Could We Travel Through A Black Hole To Take A Shortcut Into Another Galaxy?

Ever since a trip through a wormhole was first portrayed in 2001: A Space Odyssey 50 years ago, the idea of them has captured the public imagination. And small wonder: they’re the ultimate form of cosmic travel: a way of zipping across galaxies in an instant.

- Prof Robert Matthews

But while wormholes have become a staple of science fiction, among scientists they’ve been a source of endless frustration. Not because the idea is  Eridiculous, but because it isn’t. The astonishing fact is that wormholes are a natural consequence of current theories of gravity, and were investigated by Einstein himself over 80 years ago. Ever since, researchers have been trying to find out if such a bizarre theoretical possibility could be a reality.

And now they have made a major breakthrough – one which exploits deep connections between the nature of space and time and the laws of the subatomic world. The result is a new understanding of exactly what’s required to make a real-life wormhole.

Einstein first investigated the properties of wormholes with his colleague Nathan Rosen in 1935, using his theory of gravity known as General Relativity. They found that what we now call a black hole could be connected to another via a tube-like ‘throat’. Now called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, this seemed to open the way to taking shortcuts through space and time, entering a black hole in one part of the Universe and emerging from another perhaps millions of light-years away, but without taking millions of years to do so – thus effectively travelling faster than the speed of light.

It was a stunning idea, but in the early 1960s it was dealt a severe blow by John Wheeler, the brilliant US physicist who first coined the terms ‘black hole’ and ‘wormhole’. Together with fellow theorist Robert Fuller, he showed that the Einstein

Rosen bridge would collapse almost as soon as it formed. As Dr Daniel Jafferis, associate professor of physics at Harvard University explains: “We could jump in from opposite sides and meet in the connected interior, but then we would both be doomed.”