We know that high speeds cause time to distort. We also have found wormholes in …

We know that high speeds cause time to distort. We also have found wormholes in space that connect two distant points. Therefore, by entering a wormhole we can travel through time. How can we create a wormhole and control its destination point? — JB, Union, New Hampshire

Near some large concentration of mass/energy, the equations of general relativity do admit solutions that have two open ends and that could be interpreted as being wormholes. However, there is no widely accepted interpretation of these solutions and no evidence that such solutions are actually realized in our universe. While there are some physicists and astrophysicists who remain hopeful that wormholes will ultimately be found, the only ones I’ve ever heard about are in science fiction stories.

Even if such exotic structures do exist, there is also no evidence that people could traverse the severely distorted space-time between the two open ends without being destroyed and without having an infinite amount of time pass in the rest of the universe while they were en route. If all of these issues aren’t enough to discourage you, let me add that the possibility of engineering wormholes to connect specific regions of space-time is extraordinarily remote. Working with a wormhole would be at least as difficult as working with a black hole and I, for one, hope never to encounter such a destructive and dangerous object.

Leave a Reply