The Physics of Wormholes

"However, as Morris and Thorne had revealed, and further studies have confirmed, to construct traversable wormholes requires an ingredient nature seems to lack — at least in large quantities — something called “exotic matter.” Exotic matter possesses a negative mass, and thus functions as a kind of antigravity stabilizing mechanism to help prop the wormhole’s throat open."

If you want to travel to the stars — to star systems beyond our own — you’d better be prepared to take your sweet time. Even at the speeds the Apollo astronauts traveled to the Moon, it would take millions of years to reach even the next nearest star beyond our own, Proxima Centauri. And yet, General Relativity admits an astounding possibility to short-cut the great cosmic distances by punching a hole in spacetime, connecting two far-separated events to one another through a cosmic bridge: a wormhole. What strikes us as the most fanciful of science fiction ideas may legitimately someday become science fact, and if it does, here’s the physics of how it will work!