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A wormhole
is a portal through space, and possibly time, created by a black hole linked
to its
opposite
white hole somewhere
else. A black hole, of course, is a collapsed neutron star that
has
teetered past the
three solar mass limit into the twilight zone of Einstein's General
Theory.
It
was Albert Einstein with his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 and his
General Theory of
Relativity
in 1916, who set up
the parameters of infinity. The former, of course, pegged the
speed
of light for all observers
at 186,000 mps. The latter showed how the gravitational field of
matter
defines the universe through
gravitational force. The larger the mass, the larger the gravi-
tational
field. The
very stuff of space and
time can be considered physical entities.
A black
hole is matter that has become so dense that its center approaches infinite
density.
It
becomes a singularity. Anything that enters gets scrunched.
Any matter, energy,
light, etc.
that
gets too close will not be able to get out. Once
you've crossed the event horizon - you're
there
and presumably in trouble.
Work
in the 1960's showed how space and time could be warped around black holes.
The Law
of
Symmetry would indicate, some theorists speculate, the existence of a black
hole's counter-
point
a white hole. Matter sucked in by a black hole near Pluto,
might simply whoosh
out through
a
white hole in Andromeda!
Wormholes
are also believed to be built into the structure of space-time at the Planck
length,
(Gh/c^3)^(1/2)
=1.6 *10(-35) meters. This length is 20 powers of ten smaller than the
nucleus of an
atom
so it is far beyond our power to measure. But the nascent quantum theory
of gravity seems
to
predict that wormholes should be continually created and destroyed at the
Planck length. That
means
we would be surrounded by trillions of wormholes forming and collapsing
trillions - of
times
a
second. Hawking has recently argued that this phenomena may explain the
nature of the
physical
constants, like G, h and c. (See Hawking, Physical review D, 1988).
The
U.S.S Enterprise found a wormhole that was stable only on one end,
which would still be useful
for
sending a probe in (and pulling it back before the other end changed) to
explore far reaches of the galaxy.
The
Bajoran is the only known stable wormhole.
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