Wormholes May Not Exist—We've Found They Reveal Something Deeper About Time and the Universe

jelizondo writes:

phys.org published an interesting article about a new hypothesis regarding the existence of worm holes:

Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time-shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

In 1935, while studying the behavior of particles in regions of extreme gravity, Einstein and Rosen introduced what they called a "bridge": a mathematical link between two perfectly symmetrical copies of spacetime. It was not intended as a passage for travel, but as a way to maintain consistency between gravity and quantum physics. Only later did Einstein-Rosen bridges become associated with wormholes, despite having little to do with the original idea.

But in new research published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, my colleagues and I show that the original Einstein-Rosen bridge points to something far stranger-and more fundamental-than a wormhole.

The puzzle Einstein and Rosen were addressing was never about space travel, but about how quantum fields behave in curved spacetime. Interpreted this way, the Einstein-Rosen bridge acts as a mirror in spacetime: a connection between two microscopic arrows of time.

Quantum mechanics governs nature at the smallest scales such as particles, while Einstein's theory of general relativity applies to gravity and spacetime. Reconciling the two remains one of physics' deepest challenges. And excitingly, our reinterpretation may offer a path to doing this.

The "wormhole" interpretation emerged decades after Einstein and Rosen's work, when physicists speculated about crossing from one side of spacetime to the other, most notably in the late-1980s research.

But those same analyses also made clear how speculative the idea was: within general relativity, such a journey is forbidden. The bridge pinches off faster than light could traverse it, rendering it non-traversable. Einstein-Rosen bridges are therefore unstable and unobservable-mathematical structures, not portals.

Yet there is no observational evidence for macroscopic wormholes, nor any compelling theoretical reason to expect them within Einstein's theory. While speculative extensions of physics-such as exotic forms of matter or modifications of general relativity-have been proposed to support such structures, they remain untested and highly conjectural.

Our recent work revisits the Einstein-Rosen bridge puzzle using a modern quantum interpretation of time, building on ideas developed by Sravan Kumar and Joao Marto.

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