If space is a vacuum and not a fabric made out of a material how do wormholes work? (Please avoid the pen through paper analogy)

Question

I’m struggling to understand how someone can create a hole in space if space is already a vacuum. I mean, you can’t create a hole in emptiness. So where does that leave wormholes?

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Answer 1

General Relativity treats space as its own thing rather than just the arena where things happen. It can expand, compress or be deformed in many other ways depending on what is currently in said space. We see the stretching as the expanding of distant space and compression near massive objects(this is why light bends around stars and black holes). We could also in theory deform space in such a way that we link 2 otherwise very distant areas through a much smaller distance known as a worm hole.

Worm holes work in the math but are most likely not a real thing. They require negative energy which isn’t something we think can actually exist.