David M Goldberg

When bringing 'physics to the people', do we make physicists seem more like Tony Stark than Bruce Banner? Should we dash the hopes for time travel, warp drives, and other speculative (but very appealing) scenarios? What about the buzz around controversial topics like string theory, supersymmetry, multiverse, and more? And do we really need tech breakthroughs like the World Wide Web to justify basic science?

Imagine that you’re a science-fiction writer on a tight schedule. You’d like to play in the vast expanses of the universe, but you have too much scientific integrity to conjure up a warp drive or a DeLorean out of thin air. You’re also concerned that your audience would get bored in the thousands of years that it would take for a spaceship to realistically travel the distances between stars. What you really need is a wormhole — a shortcut through time and space. Best of all, unlike most science-fiction tropes, wormholes might very well be real.