Why Do Scientists Believe in the Existence of Wormholes?

[bassplayer142]

I have been reading a book about black holes and I picked up a lot of information, but some things still bother me. First I don't understand why they think a wormhole exists. I understand that as you get closer to the singularity space time is curved drastically. But if you look at common sense, it should tell you that this is just a ball of matter so tightly compact that there is no hole and that anything that goes inside it will be destroyed. It seems that they took a graph of the curvature of space that approaches infinity and desided to say that is never reaches infinity and therefore there is a hole in the graph that they actually think is transversable. But how could it be infinity if there is a finite density. This makes no sense to me.

I can't think of the other questions but I will post them soon. thanks

 

[Chris Hillman]

I have been reading a book about black holes and I picked up a lot of information,

What book?

First I don't understand why they think a wormhole exists.

They? As in, the authors of the book you read? Or as in, astrophysicists?

A (traverseable?) wormhole? Or a black hole?

Assuming the answers are "astrophysicists" and "black hole", see for example the review article by Martin Rees inhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13535.ctl ; see also http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9701161 for an update to 1997. The existence of black holes has not been doubt for several decades. (For a long time this notion was viewed a theoretical speculation with little observational support, but this changed drastically with the discovery of Cyg X-1.)

If the answers are ""astrophysicists" and "Einstein-Rosen bridge" (old name for so-called "throat" of "eternal Schwarzschild hole"), try some of the posts in my sig.

If the answers are "astrophysicists" and "traversable wormhole", try http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0710.4474 for a review of arguments pro/con regarding the (im)-plausibility of "exotic matter" and "traversable wormholes" (note that the author is in the pro camp; most physicists seem to be in the "con" camp, as I am).

I understand that as you get closer to the singularity space time is curved drastically. But if you look at common sense, it should tell you that this is just a ball of matter so tightly compact that there is no hole and that anything that goes inside it will be destroyed.

Your common sense probably doesn't agree with what gtr actually says about the interior of the Schwarzschild vacuum, the model you probably have in mind. I urge you to obtain and read the excellent popular book by gtr expert Robert Geroch, General Relativity from A to B, which specifically aims to convey an accurate geometrical picture.

I can't think of the other questions but I will post them soon.

If possible I urge you to obtain the book I mentioned and read it first. The thoughts you are trying to express appear to correspond to some common misconceptions. Geroch's book will clear these up much more authoritatively and probably more clearly than we can do at PF.

 

[tacman]

First of all, it's great that you are delving into the fascinating topic of black holes and wormholes. It's natural to have questions and doubts when trying to understand such complex concepts.

Let's start with the idea of a wormhole. It is a hypothetical tunnel or shortcut through space and time that connects two distant points in the universe. The concept of wormholes was first proposed in Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the curvature of space and time. According to this theory, massive objects like stars and planets cause a curvature in space-time, and this curvature is more pronounced near black holes.

Now, imagine two points in space-time that are very far apart, and there is a black hole in between them. As you correctly stated, as you get closer to the black hole, the curvature of space-time becomes more and more extreme. In fact, at the center of the black hole, the curvature becomes infinite, and we call this point the singularity. However, this does not mean that the black hole is just a ball of matter with no hole. In fact, it is the extreme curvature of space-time that creates the "hole" or the tunnel between the two distant points.

To understand this better, think of a sheet of paper as representing the fabric of space-time. If you place a heavy object on it, it will create a dip in the sheet, and any other object placed near it will roll towards the dip. This is similar to how gravity works in the universe. Now, if you fold the sheet in half, you create a shortcut between two distant points on the sheet. This is the basic idea behind a wormhole.

But you might still be wondering, how can something that approaches infinity be transversable? The answer lies in the fact that we are talking about the curvature of space-time, not the physical dimensions of the black hole. The singularity at the center of a black hole is a point of infinite density and zero volume, but the wormhole is not a physical object, it is a distortion in space-time.

I hope this explanation has helped clear some of your doubts. Black holes and wormholes are still areas of active research, and there is much we don't fully understand about them. But scientists continue to study and gather evidence to better understand these fascinating phenomena. Keep exploring and asking questions, and you might just uncover some of the mysteries of the universe.