You can’t open a wormhole. No one can, at least not with any technology that exists or is remotely on the horizon. Wormholes are valid solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity, meaning the math permits them, but the physical requirements to actually create and sustain one are so extreme they may be permanently out of reach. That said, the physics of what it would theoretically take is fascinating and surprisingly well-mapped.
What a Wormhole Actually Is
In 1935, Einstein and Nathan Rosen proposed that particles could be described by “mathematical bridges connecting two sheets of spacetime.” These Einstein-Rosen bridges are the original wormhole concept: a tunnel-like shortcut linking two distant points in the universe, or potentially two entirely separate universes. Picture a sheet of paper folded in half. Instead of traveling along the surface from one end to the other, a wormhole would punch straight through.
The original Einstein-Rosen bridges, though, aren’t the kind you could travel through. They collapse far too quickly for anything, even light, to pass from one side to the other. It wasn’t until 1988 that physicists Kip Thorne and Michael Morris worked out what a traversable wormhole would need to look like. Their model introduced a “shape function” describing the geometry of the wormhole’s throat, the narrowest point of the tunnel, along with a set of conditions the throat must satisfy to stay open. This Morris-Thorne framework is still the foundation for most serious wormhole research today.
The Exotic Matter Problem
Here’s where things get difficult. A wormhole’s throat wants to collapse. Gravity pulls it shut. To hold it open, you’d need something pushing outward with enough force to counteract that collapse. Ordinary matter can’t do this. You need what physicists call “exotic matter,” a substance where the outward tension exceeds the energy density. In practical terms, this means the material would need to have negative energy density, effectively negative mass, in at least some reference frame.
Negative energy isn’t entirely fictional. The Casimir effect, a measurable quantum phenomenon where two closely spaced metal plates experience an attractive force due to vacuum fluctuations, produces a tiny region of negative energy density. Morris, Thorne, and a colleague proposed the Casimir vacuum as a potential wormhole stabilizer. But later analysis showed a fatal flaw: any gap in the negative energy field, which you’d need to actually let something pass through, would destroy the wormhole faster than anything could traverse it.
No one has found or created exotic matter in quantities that would be remotely useful. Whether it even exists in sufficient amounts anywhere in the universe remains an open question. Some recent theoretical work has explored wormhole models supported by non-exotic matter, but these remain mathematical exercises without experimental backing.
The Energy Requirements Are Staggering
Even if you had exotic matter, the energy scales involved are almost comically large. For a wormhole with a throat about 10 meters wide (barely large enough for a small spacecraft), the tension required at the throat works out to roughly 5 × 10⁴¹ dynes per square centimeter. To put that in perspective: for a throat just 3 kilometers wide, the pressure at the throat matches the pressure at the center of a massive neutron star, one of the densest objects in the known universe.
Recent calculations show that Morris-Thorne wormholes could only exist on very large scales. A human-sized wormhole would demand pressures and energy densities that dwarf anything we can produce or even meaningfully conceptualize with current technology. We’re not talking about a gap that better engineering could close. The energy required exceeds our entire civilization’s output by many, many orders of magnitude.
Keeping It Stable
Suppose you somehow gathered enough exotic matter and pried open a wormhole throat. You’d immediately face the stability problem. Quantum effects create feedback loops that can either stabilize or destabilize the structure depending on the precise conditions. Small perturbations, a stray particle entering the throat, gravitational waves passing nearby, could trigger a cascade that collapses the whole thing into a black hole or pinches it shut.
Tidal forces present another challenge for anything living. Just like near a black hole, the curvature of spacetime around and inside a wormhole would stretch and compress matter. If the curvature is too extreme, any astronaut would be torn apart. Surviving passage would require a wormhole with an extremely gentle curvature, which means an even larger throat, which means even more exotic matter and energy.
The Quantum Entanglement Connection
One of the most intriguing developments in wormhole physics is the ER=EPR hypothesis, proposed by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013. The idea is that quantum entanglement (the “spooky” connection between paired particles, called EPR pairs) and Einstein-Rosen bridges are actually the same phenomenon described in two different languages. Every pair of entangled particles would be connected by a microscopic, non-traversable wormhole.
This doesn’t mean entangling two particles opens a usable tunnel. Research published in the Journal of High Energy Physics confirmed that there’s no measurement in general relativity that can unambiguously detect the presence of a generic wormhole geometry, mirroring the fact that you can’t directly detect entanglement through observation alone. The connection is deep and mathematical, not practical. You can’t send a message or a person through an entanglement-based wormhole.
What the Quantum Computer Experiment Actually Did
In 2022, headlines announced that scientists had created a wormhole on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor. This requires careful clarification. The team used a nine-qubit quantum circuit with 164 two-qubit gates to simulate the dynamics of a simplified model related to wormhole physics. They observed behaviors consistent with traversable wormhole dynamics: signals emerging in causal time-order, effects consistent with negative energy shockwaves, and appropriate scrambling and thermalization patterns.
But no actual hole in spacetime was created. The experiment demonstrated that a quantum computer could model wormhole-like behavior in a simplified theoretical framework. It’s a significant result for understanding the relationship between quantum information and gravity, but it’s closer to simulating weather on a computer than to creating an actual storm.
The Time Travel Complication
If traversable wormholes were possible, they could theoretically be converted into time machines. By moving one mouth of a wormhole at high speed (exploiting time dilation from special relativity) and then returning it, the two ends would exist at different points in time. Step through one end and you’d emerge from the other in the past or future.
This creates obvious paradox problems. The Novikov self-consistency conjecture proposes that any time travel event must be self-consistent: you simply can’t change the past. But recent theoretical work has shown that more realistic wormhole models inevitably produce paradoxes that Novikov’s conjecture can’t resolve. These paradoxes can only be avoided by accepting multiple histories, essentially parallel timelines, or by concluding that time travel is impossible in the first place.
Stephen Hawking proposed the chronology protection conjecture, which argues that the laws of physics conspire to prevent time travel. Supporting this idea, calculations show that quantum field energy tends to diverge (blow up to infinity) near a forming time machine, which would destroy it before it could function. A definitive proof, though, would require a complete theory of quantum gravity, something physicists don’t yet have.
Where Things Actually Stand
Wormholes occupy a strange space in physics: mathematically permitted, physically implausible, and experimentally untouched. The math of general relativity allows them. Quantum mechanics may connect them to entanglement at the smallest scales. But every concrete requirement for building one, exotic matter in bulk, energy densities rivaling neutron stars, stability against quantum perturbations, gentle enough curvature for survival, points to the same conclusion. Opening a wormhole is not a problem of engineering. It may be a fundamental impossibility, or it may require physics we haven’t discovered yet. Either way, it sits firmly beyond anything humanity can attempt today or in any foreseeable future.