The wormhole in the science fiction film that can transport you from earth to the other end of the galaxy may have been a beautiful misunderstanding from the beginning。
According to a recent study published in the journal classics and quantum gravity, einstein and rosen proposed the bridge in 1935, which was never a cosmic tunnel. The research team, led by professor enrique gaztanaga of astrophysics of the university of parksmouth, believes that the true meaning of the bridge is a mirror of time itself, linked to two directions of time flow, not two remote points in space。
This conclusion sounds more brain-breathing than a wormhole, but it may be the real answer to a 90-year puzzle。
How did the misunderstanding happen
In 1935, einstein and nathan rosen were not studying how to cross the universe. What they really want to do is: how should quantum particles be described in extreme gravity to keep the equation in line? The "bridge" they introduced was a purely mathematical structure linking two fully symmetrical copies of time and space to maintain consistency between gravity and quantum physics。
Packing this bridge into a "cosmic shortcut" is a matter of decades. Physicists later realized that, even in a broad relativity theory, the bridge collapsed faster than the speed of light and that no substance could pass. It's physically impenetrable. It's just a mathematical structure, not a tunnel。
But the idea of the wormhole is so fascinating that it grows and grows more savagely on the margins of science fictional culture and theoretical physics. It was not until the gaztanaga team reopened the original equation of 1935 that this misunderstanding was formally put on the table。
Why can time be two-way
The core insight of the gaztanaga team came from the seriousness with which quantum mechanics time symmetry was taken. Most of the basic laws of physics remain valid in the back of time, and the equation works as well as in the back of time。
They found that the einstein-roson bridge actually describes two complementary elements of a quantum pattern: one dimension of time moving forward and the other of time moving backwards, both mirroring each other. This bridge is connected in these two time directions。
On a day-to-day scale, we only feel time moving forward one way, because the principle of entropy dominates everything in the macroworld. But in an extreme scenario such as near a black hole or in the early stages of the universe, the complete description of the quantum dimension must contain two temporal directions at the same time, otherwise there would be gaps in the equation. Einstein-roson bridge is the mathematical expression of this integrity。
The most direct application of this framework is to address the black hole information paradox that has plagued the physics community for half a century. In 1974, hawking proved that the black hole would slowly evaporate and eventually disappear through thermal radiation, which meant that the information carried by the substance falling into the black hole seemed to have been completely destroyed, in direct violation of the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics "indestructible information"。
The gaztanaga team explained that the information had not disappeared, that it had moved to the opposite point of time in the event scene, and that it had continued to evolve, except that we could not see it directly from our own point of time. The paradox arises because we force a single time-direction to describe a physical system that essentially takes two directions in order to be fully expressed。
The big bang may not be the starting point
This study is more than that. If time is two-way at the quantum level, then the big bang of the universe does not have to be the absolute beginning of everything. It may be just a quantum rebound: a former universe that is collapseing has bounced back after reaching its maximum density and turned into the expanding universe that we have observed today。
In this picture, our universe may even be located inside a black hole in another larger universe。
The team also noted that a persistent spatial asymmetry in cosmic microwave background radiation, which was considered in the standard model as a statistical anomaly with very low probability, was highly consistent with the model that introduced mirror quantum weights. This is not proof, but it is a clue worth tracking。
Gaztanaga made it clear that the study was not intended to overturn einstein's relativity or quantum mechanics, but rather to make them more complete within a unified framework. The dream of a wormhole as a delivery service for the universe may end. But what it leaves behind is a physical picture of the nature of time that is far more strange than we thought。
