Stellar Horizons: Emma Experiences Wormhole Theory

Margarita is a Student Ambassador in Greece, leading a series of articles about Aerospace Engineering as part of her leadership project.

The classroom was quiet except for the scratching of pens. On the board, one phrase was written: QUANTUM MECHANICS.

Emma blinked at the board. Her teacher’s voice blurred into a symphony of mumbles and whispers “..probability…waves.”

Emma’s eyes grew heavy; the ticking of the clock grew slower. Then it stopped. Silence, she opened her eyes, and she was no longer in class. She was sitting at a small round café in the middle of a galaxy. Outside the window, stars glittered and drifted through space. Far away was a massive black hole, bending and twisting light itself.

Emma stood abruptly. “Okay,” she muttered, “I am dreaming….there is no wa-”

“Not exactly.”

A voice was heard. Emma turned around, and a waiter stood at a table. He was tall, and he shimmered.

“Welcome,” he said, smiling. “To the Café at the edge of the Universe.”

Emma was shocked, she gathered the courage and asked, “Who are you?”

The waiter chuckled, “I am a quantum particle”.

Emma blinked. “No way, it’s impos-”, before she could finish her sentence, the waiter appeared in two places at once-one beside her chair, one across the table.

“You are duplicating”, Emma whispered.

“No, Emma, I am in superposition,” both versions replied, then they merged back into one.

The waiter moved efficiently and fast, like a blurry picture. He placed a napkin on the table.

“Imagine this napkin is spacetime.” He drew two small dots on opposite ends.

“These are two distant points in the universe. If you travel normally, you move across the surface.”

He slid his finger slowly from one dot to the other.

“Long journey.”

Emma nodded.

Then he lifted the napkin and folded it so the two dots touched. “But spacetime is not rigid”, he continued. According to Albert Einstein, mass and energy can bend it. The two dots met. “If spacetime bends enough”, he said, “those two distant points can connect.  Like a tunnel.”

Outside the window, an elongated shape appeared, like a glowing corridor connecting two distant stars.

“Around the 1930’s, Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen proposed that black holes could connect to hypothetical white holes, forming a bridge shape,” the waiter explained. Today, we call it a wormhole.

Emma was stunned. “Look,” she said, pointing at the bridge-shaped object, “it’s flickering”, she whispered.

The tunnel flickered uncontrollably, and then suddenly, it collapsed.

The waiter turned and looked at Emma, “A wormhole naturally pinches shut almost instantly. Too fast for light to cross.”

He clicked his fingers, and a whiteboard appeared.

“John Archibald, a theoretical physicist, noted that such bridges would likely collapse almost instantaneously, making them unviable for human transportation.” The waiter said, and his words appeared on the whiteboard.

“Though in the 1980s, theoretical physicists, including Kip Thorne, studied the possibility of “traversable wormholes”, which could, in theory, remain open long enough for matter or even a spacecraft to pass through. Their research suggested that keeping a wormhole stable would require a form of exotic matter with negative energy density-something that would counteract gravity and prevent the tunnel from closing.”

“But there is no negative energy….my teacher told me it’s impossible”, Emma said.

The waiter nodded, “That’s true, though in mathematics it’s permitted that certain quantum phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, show tiny amounts of negative energy under specific conditions.”

“It’s not enough to stabilize the wormhole, and unfortunately, no known material could generate the enormous quantities required to stabilize a macroscopic wormhole.”

Emma looked out of the window again and then back at the waiter.

“If a wormhole can connect two different places, can it connect two different times?”

The waiter clicked his fingers again, and this time two clocks appeared. “We are going to do a small experiment.”

“Imagine that a pair of twins, named Maggie and Emily, are standing at either end of the wormhole. Maggie is next to the wormhole on Earth in 2009, while Emily is on the spaceship (also, for the moment, in 2009).” He said, pointing at the two flickering silhouettes of two girls far away.

“She goes on a little jaunt for a few days, traveling at nearly the speed of light, but when she comes back, thousands of years have passed on Earth due to time dilation (she is now in 5909).”

“On Maggie’s side of the wormhole (still 2009), only a few days have passed.”

He chuckled, “In fact, the twins have regularly been discussing the strange sights that Emily has witnessed over the few days of her journey.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” the waiter added.

Emma’s eyes widened. “You could step through….and arrive in a different time.”

“Yes,” he answered.

“That would break causality,” Emma exclaimed.

“Perhaps”, he said calmly. “Or perhaps it tells you that spacetime is far stranger than you imagine.”

The café started to shake and flicker. Loud noises were heard.

“Are wormholes real?” Emma shouted.

The waiter turned to look at her. The noise grew louder, the café flickered more, and started to fade.

“The universe does not forbid them.”

“What?” Emma shouted, “I can’t hear you!”

The waiter started to fade too. “The universe does not forbid them. But it has not revealed them either”.

“Till next time, dear Emma.”

The last thing Emma saw before darkness returned was the napkin on the table- still folded.

This article was written with the assistance of GenAI tools.