LA TIMES– 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.

Seventy-five years ago today, Albert Einstein and his collaborator, Nathan Rosen, submitted a paper to the Physical Review with the goal of unifying gravity and electromagnetism. Although they failed to discover a theory of everything, they did something arguably more much important: By creating the first theoretical model of a wormhole, Einstein and Rosen allowed science-fiction writers — including Arthur C. Clarke, Madeleine L’Engle and the writers of “Babylon 5″ and “Doctor Who” — to explore vast stretches of space and time in the blink of an eye.

From the outside, an Einstein-Rosen bridge, as wormholes were originally known, looks a lot like its cousin, the black hole. And I risk having my official Physics Badge revoked if I don’t tell you, ideally in a spooky voice, that “nothing can escape from a black hole — not even light.”

Continue reading about Time Travel? Maybe.

© 2010, Los Angeles Times

Photo by flickr user Uberto

Dave Goldberg is the author, with Jeff Blomquist, of “A User’s Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty.” He is an associate professor of Physics at Drexel University. His Web site is usersguidetotheuniverse.com.