It’s really not possible to know what all exists out there, among the stars, beyond our ability to see. One of the most commonly chased wild ideas is the wormhole. Mathematically, wormholes were devised by Hermann Weyl in 1928, but the term wormhole was coined in a 1957 paper by John Wheeler and Charles Misner. For most of her career, Pamela has repeatedly explained that actual wormholes shouldn’t exist because they, according to the maths she learned, would collapse when any matter or energy entered them unless some otherwise unneeded form of exotic matter exists. The thing is until something is observed, there are always ways to tweak the maths and devise new possibilities. 

A new paper in Physical Review Letters by José Luis Blázquez-Salcedo, Christian Knoll, and Eugene Radu describes, and I quote, “a class of traversable wormholes… without needing any form of exotic matter.” This theory isn’t without a catch, however; their wormholes are constructed from just two massive particles. Specifically, two massive fermions, particles related to electrons or neutrinos but bigger. 

And there is another catch: the matter passing through must have just the right amount of charge and mass. In this case, they devised a scenario where electrons are able to travel through a microscopic wormhole. Now, all because this is possible in maths, doesn’t mean it’s possible in reality, but there is nothing obvious to us or the peer-reviewers to say this kind of a wormhole can’t exist. I’m just not sure how we’re going to dig up these microscopic wormholes out there in the vastness of space, but that’s a problem for another day.

More Information

University of Oldenburg press release (German)

“Traversable Wormholes in Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell Theory,” Jose Luis Blázquez-Salcedo, Christian Knoll, and Eugene Radu, 2021 March 9, Physical Review Letters