1.   Foreword

 

Note: Nothing in this document is directly copied from internet, just like my other essays.

I decided to write something about wormholes because of a book I read. The book was called ‘Time travel girl 1989’ and it was about a girl who could time travel through worm holes. To be honest, I had no idea what wormholes were, so I decided to look up some information and this is the result.

“Wormholes are doors to other worlds”

 

2.   What are wormholes?

 

A wormhole is described a gateway that connects two places in space and time with each other. It’s often displayed as a tunnel with two ends, each at separate points in space or time. It is also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
With a wormhole, you could time travel! But, don’t cheer to soon, because everything is still theoretical and hypothetical.

 

3.   Who discovered wormholes and how do they work?

There are three scientists involved in the definition of wormholes.
First, people already knew that there existed something like wormholes, but they didn’t use the term yet.
It was Ludwig Ramm who invented the term ‘wormholes’ and described the phenomenon theoretically, based on those earlier descriptions.

Later on, the scientists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen worked further with this concept, where they used the theory of relativity. What is this theory?

Everything is relative, like light and sound. That means, it is different for every observer.

If there are 4 observers experiencing the sound of a honking car driving by, on different positions along the way, they will all hear another sound of the honk.
This is called the Doppler-effect caused by sound waves getting more or less dense and thereby changing the pitch of the sound. So sound is relative to the ones listening.

Time is also relative. We maybe think it’s not because we are in the middle of it, but if someone would see it from another point in the universe, they will ‘see’ something much different. Time is not a straight line, but can also be seen as another dimension.

Einstein stated that there are 4 dimensions. The fourth dimension is spacetime.

Things that emit a lot of energy, like planets and stars, make a ‘bend’ in this spacetime. These bends are what Newton called gravity.
So both scientists described the same phenomenon: in space small objects move to large objects, using very different theories and principles.

Rosen and Einstein went further in the concept ‘wormholes’ by using other theories.

Rosen stated that light is waves. Einstein stated that light waves bend with the spacetime. These concepts are both needed to describe wormholes.

The maximum achievable speed is the speed of light, which is 300.000 kilometers per second. The speed of light is set. In other words: the speed is constant.

In Einstein’s theory of relativity ‘E=mc²’ is a formula with which you can calculate the bend of the spacetime. E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light.  

Einstein also figured out that mass = energy. You don’t need to understand that, you just need to know it.

A wormhole is a very strong bend in the spacetime, almost a double folded spacetime. You can see that in this picture:

 

4.   Are wormholes real?

 

A Mexican scientist named Alcubierre calculated how much energy you would be needed to create a wormhole with the formula ‘E=mc²’.
The number that he got, was a negative number. That means there is negative energy required to create a wormhole.
Not only that, but a gigantic amount of negative energy is required; as much energy as the whole universe together, but negative.

Negative energy is very rare. People only know one way to generate it, with the so-called Casimir effect. That is a difficult phenonym that I’m not going to explain because it’s practically unusable. It is such a small amount.

So, wormholes are still very theoratically and complicated. A few people -like Einstein, Rosen and Alcubierre- looked at wormholes. They all discovered something about it, but there is still a lot of discover.

What if we found something that could make a lot of negative energy?
But people are so interested in time travel, what you can see in a lot of movies, books and games like ‘Interstellar’, ‘The Meteor Girl’ and ‘Portal’.
But is there going exist a wormhole soon? Probably not, unfortunately.

Written in Januari 2019