Question: What is a worm hole and how does it work?

Claire Lee answered on 20 Jun 2013:

Ok, let’s think about it this way.

Take a piece of paper, and draw yourself, on earth, on the one side, and a star/planet/somewhere really cool but really far away on the other side. Let’s label you point A, and the other thing point B.

Done? Ok great.

Now, the paper itself represents space (well, spacetime, actually, but let’s not worry too much about that). If you wanted to go from point A to point B, you would have to build a spaceship and travel along the paper (through space) until you got there. Draw a line from point A to point B.

But that’s a pretty sucky way to travel, because it’s SO far away.

Anyway, the problem with travelling through space is that you are limited by relativity, which says you cannot move *through* space faster than the speed of light, (you can’t even go *at* the speed of light). And light takes 4.2 years just to get to the closest star to us! So it’s a pretty inefficient way of travelling.

But what about this! Take your piece of paper and fold it in half, so that points A and B are touching each other. Now take your pen and poke a hole in the paper next to points A and B.

Now what you can do, is climb into your spaceship at point A, go a short distance to the hole, go through the hole onto the other side of the paper, and then fly the short distance to point B.

You’ve now effectively “travelled” faster than light, but this time it was allowed, because you didn’t actually move *through* space (along the paper).

And that, basically, is a wormhole 🙂