Question: could we travel through a worm hole

Alexander Burke answered on 2 Mar 2018:

This is such a cool question. I’m so glad you’ve asked this.
First of all, let me explain the notion of a wormhole to you. First of all, I want you to get an a4 sheet of paper and hold it landscape. Then I need to you to put a dot on the left-hand side of the paper and another dot on the right-hand side of the paper. That sheet of paper right now is our universe. The dot on the left is the Earth (call this point A) and the dot on the right is a new planet which we want to live on (call this point B). The only problem is that to get from A to B could take a very long time… millions and billions of years. If we could find a clever way to manipulate that piece of paper then we could travel from A to B in a matter of minutes? Wouldn’t that be helpful… can you figure out how to do this without reading the next line.

Fold the piece of paper! If you fold the piece of paper you can travel from A to B very quickly. This is a (surprisingly accurate) way to describe exactly what a wormhole is. It is a “tunnel” that allows you to travel from different parts of the universe very quickly.

Now that you know what a wormhole is let’s try and answer the question of how we travel through one. The mathematics behind black holes suggests that if we fall into a spinning black hole then we are spat out into another universe. This could be a possible way to travel from one area of the universe to another… the only issue is that we could be transferred into a completely different universe (and most likely would be!). There is also a huge chance we will be completely and utterly destroyed by the black holes immense gravity… so let’s avoid that option.
Wormholes are very dynamical objects (they move around and open and close all the time). So to find a wormhole we can travel through is a very difficult task. At this current moment in time, we have very little idea how we could travel through a wormhole since the theory suggests that they open and close faster than it would take light to travel through them. If we could find a clever way to keep them open then we could maybe travel through a wormhole! Theory suggests that strange “exotic matter” (which is stuff which has a negative mass…) could hold wormholes open but we would need to use loads of it. Interestingly, we have been able to create a small amount of this “exotic matter” in laboratories =P.
To summarise. We could travel through a wormhole… just not for a very long time. They are still not very well understood. Theoretically, though, it is possible…