Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe

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Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time — shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

In 1935, while studying the behaviour of particles in regions of extreme gravity, Einstein and Rosen introduced what they called a “bridge”: a mathematical link between two perfectly symmetrical copies of spacetime. It was not intended as a passage for travel, but as a...