Eli5, What’s a wormhole?
In: Earth Science
Einstein’s General Relativity conceptualizes Space and Time as a 4 dimensional fabric that can bend and stretch by concentrating mass and energy in different places. Through some advanced tensor calculus and working through the rest of the relevant mathematics that is beyond my pay grade at the moment, you can find that it is in theory possible to warp this fabric enough that it connects two places that without the wormhole, would be impossibly far apart.
Nobody has ever seen a worm hole, and it is already known that General Relativity doesn’t work when you have high gravity in a tiny space, which is exactly what gets you a wormhole, so it might be a pipe dream anyway.
It’s a theoretical configuration of spacetime that would essentially create a shortcut between two points in space. We don’t know if they can actually exist.
When a worm eats and crawls through the soil, they generally leave behind what could be described as a “wormhole”.
It is entirely unnoticed and impassible for humans afaik.
EDIT: My bad, I thought this was labelled Earth Science…
So take a piece of paper, and mark two points on it on opposite ends of the sheet. Normally, the shortest path from one point to the other is a straight line across the sheet. But, suppose we could fold the paper in half, such that the holes are lined up on top of each other. Then the shortest path would be through the paper. A wormhole is a distortion in space-time that connects one point to another point, much like how the folded paper brings two points that are normally apart, together.
A wormhole is a theoretical passage through space-time that could create shortcuts for long journeys across the universe.
if space is a piece of paper. fold the paper so the two ends touch. use a pin to poke a hole through both sheets. this would be what we believe a wormhole could be like.
its all theoretical. and we find it hard to imagine space could bend. but supposedly all the math checks out.
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