A new theory suggests that worms may be stable after all.
The findings are contrary to previous predictions that the hypothetical shortcut would collapse.
The sea change is caused by tiny differences in the mathematics of relativity, which are used to describe such wormholes, changing our overall picture of how they behave.
The 18 biggest unsolved mysteries in physics.
There are some good videos for you. It was created with a sketch.
There is a game of metrics.
There is a background on how general relativity works. It's like a machine. The machine spits out how the collection will behave over time if certain objects are put in. Everything in general relativity is based on the movement of objects in space and time.
The rules of general relativity are fixed, but the theory gives a lot of freedom to describe those coordinates. Physicists call these descriptionsmetrics. The metric can be used to describe how to get to your grandma's house for Thanksgiving. Satellite-based latitude and longitude, or landmarks scribbled on a napkin, may be that. No matter which metric you choose, you end up at the big feast.
You can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life.
Physicists can use different metrics to describe the same situation, and sometimes one metric is more helpful than the other, like starting off with the street directions.
The black hole is extended.
There are a few possible metrics when it comes to black holes. The first black holes were discovered in the Schwarzschild metric. There is some funky math in the Schwarzschild metric. The metric is bad at a particular distance from the black hole.
The metric can no longer distinguish between different points in space and time because it has completely broken down. The Eddington-Finkelstein metric describes what happens to particles when they pass through the event horizon and fall into a black hole. What does this have to do with wormholes? Extending the idea of a black hole with its mirror image is the simplest way to build a wormhole. The idea of "Einstein-Rosen bridges" was first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. White holes never let anything in. A black hole and a white hole can be joined to form a wormhole. A tunnel is created through space-time.
The result? A tunnel that is very bad.
There is a narrow path.
It's reasonable to ask what would happen if someone tried to walk through a theoretical wormhole. That's where the machinery of general relativity comes in, to find out how particles behave. The standard answer is that they are not good. The white holes are unstable and the forces within the wormhole cause them to snap like a rubber band. If you try to send something down. Good luck.
Most analyses of wormholes use the same metric as Einstein and Rosen did, which is the Schwarzschild metric. The physicist at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon tried a different metric. His paper is scheduled to be published in the Journal of Modern Physics D in a forthcoming issue.
Koiran was able to trace the path of a particle through a hypothetical wormhole by using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric. He found that the particle can cross the event horizon, enter the wormhole tunnel and escape through the other side in a finite amount of time. The Eddington-Finkelstein metric behaved in that trajectory.
Does this mean that the bridges are stable? Not quite. General relativity only tells us about gravity. White holes are unstable according to the theory of how heat and energy act. If physicists tried to make a black hole-white hole combination in the real universe using real materials, the energy densities would break everything apart.
Koiran's result points out that wormholes are not as bad as they first appeared, and that there may be stable paths through wormhole tunnels.
If they could get us to grandma's quicker.
Live Science published the original article.
