The wormhole concept is explained in the fifth season of Stranger Things when science teacher Scott Clarke — played by Randy Havens –– tries to get his class interested in it. "What's neat about wormholes?" he asks them, standing in front of a chalkboard.
His star student, Erica — played by Priah Ferguson — eagerly raises her hand.
"They allow matter to travel between galaxies or dimensions without crossing the space between," she says from the front row.
The story is set in Indiana in a fictional town called Hawkins that gets caught up with a paranormal world and its various villains. Much of Stranger Things is a love letter to the 80s; this scene is straight out of a John Hughes movie.
Credit for its scientific underpinnings however, goes to Albert Einstein.
What is a wormhole?
Wormholes are a staple of Hollywood and science fiction — a handy device for any kind of space or time travel. They make appearances in places including the writing of Carl Sagan, Star Trek, or the 2014 film Interstellar.
"Just think of all the places mankind could go," Haven says in wonder during the Stranger Things classroom scene. "Another galaxy, another time even."
The wormhole concept emerged from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Theoretical physicists still use it to explore scientific questions today. "It's a hugely interesting and helpful toy model for physicists to play with," says Sean Carroll, professor of theoretical physics at Johns Hopkins University.
At the core of Einstein's theory is the idea that the universe is basically a single swath of fabric, with space and time woven into one continuum. In 1935, Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen found a mathematical solution that suggested this spacetime continuum could form a kind of tunnel connecting two distant points, called an Einstein-Rosen bridge. Later physicists realized that such a tunnel — now called a wormhole — could act like a cosmic shortcut.
" If you travel faster than the speed of light, then there's really no difference between traveling to the future and traveling to the past," says Carroll.
Carroll and other scientists stress that wormholes are theoretical. There are many practical obstacles to their existence. But as a device — whether for plot or for science — their applications are endless. "You can use them to study quantum entanglement and its relationship to emergent space time," he says.
Wormholes: Connecting hard science and pop culture
Physicist John Archibald Wheeler used the term wormhole in 1957; it was popularized when the astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan wrote about wormholes as a way to facilitate interstellar travel in his novel Contact.
Since then, says Carroll, Hollywood and the field of physics have had a kind of symbiotic relationship around wormholes. " The pop-culture need for a way to get across space very, very quickly has actually been a big reason why physicists talk about wormholes all the time these days," he says.
In 1988, theoretical physicists Kip Thorne and Michael Morris published a scientific investigation into the existence of wormholes. Their work showed that wormholes would require exotic forms of matter to hold them open — making them impossible to exist or traverse.
No matter to Hollywood writers, who continued to lean on them for interstellar travel. Today they are a much loved trope. Carroll has been a consultant to directors and writers on the subject, including those of the 2011 film Thor. In a meeting with the director, he remembers offering a wormhole as a device to get Thor from Earth to another planet quickly. "They said, 'We can't call it a wormhole, that sounds too '80s,'" he recalls.
In the movie, a scientist played by Natalie Portman's character uses the original name, Einstein-Rosen bridge. When another character asks what that is, she clarifies, "it's a wormhole."
"So yes," says Carroll, "it's completely entered the popular imagination."
In 2022, a wormhole controversy broke out when a team of physicists published a paper in the journal Nature that claimed they created a kind of holographic wormhole using Google's quantum computer chip, Sycamore. Scientists objected to their characterization, pointing out that it could mislead the public into thinking it proved the existence of actual wormholes.
"They were doing kind of very straightforward things that just used standard quantum mechanics, making various kinds of exotic conjectures," says Peter Woit, who teaches mathematics at Columbia University.
Wormholes, he says, are a known and tempting intoxicant to the public.
"They had a whole well-thought-out publicity campaign," he says, which he calls "scientifically dubious," but "incredibly effective."
Beyond the wormhole
The Stranger Things fever has also taken hold in the UK, says Carsten Welsch, a professor of physics at University of Liverpool. Welsch regularly takes advantage of his students' enthusiasm by using the series and concepts like wormholes in the classroom.
" It's a really good way to talk about science, which can be quite a challenge, especially with, with teenagers," he says. "Normally the moment you mention physics or engineering, they run away."
He started using the show for instruction after his daughter told him he could no longer rely on Star Wars to help explain the principles of physics. "She told me I have to do something different because that doesn't connect with everybody," he says. "And she loves Stranger Things."
Welsch admires the show's use of many of the principles of science and theoretical physics, beyond the wormhole. The world of the upside down — which figures largely into the plot — he calls "nearly a perfect analogy" for the idea of antimatter research.
In the show, the upside down is a mirror image to the physical world, existing in a dimension below the Earth. "The anti-particle is a mirror image to the particle," he explains. " When you overlay some of these images, you can literally picture exactly what's going on in the show as it happens in our labs."
Welsch is grateful to the creators of Stranger Things for folding these scientific concepts into the show, and says parsing what about their representations is true or possible creates an opportunity for rich inquiry. " It's basically opening a dialogue about — are there maybe other forces? Are there things that we do not understand in the universe?"
The nerds are the ones saving the world in this series. In the Stranger Things classroom scene, Erica's classmates are too cool or too bored to care about wormholes. Yet a key breakthrough happens when another character, Dustin — played by Gaten Matarazzo — identifies a real wormhole before it destroys the world.
Wormholes may not be able to deliver us into other dimensions — at least not yet — but Welsch hopes they can help inspire the next generation of scientific heroes.
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