A HARVARD physicist has shown that wormholes can exist: tunnels in curved space-time, connecting two distant places, through which travel is possible.
But don’t pack your bags for a trip to other side of the galaxy yet; although it’s theoretically possible, it’s not useful for humans to travel through, said the author of the study, Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University, written in collaboration with Ping Gao, also from Harvard and Aron Wall from Stanford University.
“It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel,” Jafferis said. He presented his findings at the 2019 American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver.
Despite his pessimism for pangalactic travel, he said that finding a way to construct a wormhole through which light could travel was a boost in the quest to develop a theory of quantum gravity.
“The real import of this work is in its relation to the black hole information problem and the connections between gravity and quantum mechanics,” Jafferis said. – Harvard University
