Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

by Ian Douglas

In fiction, such things had been called star gates, jump gates, jump portals, and a dozen other names. In physics, they were termed Lorentzian wormholes, Schwarzchilde wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges, but all of the names meant the same thing: a means of warping local space so tightly that a tunnel or doorway was opened between two points in spacetime quite possibly very far removed from each other. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen had first postulated the idea of the Einstein-Rosen bridge as early as 1935, though the structure they’d proposed mathematically would have collapsed. Other physicists, much later, had proposed theoretical constructs called wormholes. The idea was that a worm crawling over the curved surface of an apple might take a long time to reach the other side; the trip would be shortened if he bored through the middle. The concept depended on three spatial dimensions being curved through a fourth.