Mark Megahan
You never heard of Einstein-Rosen Bridges but that “instant hole” doorway between your living room and an office 100 miles away just became another step closer to reality. The journey has a long way to go though. A new theory suggests that “wormholes,” at least when it comes to the portals thought to exist between black holes, “may be stable after all.”
Bridges between dimensions
Some “wild new” findings “contradict earlier predictions that these hypothetical shortcuts through space-time would instantly collapse.”
when it comes to the math of relativity physics, tiny differences produce huge varieties of results in the theoretical models. Short-circuit bridges between black holes called wormholes have been argued about for years.
When physicists work relativity calculations through their computers, they feed in data about things like “a mass or an arrangement of particles.” After thinking about it for a while, “the machine spits out how that collection will behave over time due to gravity.”
Ever since Einstein, it’s all about movement in space and time. “Objects start at certain physical coordinates, they move around, and they end up at other coordinates.” Things get really fuzzy when the topic of hyper-dimensional “bridges” comes up.
If you want to tell someone how to meet you somewhere, you may give them a map. You could also give them some GPS coordinates. Both of those “metrics” work and you can choose which works best for your particular application.
When thinking about bridges between black holes, the experts have some choice in metrics too. One that comes up first involves the magic line where anything that crosses will never be able to escape.
Beyond the blue event horizon
One such metric to describe the critical boundary is the Schwarzschild metric. That method has a problem in that the “metric misbehaves at a particular distance from the black hole, a distance known today as the Schwarzschild radius or the event horizon.”
When a physicist says “misbehaves” they mean “that metric completely breaks down, and it can no longer distinguish between different points in space and time.” So, they re-baited the hook and tried again. That’s when they found bridges were looking more attractive.
The Eddington-Finkelstein metric describes exactly “what happens to particles when they reach the event horizon.” It was exactly what everyone expects. True, they do “pass right through and fall into the black hole, never to be seen again.”
The twist comes if you add another, mirror image, white hole. “The simplest way to construct a wormhole is to ‘extend’ the idea of a black hole with its mirror image, the white hole. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, hence the reason wormholes are sometimes called “Einstein-Rosen bridges.”
Instead of getting shredded down into whatever quarks are made up of, the Eddington-Finkelstein metric theorizes bridges that can be crossed. By using that math method, Pascal Koiran at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France “could more easily trace the path of a particle through a hypothetical wormhole.”
He found that “the particle can cross the event horizon, enter the wormhole tunnel and escape through the other side, all in a finite amount of time. The Eddington-Finkelstein metric didn’t misbehave at any point in that trajectory.” The problem is that the configuration is more unstable than mercury fulminate.
