A Potted History of The Theory of Wormholes
On 14th March 1949, Kurt Godel gave his friend Albert Einstein a set of solutions to his field equations of general relativity. It was a considerable birthday present, not least because it opened a muttering can of worms.
Einstein was initially pleased with the gift but that reaction wobbled a bit when he began to understand that one solution (with a higher than median figure for the Cosmological Constant) showed that time travel was possible in accordance with the Theory of Relativity. This appeared to validate one of Karl Schwarzchild’s 1916 attempted solutions to the field equations which claimed that curvatures in space-time, referred to as tubes, could form if gravitational effects were to become strong enough. In geometry, if a vast plane of space-time were to be tortured into a shape that bent upon itself, two distant points in the surface would be in touching distance of each other. In 1935, Einstein had co-authored a paper with Nathan Rosen in response to Schwarzchild, on the subject of Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes as we now call them. However, Einstein stated that although this category of distortion of space time was indeed a mathematical possibility, that does not mean that it would also manifest in physical reality. Godel had just added weight to the other side of the scale.
The Godel Metric demonstrated mathematically that the Universe could be rotating (although not against a context and therefore, how would this be observed and confirmed?). Although our understanding of any kind of turbulence is incomplete, even in gasses, if this rotation were to happen then space-time could bend around into loops (the closed time-like curve) that would repeat periods of time for milliseconds or perhaps even perpetuate indefinitely.
Einstein’s famous relativity model, Schwarzchild’s tubes allowing movement between distant points and Godel’s results indicating that time could circle under certain conditions were theoretically in accord, although the world’s most renown professor wasn’t comfortable with the conclusion. That’s where science ended and fiction stepped in.
In Carl Sagan’s 1985 book Contact, wormholes were used as a plot device to facilitate contact between humans and an alien intelligence, conveniently bridging the vastness of cosmological space and obviating any time lapse for messages to be exchanged across it. Wormholes have since been included in untold published and broadcast works of science fiction.
The thing about science is that it gathers and assesses data, then reaches a conclusion at the end (which is offered up to peers for destruct testing). Conversely, the thing about science fiction is that it imagines a conclusion and then hunts around for any scraps of evidence that might give it credibility. The other and more impressive thing about science fiction is that it occasionally comes up with something which a decade or so later science catches up with and actually makes possible in reality, e.g. satellites for global communications (Arthur C Clarke, 1945); the smart phone and internet browser (Douglas Adams, 1978).
In 2013, a science communicator called Dennis Meredith published a novel called Wormholes in which a fictional character travels through a naturally occurring wormhole between Earth and elsewhere, then finds a way to steer the previously drifting far end of the wormhole. As this was the first recorded use of that idea, the book was archived in various national science-fiction collections. If physics research ever makes it possible to control and not dissipate a small gravitational difference in very localised space-time, a small but very dense mass, that would also (in theory) allow a discovered wormhole to be fixed at one end in space-time (e.g. here) and to take the other end anywhere you want to visit in the Universe. That is, of course, assuming a living fool or automated probe could survive the conditions inside a space-time distortion.
