Wormhole travel may be possible — if slow

Wormholes exist — say Havard physicists — but travel through these tunnels connecting distant areas of spacetime would be ponderously slow.

Travel via wormhole has long been a staple of science fiction across all forms of media — but these objects have always remained purely theoretical. Thus meaning such travel methods were restricted to flights of fancy.

The Avengers — Thanos sends his Chituari army to Earth via wormhole. New research suggests he should’ve packed them a lunch. No wonder they were cranky. (Marvel/Disney 2012)

Now a study from Danial Jafferis and Ping Gao of Havard University, in collaboration with Aron Wall from Stanford University shows that wormholes may indeed exist. But the authors warn not to pack your bags just yet; travel from one side of the galaxy to the other via wormhole may indeed be possible, but so slow, that it would be more practical to go the long way around.

Jafferis, who presented his findings at the April 2019 meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver, Colorado, says: “It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel.”

The real boon, Jafferis adds, of constructing such a spacetime tunnel through which light could journey, would be the foundation on which to build a theory of quantum gravity and the discovery of what happens to the information that drops into a black hole.

He says: “The real import of this work is in its relation to the black hole information problem and the connections between gravity and quantum mechanics.”

The road to Jafferis’ new theory began when the physicist started speculating about two black holes entangled on a quantum level. This idea has previously been presented by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacana, the latter formulating the idea in the ER=EPR correspondence.

Jafferis says: “From the outside perspective, travel through the wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation using entangled black holes.”

The issue with extended travel times through the wormhole arises despite the fact that the direct connection between two black holes is shorter than the wormhole connection, thus travel via the latter doesn’t constitute a shortcut.

The theory proposed by Jafferis is based on a setup devised by Einstein and Rosen in 1935 — latter dubbed an ‘Einstein-Rosen bridge’ in honour of the two — consisting of a connection between two black holes.

As the wormhole — a word created in 1957 to describe this interaction— is traversable, Jafferis and colleagues believe that it constitutes a special case in which information can be extracted from a black hole.

He explains further: “It gives a causal probe of regions that would otherwise have been behind a horizon, a window to the experience of an observer inside a spacetime, that is accessible from the outside.”

Thus far, an insurmountable hurdle to the formulation of traversable wormholes has been the need for negative energy to exist — an idea which seems inconsistent with the concept of quantum gravity.

Jafferis proposes that the consideration of quantum effects similar to the Casimir effect — the phenomenon of vacuum energy pushing together closely spaced thin plates of materials — could be the key to mounting this obstacle.

Jafferis suggests that further study of his theory and the creation of a wormhole could even have profound effects on established science.

“I think it will teach us deep things about the gauge/gravity correspondence, quantum gravity, and even perhaps a new way to formulate quantum mechanics,” Jafferis concludes.

Original research: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05687