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Asked by billnyescienceguy to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 20 Jun 2013.
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Claire Lee answered on 20 Jun 2013:
With difficulty, I’m afraid, but it’s not *entirely* impossible.
Actually opening the wormhole is the easy part. And by “easy” I mean that all we have to do is get an object so massive that it can bend spacetime itself and then tear a hole in it, and do this all without destroying ourselves 🙂
But yes, that’s the easy part. The tricky part will be keeping the thing open long enough for us to actually use it to travel through. For this, we’d need something with negative energy – that is something that has less energy than nothing! Less energy than a perfect vacuum! Something exotic like this would actually feel gravity as a repulsive force, rather than an attractive one.
Clearly we haven’t ever discovered anything like this at all, ever (this is why physics experiments are so important, because maybe, just maybe, we could stumble onto something like this). But if we do…. all we’d have to do is fold spacetime in half, bore a hole through it and create a bridge, pop some of our exotic matter in the middle to hold it open, and Bob’s your uncle – we can take a day trip to the edge of the universe 🙂
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Sam Geen answered on 20 Jun 2013:
One possibility is that the universe is full of wormholes and you just have to find one to pump up to a size you could go through. But right now we don’t really know if a stable wormhole that you could go through could work. Black holes do link to another part of the universe, or maybe another universe, but you’d have to go through the event horizon to get there, which would smush you into a single point. So it’s not the best way to travel. Currently wormholes are still things mathematicians argue about on blackboards, but maybe one day we could make one – who knows?
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