-: Hi, I'm Dr. Erin Macdonald.
I'm an astrophysicist
and the Science Consultant for "Star Trek."
So I'm kind of a rocket scientist by day,
warp drive expert by night.
And today we're gonna be talking about
the science behind wormholes,
which we see in "Star Trek" all the time.
Now, in order to explain what a wormhole is,
we have to think about that sheet of space time.
If you've seen the bowling ball on the trampoline,
thinking of our universe as a sheet.
Now imagine instead of a trampoline,
we maybe think about it like toilet paper.
So let's crumble up the toilet paper,
lay it all out.
Now overall it looks flat but there might be parts
where they're folded over each other,
or there's bumps or ridges.
And if you wanna travel through that universe,
you have to travel on top and over
every single bump and ridge.
What a wormhole is is basically a shortcut,
like a tunnel through that space time.
If you were to take a part that's folded over
and just punch straight through,
that's effectively what a wormhole is.
Now what a lot of people don't realize is that,
not only do we see wormholes all the time in "Star Trek"
but they are actually a theoretical physics thing.
The whole math of this Einstein
General Relativity sheet of space time,
does allow for the geometry of wormholes.
So kind of what's a little bit more
about the science behind them?
In theoretical physics,
wormholes use Einstein's field equations
for General Relativity,
to create tunnels through space and time.
Now these are also sometimes called
Einstein-Rosen bridges.
And they can theoretically exist,
but make note, we haven't actually discovered any yet.
So when we're looking at that sheet of space time,
if you think about that area above or below that sheet,
that's what we call in "Star Trek" subspace.
So a wormhole will shortcut those distances in space time,
through subspace.
If you were to look at the geometry of it,
how it's shaped,
it does look like a black hole.
And indeed in "Star Trek" the motion picture, "Voyager 6,"
fell through what they thought was a black hole,
and it did actually end up being a wormhole
that shortcutted the distance.
Ended up throwing all the way across the galaxy.
Now in "Star Trek," some of these wormholes
can be naturally occurring.
We've come across the Barzan Wormhole before.
The issue with that was that it was stable on one end
but where it ended up, kind of fluctuated.
It was what we call unstable.
A lot of the other naturally occurring wormholes
that we've seen in "Star Trek,"
now these are ones that just exist
and connect to points in space and time,
we mostly see in the "Voyager" series.
One episode to think of is called "Counterpoint"
where they're traveling around trying to find
where these wormholes are going to pop up.
Another naturally occurring wormhole
that we've seen was in TNG's "The Price,"
which flung Ferengis to the Delta Quadrant,
and they popped up later in "Voyager."
In that episode "Counterpoint,"
they know that wormholes are kind of a catch-all,
and what they specifically are looking for
in order to shortcut a distance,
is what they call an Interspatial Flexure,
but that's probably getting a little bit
too technobabbly for us right now.
Another thing we want to remember with wormholes
is they not just shortcut distances,
but they also shortcut time.
This is something Picard discussed with Rasmussen,
in the episode "A matter of time,"
where they talk about the dangers
of actually using wormholes in order to time travel.
This is also seen in a fantastic episode of "Voyager,"
called "Eye of the needle."
They find a little wormhole,
actually called a Harry Kim Wormhole,
that connects the Delta Quadrant to the Alpha Quadrant.
It's too small for a ship to pass through,
but they start communicating
with the Romulan on the other side,
who's being kind of Romulany and doesn't quite trust them.
And so they transport him.
And while they're transporting him to the ship,
they actually realized that there is a change,
not just in the distance but in time itself.
It's a fantastic episode,
and we don't get to see that too much,
how we use wormholes to also travel through time.
Not only can wormholes be naturally occurring,
like we've been discussing,
but they can also be artificially created.
These sort of things might be like
the Borg transwarp conduit.
They're basically just artificial wormholes
that are connecting points in space and time,
creating tunnels that you can travel through,
which are wormholes.
Another form of artificial wormholes
are the MIDAS array,
which we saw in Voyager's "Pathfinder,"
where they create a network to be able
to communicate back to Earth,
effectively using wormholes as well,
but not big enough to be able to actually travel through.
And then, of course, we can't not talk about the fact
that there's an entire "Star Trek" series
based around a wormhole.
(laughing)
In "Deep Space Nine," the Bajoran Wormhole,
they mentioned that it's kind of an artificial wormhole,
that the Prophets created this,
that they made this massive wormhole.
Now there's some debate whether it was naturally occurring,
and just attributed to the Prophets,
or if that was something that the Prophets
artificially created.
But overall, it's a wormhole that connects
the Alpha Quadrant to the Gamma Quadrant.
And there's an entire series based around that.
Now all of this traveling through wormholes
between space and time,
does all get wrapped up together in "Star Trek Discovery"
with the Red Angel and Project Daedalus.
This is where you have all these pockets
that are popping up where we see a Red Angel,
at different points in time and space.
And then we discover that it's actually
a technology that allows you to build
micro-wormholes when you're wearing this suit,
to punch through and travel to a different point
in space and time.
And where we left off with Season two,
is that the Red Angel creates a wormhole,
and Discovery follows them through
to another point in space and time.
Stay tuned.
What do you think?
Are you like Picard when he's talking to Rasmussen
about the dangers of using them for time travel?
Are you afraid that you would be spaghetti-fied?
Or if we see something that looks like a wormhole,
would you just jump in and see where you ended up?
Let us know!