the science of Interstellar

1. Interstellar

2. Who was the first scientist to talk about
wormholes?

3. Who was the scientist?
• Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen
• Einstein-Rosen bridges
• No use of the term yet.
• Theory: Electromagnetic field energy

4. Who was the scientist?
• John Wheeler: first us of “wormhole”
• Used in 1957
• Paper co-authored by Charles Misner

5. Do wormholes really exist?
• Scientists have different opinions about this question…

6. YES, THEY EXIST!
• Eric Davis (Senior Research Physicist at the Institute
for Advanced Studies, Austin):
• “Wormholes should exist in nature, because they are
predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity
which is the theory that also predicted black holes, cosmology,
neutron stars […]
• There is no reason why wormholes should not exist based on a
very well tested theory whose other predictions have been
verified as previously mentioned.”

7. NO, THEY DON’T EXIST!
• Professor Andreas Karch, (professor of physics at the University of
Washington):
• “I would completely agree that most likely they are just a theoretical
construct. It’s very unlikely that we will ever see the more standard
kind of wormhole – the one that you could transverse through, as seen
in science fiction movies.
• One could not measure the existence of a wormhole directly
without sending two observers into the two connected black holes (which
could also form the basis of a wormhole). If they meet in the middle,
there’s a wormhole. If not, then there’s no wormhole.”

8. And from NASA’s point of view…
• Wormholes are allowed to exist in the math of "General
Relativity", which is our best description of the Universe. Assuming
that general relativity is correct, there may be wormholes. But no
one has any idea how they would be created, and there is no
evidence for anything like a wormhole in the observed Universe.

9. HOW DOES A WORMHOLE WORK?
• It’s a tunnel through space and time
• Theory of relativity
• Connections between different places
• This is a manipulation of gravity