WORLD YEAR OF PHYSICS: THE BIRTH OF WORMHOLES
[In honor of the World Year of Physics, which commemorates
Einstein's "miraculous year" in 1905, we're presenting papers from
the Physical Review archive related to Einstein's accomplishments.]
In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein tried endlessly to
unify electromagnetism with his own theory of gravity, general
relativity. These efforts are mostly now regarded as quixotic, but
a short proposal written in 1935 with a colleague has survived in
unlikely fashion as the source of science-fiction ideas for
speeding across the universe by means of "wormholes" through
spacetime. From the modern perspective, the paper
also illustrates how general relativity posed mathematical and
conceptual difficulties that foxed even its creator.
(A. Einstein and N. Rosen, Phys. Rev. 48, 73 (1935))
Link to the paper: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PR/v48/p73
COMPLETE Focus story at http://focus.aps.org/story/v15/st11
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