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In science fiction movies, games and television, I’ve seen lots of attempts to depict spatial wormholes and “portals to other universes.” In nearly every case they get the geometry wrong. It doesn’t look like this nor does it look like this. Even a recent image from Scientific American got it wrong. The ex-mathematics and physics major in me finds this frustrating. I’d find it easier to suspend disbelief for your story if you try to get the physics and math right.

Maybe I’m a weird person but to me it was always easy to imagine what a real wormhole would look like. I just think about gravitational curvature of a two dimensional space into three dimensions and think about how the optics would work in such situation. If you think about Einstein-Rosen bridges in two dimensional space and think about the how the optics work, it’s pretty easy to imagine what a wormhole would look to a two dimensional creature–just project the light rays along the geodesics. Once you’ve got a good mental purchase on that, you can then project this context into three and four dimensional space.

I guess if I had the patience, I could draw a lot of diagrams and write down a lot of description to make this clear to you. It’s sort of like writing down a description of how to tie your shoes or how to blow bubbles with chewing gum. It’s easier to show than to describe.

Anyway, I set myself a project a couple of years ago after I started using GIMP. I would figure out a way to use the image manipulation tools of GIMP to make an image of realistic wormhole. This sat on my mental back burner for many months simply because I thought it was harder than it really was. I thought I’d have to write some ray tracing scripts in Python or something.

It turned out to be very simple and, now that I know how to do it, here is my first image of what a wormhole would really look like:

I’ve decided to title this image “The results of Experiment 24: Successful bridge projection one or two megaparsecs outside the Black-eye Galaxy.”

Since making this image, I then discovered to my horror and joy that there are actually several other sites out there that have images of wormholes that actually get it pretty much right.

• Orion’s Arm gets it right.
• NASA, no surprises here, get it right.
• Rudy Rucker, showed me how to get it right way back in Eighties. Thanks for expanding my mind with math Rudy!
• HC Berg (A sculptor and artist no less!) gets it right.
• MC Escher–yeah what a shock, right?–got it right.

So I read today that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have received death threats. The LHC death threats are example of ignorance out of control. The risk from the LHC is minimal. How do we know that for certain? Because we know that cosmic rays routinely slam through our planet at energies much higher than the LHC can generate and our planet has not collapsed into quantum black hole or a strange droplet or some other bizarre form of matter.

The death threats are probably hoaxes and will amount to nothing but, it bothers me that there are nuts out there who still think there are things that humanity was not meant to know.

There a many social forces and groups these days who advocate positions that want to forbid us from studying certain natural phenomena. They want to discredit evolution. They want to forbid stem cell research. They want to stop animal research. They want to prevent the use of RTGs on deep space probes. They want to forbid sophisticated genetic modification of food crops. They want to forbid climatology research. As our science advances, they’ll probably want to forbid the creation of artificial organisms or minds.

They may have valid points in their arguments. There are all kinds of dangers associated with every new thing we learn. They are certainly right to advocate caution but, fundamentally, basically, I think they are enemies of civilization and the ideal of progress.

Not that I really believe in the ideal of progress either but I categorically disagree with people who take these positions because they are based in fear of the unknown. They are afraid of change, afraid of novelty. They are based in a pessimism that we can never learn to use our new knowledge wisely.

I’ve ranted about this many times before on my site but, you know how outrageous news events can inspire a person. This story struck home for me because I was physics major myself back in ancient days.