't), the extreme gravity of the mutual singularities would cause the wormhole tunnel to immediately stretch and snap much more quickly than anything could cross it. There's no known process in our universe that would actually form them, and even if they did pop into existence, their natural extreme instability would snuff them right out again. While we have gobs of evidence for the existence of black holes, white holes appear to be mathematical fiction. That same mathematical machinery delivers a bonus, too: All black holes would be naturally "connected" to white holes via their singularities, making a tunnel through space. A white hole is pretty much what you think: Whereas a black hole's event horizon marks a region of space that once you enter you can't leave, it's impossible to enter a white hole's horizon, although anything already in there can escape. ![]() The concept of wormholes got its start when physicist Ludwig Flamm, and later Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, realized that black holes can be "extended." When one goes about solving the fantastically complicated equations of general relativity, the machinery that predicts a black hole also predicts a phenomenon called a white hole. Wormholes are a workhorse of sci-fi interstellar civilizations in books and on the screen because they solve the annoying problem of "Well, if we stuck to known physics, 99.99999 percent of the story would be as fascinating as watching people sleep."īut could we do it? Could we actually warp and bend space-time to make a convenient tunnel, making all of our galactic dreams come true? A tunnel through space-time that allows intrepid travelers to hop from star system to star system without ever coming close to the speed of light.
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