Wormholes? We seen them on TV and in movie, but do they actually exist? Well according to this article from interestingengineering.com they may.

"Could this equation finally unite two of the biggest theories in physics?

Theoretical physicists have spent nearly a century trying to reconcile a unified physical theory of our universe out of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

The problem they face is that both prevailing theories work incredibly well at describing our world, and have both held up under repeated experimentation.

But the two might as well be describing two entirely different realities that never actually intersect.

General relativity can mathematically describe a leaf falling from a tree, the orbits of moons and planets, even the formation of galaxies, but is not much use when trying to predict the motion of an electron.

Quantum mechanics, meanwhile appears to violate nearly everything we know about the universe — that matter can only be in one place at any given time, that something can only be in one state at a time, or that observing something is not the same thing as interacting with it — but which nonetheless gives us the mathematical tools we need to create lasers, quantum computers, and many other modern technologies.

Recently, though, an interesting proposal about a thorny paradox involving black holes, ER = EPR, has been causing quite a stir among physicists, and it's easy to see why. This simple equation might be the wormhole we've been looking for that bridges the two seemingly irreconcilable theories.

The Great Black Hole Firewall Controversy

The equation ER = EPR was proposed in 2013 by the theoretical physicists Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena as a possible solution to one of the most contentious issues in modern physics: the black hole firewall.

The problem began in 1974, when British cosmologist Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes would actually leak particles and radiation, and eventually explode. This combined general relativity with quantum theory, but there was a big problem. Dr. Hawking concluded that the radiation coming from a black hole would be completely random, and would convey no information about what had fallen into it. When the black hole finally exploded, that information would be erased from the universe forever.

For particle physicists, this violated a basic tenet of quantum theory, that information is always preserved. Following a 30-year controversy, Dr. Hawking announced in 2004 that his theory was incorrect. However, Dr. Hawking might have been too hasty. At the time, nobody had figured out how information could get out of a black hole. But a group of researchers based in Santa Barabara may have found an answer.

First put forward in a 2012 paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, the black hole firewall theory states that immediately behind every event horizon of a black hole there must exist a veil of energy so intense that it completely incinerates anything that falls into it.

The authors demonstrated that information flowing out of a black hole is incompatible with having an area of Einsteinian space-time, the event horizon, at its boundary. Instead of the event horizon, a black hole would have a region of energetic particles — a “firewall” — located just inside.

The reason for this, according to the paper's authors, Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully — known collectively as AMPS — is that three key assumptions about black holes can't all be true: that information which falls into a black hole is not lost forever (unitarity); that physics outside the event horizon still functions as normal even if it breaks down beyond the event horizon (quantum field theory); and that an object passing the beyond the event horizon would not experience an immediate change (equivalence).

It is this last assumption that AMPS says gives rise to the firewall. AMPS argues that the entanglement of a pair of virtual particles responsible for Hawking radiation is broken at the event horizon, releasing an incredible amount of energy just behind and all along the entire visible boundary of a black hole.

This violation of a key principle of Einstein's General Relativity, however, would essentially lead to the unraveling of the core model of modern physics. If physicists don't like that idea, AMPS argues, then one of the other two pillars of physics as we know it must fall instead.

This has produced fierce debate ever since, with no satisfactory solution. Raphael Bousso, a string theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, says the problem posed by the firewall theory, "shakes the foundations of what most of us believed about black holes...It essentially pits quantum mechanics against general relativity, without giving us any clues as to which direction to go next."

Susskind and Maldacena, however, proposed a novel solution to this problem: wormholes, and this has far-reaching implications beyond just the firewall paradox.

Einstein, Black Holes, and Wormholes

When Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1916, he revolutionized our understanding of gravity by describing it as the curvature in the fabric of space and time created by the masses of objects in space.

Curvature in space-time can vary with mass, and in theory, in extreme cases, space-time can even curve so much that it touches some other point in the fabric, linking the two points together even if they are separated by vast distances, represent different points in time, or exist in different universes entirely.

Formally known as an Einstein-Rosen (ER) bridge, named for Einstein and his co-author of the 1935 paper describing the bridge, Nathan Rosen, this theoretical bridge in space time is more popularly called a wormhole.

Among the cases where wormholes are hypothesized to be most likely to form are black holes, and if two black holes form an ER bridge with each other, then the point where one black hole begins and the other one ends would essentially disappear.

An ER bridge isn't restricted to singularities though, and if the entwining of two distinct objects into a connected pair sounds familiar, then you're on your way to understanding ER = EPR."

So there you have it, but it may not be one that you can take your star ship into anytime soon.

Reference: https://interestingengineering.com/a-simple-equation-indicates-wormholes-may-be-the-key-to-quantum-gravity