Our Wormholes Are Different

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
A Lorentzian wormhole topology held open by exotic matter with negative energy density.

In reality, wormholes are purely a scientific conjecture, a consequence of the same equations that describe black holes. Being inconveniently located at (or near) the centers of said black holes, it is of course impossible to detect them, at least with current technology. The theoretical wormhole would, thanks to relativistic effects, close before anyone could get through it, no matter how fast they were traveling. One way to get around this could be to try to get through a wormhole inside a rotating black hole; but even then, you'd have to somehow survive being pummeled by literally all the radiation in the universe, and somehow not create any disturbance and collapse the wormhole altogether. Actually stabilizing the wormhole would theoretically require "exotic matter"... which would have, among other never-encountered qualities, negative mass... Needless to say, wormholes have remained a curiosity in the field of physics, and are certainly not being considered for practical travel anytime soon.

Fiction, of course, is different. Wormholes are often used as a potential way to get past that bothersome "can't accelerate past the speed of light" rule, using the wormholes as nodes in an interstellar Portal Network. In fiction, wormholes take on all sorts of forms, including confusing them with black holes, which are a naturally-occurring scientific phenomena in which all energy and matter are attracted to it (also known as having a lot of gravity); nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole (though if FTL were possible, the event horizon—being based on lightspeed as an absolute limit to escape velocity—would need to be redefined), let alone the singularity at the centre (as things would need to, were they to act as most theories of wormholes state). Sometimes they can be opened at will, sometimes you can transmit radio waves through them for FTL Radio, sometimes they connect you to parallel universes, sometimes they are used for Time Travel, and so on.

As the Timey-Wimey Ball means that every TV show, movie, book and game can have quantum physics do slightly different things, you can be assured that Our Wormholes Are Different too.

Related to Negative Space Wedgie. Compare: Our Time Travel Is Different, which this may sometimes overlap. See also Swirly Energy Thingy. Compare Black Holes Suck.

Examples of Our Wormholes Are Different include:

Wormholes

Anime and Manga

Film

  • Donnie Darko involves one that loops through time, maybe possibly.
  • The Bifröst bridge in Thor is actually a traversable Einstein-Rosen Bridge (read: wormhole). The myth of it being a rainbow bridge is due to the fact that it causes atmospheric disturbances as it opens up on Earth. It also comes with a neat light show.
    • Apparently, if you keep it open longer than a few seconds, it can act as a Wave Motion Gun and destroy an entire planet... Which makes a lot more sense when one considers the ludicrous energies required to make on of these things work in Real Life.
  • The Mi-Go portal from Yuggoth (Pluto) to Earth in the 2011 adaptation of The Whisperer In Darkness seems to be mystical in nature, rather than technological. An elaborate ritual is required to open it, along with, you guessed it, Human Sacrifice. It is critical that a shaman or priest from Earth passes through first, before it can be used, lest it collapses. Oh, and it was probably left behind by Shub-Niggurath.
  • In Contact, Dr. Arroway theorizes that the the alien machine transports its subject via an Einstein-Rosen bridge.

Literature

  • The only time a wormhole came up in the Star Wars Expanded Universe was in The Phantom Affair, an arc in the X Wing Series comics. A superweapon known as the gravitic polarizing device made the enemy ships and a portion of the asteroid belt ringing a planet simply disappear, with one of the startled pilots saying that it looked like a wormhole had opened up.
    • In "The Glove of Darth Vader", a wormhole created by the exploding reactor is responsible for transporting Darth Vader's indestructible glove from the exploding wreckage of the Death Star II to the oceans of Mon Calamari.
  • The Night's Dawn Trilogy has humans using wormhole-generating ZTT drives to cross interstellar distances. The mechanical type requires the ship to be spherical and is bound by orbital mechanics, while the ones used by the organic Voidhawks have no such limitations, but die after a few decades. The Kiint have refined the technology to the point where they use personal teleporters to jump between distant galaxies.
  • From the same author: In Pandoras Star, two hipster Californian scientists invent a wormhole generator in mid-21st century, and reveal it to the world by transporting themselves to Mars to greet the NASA astronauts who were just landing there for the first time. From that day on, the very notion of space travel becomes laughable, and an interstellar empire is created with wormholes linked by train lines.
  • Lois Mc Master Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga has an interstellar community, "the Nexus," linked together by "wormholes." Rather than being stellar-scale objects of massive gravity, these are subtle flaws in spacetime that you need special equipment to detect and use. They are natural features of some star systems. Earth only has one, way out in the Oort Cloud. Lucky systems have a handful. Barrayar, the heroes' home planet, was cut off from the Nexus for centuries when their one wormhole unexpectedly closed.
  • The Time Scout portals combine this with Portal to the Past.

Live-Action TV

  • Sliders had wormholes that could only be opened at certain times, and transported people between parallel dimensions (alternate realities would be a better pair of words). A specific device was required to create said wormholes.
    • In fact, each timer was unique in that each had its own cycle. Should the traveler miss his/her window, he/she would have to wait for the next one with the current timer for over 29 years - a number defined by Applied Phlebotinum.
  • Farscape had a wormhole send the protagonist from our solar system into very unfamiliar space. Aliens (and thus hilarity) ensue.
    • Later he turned wormholes into offensive weapons, learned how they could be used for travelling to different points in time as well as "unrealised" realities", and eventually he learned how to make a "wormhole weapon" (essentially a black hole that doubles in size every few minutes).
  • Stargate SG-1 has controlled wormholes created between the titular stargates, and as the means for spacecraft to enter hyperspace.
    • In the Stargate 'Verse, wormholes operate in subspace, rather than hyperspace. Atlantis (the city) used a wormhole drive (rather than a hyperspace drive) to get from the Pegasus Galaxy to Earth (in the Milky Way) in a split second, where Hyperspace was taking weeks. Our Wormholes Are Different indeed.
      • Atlantis used a hyperdrive to get from Pegasus to the Milky Way, and used its wormhole drive only after its hyperdrive broke down near the edge of the Milky Way. Also, in the first episode of SG-1's sixth season, a "hyperspace window" is referred to as a "wormhole," so wormholes are used to enter hyperspace.
      • Hyperspace is used by Stargates. Subspace is used by FTL travel. Various other dimensions/planes of existence are used by the Ascended, the Abydonians, and the occasional lost half-Ascended Replicator.
    • This franchise also has the peculiar and arbitrary "time limit" rule. It's apparently a "law of wormhole physics" that it's impossible to maintain a wormhole for more than 38 minutes (unless it's plugged into a black hole or similar massive power source, which would suggest that it's more a limitation of the stargate's power systems than anything to do with physics). In effect, though, there seem to be more exceptions than cases of this rule being played straight.
      • The first time that the 38 minute rule was exceeded was because of time dilation, not energy expenditure: on the black hole planet, 38 minutes hadn't elapsed yet. This is why the wormhole remained open. Sadly, in later episodes it just became dumbed down to "black hole/energy = wormhole can stay open longer".
    • During solar flares, wormholes have a tendency to travel back in time, with the strength of the flare determining how far back/forward in time the wormhole can go. Strangely, the first time this happened, SG-1 were rematerialized without a stargate, something thought to be impossible. This forms the plotline of several episodes as well as the Continuum film.
      • Indeed, the rules for how wormholes behave under these conditions seem to be different in each and every appearance. Sometimes the wormhole "loops back" and travelers emerge from the gate they just entered, sometimes they come out of the gate they were trying to travel to, sometimes there is a visual effect associated with the disruption, sometimes not... There have been passing Handwaves about how different external conditions result in the different effects, but yeah... Those wormholes are different.
      • At first, it's not the 'solar flares', the flares are just bending the wormholes somewhere else. The implication is that someone who understood, and had full control of, a Stargate could basically connect a wormhole to any point in time or space, and the lack of time travel was a deliberate technological limitation of the gate you had to 'hack' by using solar flares to bend the wormhole. Although that raises other questions, like why did the Ancients have to build an entire separate time travel system? Later, they seemed to have forgotten this explanation, and time travel started requiring solar flares.
  • Star Trek has wormholes. For example, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an imbalance in the matter-antimatter ratio in the ship's engines can create a temporary wormhole that traps the ship and other nearby objects—like asteroids. An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation had Ferengi trying to buy the rights to a wormhole. Deep Space Nine prominently featured a permanent wormhole as part of the premise of its show, created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens; one episode featured a Federation scientist trying to duplicate this feat. And then there were the "micro-wormholes" used for communication between Earth and Voyager.
  • Terra Nova has a wormhole that exists in their universe 2149 and alternate timeline cretaceous period. It is still not explained if people can go back to 2149 or it is one way, but there are hints at it being the former.
  • The fugitives in Tracker came to Earth via a womrhole, and Cole used one in the final episode. The math apparently isn't easy to get, and he misjudged the timing, allowing him to come back to Earth in the very end. Zin apparently originated a lot of the wormhole stuff, then got laughed at by his fellow scientists for it.

Tabletop Games

  • Porte sorcerors in 7th Sea have access to a rather bizarre version of portals. They can mark an object with their own blood, and then pull the object to them across a hand-sized portal, regardless of where it is. Later, they gain the ability to pull themselves to the object, regardless of where it is (rather handy if, for example, the object is in the pocket of a friend who's been imprisoned), and still later they can bring others with them. There are even rules for creating permanent Porte holes, though they cost an extreme version of Cast from Hit Points (as 7th Sea doesn't have Hit Points per se, creating a permanent Porte hole will permanently cost a number of Sorcerors a point of the primary stat that determines when damage kills them). Porte has other restrictions, though; the dimension that the Sorceror (and any passengers) must cross is implied to one of a few cans holding Sealed Evil in a Can, either hell itself or the abode of the now-vanished Abusive Precursors (or possibly both). It is explicitly stated that anyone, sorceror or passenger, who opens his eyes during the trip will go mad—and that the denizens of this place will whisper sweet promises to any human making the trip, if only they'd open their eyes. All the sorceries but one in 7th Sea are also weakening the boundary between the real world and hell. Porte, as it tears holes in reality itself, is implied to be one of the worst about these. Lastly, Porte sorcerors are easy to spot—they have red hands as a consequence of frequently blooding objects for their art. As a result, gloves have become fashionable in Montaigne.
    • The consequences of Porte are dire enough that at least one canon NPC has been executed by L'Empereur (an Expy of Louis XIV) by having his eyelids torn off and being cast into a Porte hole.

Video Games

  • The X-Universe has the Lost Technology Jump Gates, which are needed to get between solar systems. None of the races know how to make them except the Terrans (who developed the tech on their own) and the Paranid (because they were told how by one of the Precursors).
    • According to the X-Superbox Encyclopedia, the wormholes are different due to using exotic matter to power the wormhole, and by using magnetic forces to flatten the aperture. If those factors didn't occur, it would be the exact same as Real Life's theoretical wormholes.
  • Freelancer has Jump Gates that are implied to work as controlled wormholes, as well as normal, hidden wormholes that are implied to be dangerous, but perfectly safe in practice.
  • The portals in Prey, much like those in Portal, show a clear view of the destination, and have zero internal length. They also have only two dimensions and one side, and can be used to shrink things and create spatial anomalies.
  • The portals in Portal, though a bit more short ranged than most other examples.
    • With possible application as a shower curtain.
    • As of Portal 2, they're not so short-ranged anymore; the portal gun is capable of generating wormholes at a distance of at least 356400 km (from Earth to the Moon).
      • We'll, they can open portals between certain materials Moon rocks. They don't do good things for your health.. So long as they have a line to the target with no other solids in the way, the portal works.
  • EVE Online: the most recent expansion pack - Apocrypha - caused numerous wormholes to open all over New Eden. They transport ships absurd distances instantly, either to elsewhere in New Eden (distances that would take an hour to travel via stargates) or to uncharted Sleeper space (which could conceivably be in an entire other galaxy). They are only open for a limited time, and will only allow a certain amount of mass through before collapsing.
    • This was also how the original EVE Gate worked in the backstory. It lasted several hundred years before collapsing and was considerably larger, but the principle was the same.
  • Conquest: Frontier Wars has naturally occurring wormholes to travel between systems, but then they somebody starts making artificial wormholes and things get a bit complicated, then someone else steals that technology..
  • Wormholes in Nexus the Jupiter Incident act as rapid transit between remote star systems. However, the latter stages of the game reveal that they were created by the Big Bad Mechanoids as a byproduct of them altering the universe.
  • The only mode of system-to-system travel in the Space Empires series, as there is no FTL Travel. Some of them can be one-way only, though most are two-way. Random wormhole events can also fling your ships (or even bases!) hundreds of LY across the map, as a sort of... Blind Jump meets Negative Space Wedgie.
  • In Haegemonia, wormholes are naturally-occurring space phenomena that allow rapid travel to other systems. The only other way to travel to other system is via an experimental technology that creates temporary one-way wormholes to "wormhole probes" which only becomes available in the latter stages. Wormholes can be blocked by Darzok-developed probes or natural events.
  • In the second Master of Orion, some planets are connected by a wormhole that allows a ship to travel between the systems in a single turn regardless of the race's propulsion tech. The wormholes can span distances anywhere from a few parsecs to going from one side of the galactic map to the other.
    • A one-time special event can also create a temporary wormhole for a ship/fleet in transit, letting them finish their trip at the start of the next turn, regardless of how long they would normally have had remaining.
  • Space Rangers has "black holes" (though their name is just pilots' slang) that randomly appear on the edges of star systems, and hurl you into a random system (be it one hyper-jump away or 50 parsecs into enemy territory). They also contain hyperspace pockets inhabited by unidentified ships.
  • In Free Space, Subspace travel utilizes "Subspace Nodes", which are essentially wormholes that link together certain regions of space.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • Integral to the existence of society in Orion's Arm due to the lack of any other sort of FTL travel. Actually traveling through them is time consuming and difficult, their main use is to transfer massive amount of information between star systems.
    • It takes so long because traversible wormholes need a "transition zone" clear of all massive objects that is at least 654 AU in diameter (over eight times that of the entire solar system). For some reason nanoscale wormholes used for data transmission don't need that much space.

Western Animation

  • The Invader Zim episode "A Room With a Moose" had Zim attempt to send the rest of his class (but especially Dib) through a wormhole to the eponymous room with a moose. It was not stated whether this was in their dimension or another.
  • Interstella 5555 features a wormhole located behind the moon that connects our solar system to another. It's particularly dangerous to use, and Shep's ship is badly damaged trying to navigate it.
  • In ReBoot, perfectly spherical "portals" connect different systems together. The "other side" is visible from all angles of viewing, distorted by the curvature of space around the opening — this is arguably the most realistic depiction of wormholes in any TV series, bar none. (Rather ironic, as ReBoot doesn't take place in the physical world and so could have easily justified a wholly unrealistic depiction. Of course, it's a cool effect.)

Black Holes As Wormholes

Fan Works

Film

  • The Black Hole treats its title menace, a collapsed star, as a wormhole. And not just in theory; when we finally travel into it, it is a wormhole.
  • Event Horizon uses black hole as wormhole, a wormhole that is connected to hell!
    • Technically, they use a "quantum singularity" (as in semi-controlled artificial black hole) to power the ENGINE which creates a wormhole. Somehow. Still goes to hell though.
  • The 2009 Star Trek features an Black Holes Suck that functions exactly like a wormhole leading to the past...when it isn't instead acting like a black hole by destroying things with no explanation of what makes it act one way or another. Note that the Star Trek franchise has used both wormholes and black holes on many occasions, but never mixed them up before. On a couple of occasions, black holes were used for time travel not by flying through them but by a by-product of the black hole's gravity, or warping near a black hole, or some other technobabble. This is not a case of getting the terms mixed up; the black hole is explicitly created by a collapsing star, which is (roughly) how real black holes form.
    • Except the black hole in that movie wasn't created by a collapsing star, the first one was created when Spock used the "red matter" to stop the "supernova" that was going to destroy the galaxy. Because that's what red matter is used for, creating black holes.
  • The Giant Spider Invasion has a miniature black hole(that can be contained in a meteor and impact the Earth without compressing the whole thing) that apparently leads to the spider dimension. Also it can be closed off by filling it with SCIENCE!

Literature

  • The Flinx and Pip novel The End of the Matter features a white hole used not for transportation but to destroy (slowly) a black hole of equal but opposite mass. This is of course nearly as unrealistic as the trope being discussed.
  • In Sphere, the future ship used a black hole that creates a wormhole, using a Kerr metric; the black hole spins so rapidly that it warps nearby spacetime so that two distant locations and times touch.
  • While the word "wormhole" is never used in Angel Station by Walter Jon Williams, all ships use captured black holes in order to perform FTL jumps. This requires precise calculations, which are done perfectly by one of the protagonists, because she's a "witch", a genetically-engineered girl with the ability to see and alter electron motion. Opening a "tunnel" creates in a massive radiation wave that can damage anything for thousands of miles, meaning jumps have to be made far away from planets or other ships. It is also revealed that aliens use the same method. Apparently, any ship can be equipped with devices for capturing black holes. Why they don't get torn to shreds by gravity is never brought up.

Live-Action TV

  • Black Hole High originally called it a black hole, though they later speculated that it was actually a wormhole and preferred that term, despite occasionally reverting to the less accurate term for its mnemonic transfer ("Black Hole" also sounds a lot like "Blake Holsey", the name of the school). Wormholes can do just about anything in this show.
  • A white hole appears in the Red Dwarf episode "White Hole". It spat out the matter and time that a black hole swallowed up, leading to short time loops and similar disturbances.
  • In First Wave, Joshua claims the Gua use "white holes" to transport objects from their planet.

Music

  • In the album: The Universal Migrator Part 2 - Flight of the Migrator by Ayreon, the protagonist plunges into the black hole located in the center of the quasar 3C 273 to end up in a wormhole that will carry him to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).

Video Games

  • Spore treats its black holes as wormholes, and in fact often names one as the other and vice versa.
  • X-COM Interceptor features black holes all over the sector that can wreck havoc on your ships and probes. Playing through the game and researching the alien intentions reveals that there is exactly one black hole that is actually a worm hole to a pocket solar system, where the aliens are constructing their doomsday weapon, and the game becomes a race against time to discover the method to use the wormhole to reach the pocket dimension and destroy the weapon before it's completed.
  • In Gateway II: Homeworld, the player uses a Heechee ship to go through a black hole that leads to a pocket universe, which is the sanctuary of the entire Heechee race, who hid there after discovering the Assassins. Apparently, only certain ships are able to safely pass through the black hole, and it requires certain devices, which the Heechee promptly remove from the ship, preventing the player from leaving.

Western Animation

  • At the end of the Futurama episode "A Flight To Remember", the spaceship Titanic gets sucked into a black hole along with Countess Dela Rocha, the rich robot Bender fell in love with. Fry reassures Bender that no one really knows what happens in a black hole and that the Countess could still be alive somewhere. Prof. Farnsworth agrees with him, but then turns to Hermes to say "not a chance."

Real Life

  • One Real Life outdated theory proposed that black holes are the counterparts of "white holes" located elsewhere. All of the matter and energy falling into a particular black hole is supposed to be ejected from its corresponding white hole. But even white holes are subject to their own "Ours are different" among the scientific community: Dr. Stephen Hawking suggests that the "time reversal" of a black hole is also a black hole; another common perception is that white holes recede faster-than-light from attracted matter.

Other Wormhole-like Phenomena

Comic Books

Film

  • The electromagnetic storm in the 2001 Planet of the Apes, which not only goes through space, but also time.

Literature

  • A Wrinkle in Time has Tesseracts, which basically function as wormholes. Real Tesseracts have nothing to do with this, being a geometric concept related to cubes (basically, a Tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square). Wormholes were not topical at the time.
  • Quantum Gravity: There are portals between realms used to get from one to the other. Or into I-space.
  • The Honorverse has several wormholes but rather than a tunnel in space they are described as points where extremely powerful standing grav-waves that normally exist in hyperspace overlap with real space and allow effectively instantaneous travel between their two ends. They all come in clusters of at least two and a large portion of Manticore's wealth comes from shipping fees of their own six, later seven, terminus wormhole junction, the largest in the known galaxy.
  • In Necroscope a "white hole" crash landed on a Vampire World creating a small one-way wormhole that links it with ours (specifically Romania). A few millennia later a Phlebotinum Overload in Russia's ambitious continent-wide Deflector Shield creates a much bigger wormhole in the heart of the then U.S.S.R. The twist is that each wormhole is a one way trip, but by using both you can turn them into a superhighway.
  • In the Carrera's Legions series, Earth and Terra Nova are connected by what's referred to as a rift that allows nearly instantaneous transition between the two star systems, the only FTL Travel option for humanity.

Live-Action TV

  • Lexx's fractal cores, glowing swirly points in space where the Two Universes intersect.
  • Jumpgates and jump points in Babylon 5 are very much wormhole-like on their ends, though the big expanse of hyperspace in between bears little resemblance to the theory.
  • All the strange things in Strange Days At Blake Holsey High are handwaved by the black hole/wormhole thing.
  • Wormholes haven't actually appeared on Supernatural (unless you count a few magic portals), but they have been mentioned. When the Trickster is interrogated on where a missing skeptic is, he says smugly "He didn't believe in wormholes. So I dropped him in one."
  • The dimensional portals in Angel.

Tabletop Games

  • In Starfire, every accessible star system is home to one or more naturally-occurring "warp points." A warp point provides an FTL link to another specific warp point in another star system (or, occasionally, to a warp point floating deep in interstellar space). Sometimes, one of the two warp points that forms a warp-link may be "closed" (totally undetectable unless you happen to see something coming out of it), which means there may be undiscovered warp points lurking about in any star system. (This created a dire threat to the Terran Federation during Interstellar War IV.)

Video Games

  • King's Quest Mask of Eternity has portals that only go between two specified points, and operate on switches.
  • Stormgates from Pirate 101 are whirlpool like wormholes act like portals that allow pirates to sail to through the stars to different parts of the Spiral.

Real Life

  • Because black holes don't mesh very neatly with quantum mechanics some physicists have put forward the idea of a "black star" which is like a black hole, but not.
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