Wild New Theory Suggests Wormholes Could Be Stable Shortcuts Through Space-Time

sciencealert.com/ ^

[BenLurkin]

The simplest way to construct a wormhole is to "extend" the idea of a black hole with its mirror image, the white hole. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, hence the reason wormholes are sometimes called "Einstein-Rosen bridges".

This creates a tunnel through space-time.

Einstein and Rosen constructed their wormhole with the usual Schwarzschild metric, and most analyses of wormholes use that same metric. So physicist Pascal Koiran at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France tried something else: using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric instead. His paper, described in October in the preprint database arXiv, is scheduled to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Modern Physics D.

Koiran found that by using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, he could more easily trace the path of a particle through a hypothetical wormhole. He found that the particle can cross the event horizon, enter the wormhole tunnel and escape through the other side, all in a finite amount of time. The Eddington-Finkelstein metric didn't misbehave at any point in that trajectory.

Does this mean that Einstein-Rosen bridges are stable? Not quite.

General relativity only tells us about the behavior of gravity, and not the other forces of nature. Thermodynamics, which is the theory of how heat and energy act, for example, tells us that white holes are unstable. And if physicists tried to manufacture a black hole-white hole combination in the real universe using real materials, other math suggests the energy densities would break everything apart.

However, Koiran's result is still interesting because it points out that wormholes aren't quite as catastrophic as they first appeared, and that there may be stable paths through wormhole tunnels, perfectly allowed by general relativity.

[Redcitizen]

lol.