[Sci-Fi Soothsayers Scavenger Hunt] Wormholes and Portals
Round-up and some Science IRL comments on Wormholes and Portals!
For Sci-Friday this week, the Sci-Fi Soothsayers (currently
and myself, and we are always on the lookout for more folk with an interest in both Sci-Fi and real-life science to join this little community!) ran a Scavenger Hunt on Notes. We asked our treasure hunters to find stories or share thoughts on the theme of wormholes or portals, within or between universes. Here, I’ve collected all the treasure you’ve found, and added some science commentary below. Enjoy! The Sci-Fi
has a whole book of stories centred around portals between three universes: “Portals have opened in London, connecting Earth to a far future version of itself and a fantastical land where magic is real. As society adjusts to the new status quo, a specialist division of the police is established to handle the growing number of portal crimes.”This is actually one of the first fiction series I stumbled on when I first blundered into Substack, and one I’m still reading. It’s a lot of fun, and I love the way Simon blends the police detective genre with the sci-fi and fantasy of his three universes. His portals only allow a very limited transfer of technology between the worlds, and one of the things I enjoy about the stories is the deft way he explores the social and economic consequences of that.
writes beautiful dreamlike prose about “the surreal machinations of interdimensional travel” through a portal in his stories for the Blackwater Files project. His whole series is well worth reading. is currently writing Eras of Cain, featuring communication across eight universes. It has a great cyber-punk vibe and lots of action, not too late to catch up! has a whole multiverse with characters moving between worlds! I’ve only read one of his stories so far but I am definitely planning to read more! shared an extract from his current work-in-progress, about faster-than-light travel through “gravity wells” / wormholes. I enjoyed the methodical testing that the characters are doing here, working out how they can use the gravity wells1 first with ions then with larger pieces of matter. This gets my prize for being most thought-out in terms of science and I shall look forward to reading more of Michael’s book whenever it comes out! explores diverging paths and alternate selves in this haunting short story - a great read, as Cole’s stories always are! shared her shape-shifting “woods between the worlds” portal story “How to Open a Portal”. I haven’t had time to fully read this yet but check it out for a different take on the portal idea! shared a teaser for his series Black Hole Bodhisattva, which looks interesting, though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
I came across this short story by
, which includes a time-travel wormhole, after the Scavenger Hunt had officially closed, but it was so good I had to include it here!
Finally,
gives us Interdimensional Talks, where host Mike talks to guests from different universes as well as our own!
🔭 The Science IRL
Wormholes acting as portals or fast-travel routes to faraway parts of the universe or even to other universes are a sci-fi staple, but could they actually exist? And if they did exist, could they be traversable?
Disclaimer: I’m not a cosmologist, or an expert in general relativity or quantum mechanics. I do have a PhD in experimental particle physics, but wormholes are not my area of expertise!
The idea of wormholes comes from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In 1935, Einstein published a paper with Nathan Rosen, where they showed that “bridges” could theoretically be formed if space-time is warped in a certain way. Think about how if you curve a sheet of paper or cloth, two flat surfaces might lie kind of parallel to each other, and you can imagine a hole or tunnel connecting the two surfaces. These “Einstein-Rosen bridges” are what we now call wormholes.
The problem is that these types of wormholes, if they exist, would be very short-lived and would collapse before anything could get through them. There are theoretical frameworks that could potentially keep a wormhole open and allow travel, involving negative energy density in localised regions of space. Kip Thorne, the well-known Caltech cosmologist who (among many other things) was scientific advisor on Interstellar, is one of the theorists who thinks this might be feasible. Stephen Hawking was another, and who am I to argue with guys like that? I’m going to stress that might, though; this is one of these areas of theoretical physics where it’s so speculative that from where we’re standing right now, it looks like a very remote possibility indeed.
This is all for wormholes within this universe. If we get into multiverses, it depends which type of multiverse we’re talking about.
If it’s a quantum multiverse - the type where new universes split off left, right and centre and there are multiple alternate parallel selves - then in principle there’s no way to communicate between them, so there’s no way to visit your other self or talk to them. These make great sci-fi stories though.
If it’s a cosmological multiverse, where different “universes” with different physical laws bubbled off during the inflationary period after the Big Bang, then maybe you could connect them with a wormhole, assuming you solve the keeping-the-wormhole-open problem.
The thing is, there’s really no evidence for any kind of multiverse and no theoretical requirement for it either. This is where I bring out Occam’s Razor and say that personally, I plump for there being just one universe. But again, the multiverse gives rise to all sorts of interesting philosophical ideas and fun stories and I will continue to enjoy them!
In conclusion, we’re not going to get faster-than-light travel (or time travel) through a wormhole anytime soon, and quite likely never. So keep enjoying the wormhole adventures on the page or screen, because IRL is unlikely!
References:
Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time, 2017 edition, pp. 163-169
Lindley, David. “The Birth of Wormholes”, March 25, 2005 Phys. Rev. Focus 15, 11
Morris, Michael S; Thorne, Kip S.; Yurtsever, Ulvi. “Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition”. September 1988. Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 1446
I’m so stoked to read through all this fabulous multiverse gold! Thank you for compiling this and taking the time to share some IRL science about worm holes with us! PS that XKCD comic is tremendous. Would really love to escape Deimos’s gravity well with a bike and ramp.
What a wonderful post. Looking forward to reading all of these recommendations.