What if messages could arrive in seconds from light years away, not by breaking the speed limit, but by taking a shorter road through space time? New wormhole models hint that tiny throats, fed by electrons and threaded with light, could one day carry a signal across the cosmos.

The notion that information might traverse spacetime through a shortcut is old enough to be respectable and strange enough to be perpetually controversial. Wormholes are bona fide solutions to Einstein’s field equations; the catch has always been keeping them open long enough to be useful without requiring “exotic matter” that violates the usual energy conditions. In 2021, José Luis Blázquez-Salcedo, Christian Knoll, and Eugen Radu reported traversable wormhole solutions within the Einstein–Dirac–Maxwell (EDM) framework—gravity coupled to spin-½ fermions and electromagnetism—that are smooth, asymptotically flat, and horizon-free. In their construction, two localized, oppositely spinning fermions thread a throat supported by an electric field; the resulting configurations possess mass $M$ and electric charge QeQ_eQe​ with Qe/M>1Q_e/M>1Qe​/M>1 and connect smoothly to extremal Reissner–Nordström black holes in an appropriate limit. Crucially, the model achieves traversability without introducing phantom fields or modifying general relativity.

Science writer and hard-SF author Brandon Q. Morris recognized the communication angle immediately, arguing that if a tiny throat can conduct electrons, then photons—the carriers of information—can ride the same path. The point is not to fly a starship, but to whisper across light-years. “Electromagnetic waves … can move through this kind of nano-wormhole if you keep it open,” he notes, adding that “you would basically shoot both photons and electrons through it,” because the electrons help maintain the throat while the photons encode the message.

Wormhole physics: from exotic matter to charged fermions

To appreciate why the EDM result matters, it helps to recall the classic roadblock. Analyses of traversable wormholes in the late twentieth century crystallized a bleak requirement: the stress-energy at the throat must violate the null energy condition. That led generations of theorists toward “exotic matter,” negative energy densities, or alternative gravity theories. The EDM construction shifts the burden from new physics to a new arrangement of known fields. The authors treat the fermionic sector semiclassically—as quantum wavefunctions coupled back into the classical geometry—an approximation that is standard in curved-spacetime settings and, they argue, likely to persist when the matter fields are fully quantized.

Electromagnetism is not an afterthought in this story; it is the difference between “toy wormhole” and “smooth, horizon-free wormhole.” In the ungauged limit or with vanishing charge, solutions tend to require an extra layer of matter at the throat. Introducing charge produces families of geometries with clean throats and no hidden shells, and along these families the authors find the characteristic Qe/M>1Q_e/M>1Qe​/M>1 relation and a continuous connection to extremal charged black holes.

This is where communication enters. Electrons have an exceptionally high charge-to-mass ratio, making them ideal contributors to the throat’s support while also serving as carriers of digital states. Morris underscores a subtle but easily confused point from the public discourse: “Negative charge is … a very usual phenomenon … Negative energy would be something that takes away energy from us.” The EDM analysis leverages the former, not the latter—charge, not negative energy, plays the starring role.

How a message might thread a microscopic throat

A credible wormhole “radio” would look nothing like science-fiction star-gates. The EDM throats are expected to be microscopic—nanoscale or smaller—so the relevant traffic is subatomic. In a conceptual link, electrons are fed through the throat to help maintain its geometry, while photons convey information as modulated optical or RF pulses. As Morris puts it, you would “shoot both photons and electrons through it,” synchronizing the electron supply with the signaling to keep the channel open.

The kinematics can be counterintuitive. Locally, nothing outruns light; an electron or photon never exceeds $c$. The shortcut comes from geometry, not speed: the wormhole creates a shorter path between distant regions of spacetime. “The electron itself does never go above the speed of light,” Morris says. “Even if it needs only 10 seconds … to reach the target, which is … five light years away, it still … flies with its own speed.” To a distant observer who measures along normal space, causality remains intact; to a traveler or a signal riding the throat, the transit appears near-instantaneous.

Keeping such a link stable is the engineering crux. Any practical device would require exquisitely precise control of electromagnetic potentials, electron currents, and boundary conditions at both mouths. Drift too far in charge-to-mass balance or throat size and the configuration could collapse into a black hole. The key conceptual move is replacing impossible requirements (vast negative energies) with extraordinarily challenging—but orthodox—electrodynamics and materials control.

What the theory actually says—and what it doesn’t

On the theory side, the EDM paper lays out the full action for gravity plus a gauged Dirac field, with two spinors in an opposite-spin configuration to preserve spherical symmetry. The coupled Einstein, Maxwell, and Dirac equations are then solved for static, asymptotically flat states with a throat of radius r0r_0r0​. The “smooth” solutions—those not requiring a thin shell at the throat—arise when an electric field threads the geometry, and they can be organized along families in which the throat size, ADM mass, and charge vary continuously. The authors derive a generalized Smarr relation and show that as parameters are tuned the wormhole approaches the extremal Reissner–Nordström limit while the spinor fields fade. These details are not window dressing; they are the bookkeeping that anchors the solutions in familiar gravitational thermodynamics and black-hole physics.

But static existence is not the same as dynamical viability for signaling. Subsequent numerical studies have evolved EDM wormhole data forward in time and found that black holes may form during evolution; null geodesics can pass through the throat but remain trapped inside a horizon and cannot escape to infinity. That would render the wormhole, in practice, a dead-end, not a channel. These simulations do not exhaust all possible configurations or control schemes, yet they sharpen the debate by moving it from “are the equations solvable?” to “what survives perturbations and signaling?”—the kind of question numerical relativity is built to answer.

The EDM authors themselves adopt a cautious stance on the semiclassical treatment, acknowledging that the fermions are modeled as wavefunctions and arguing that comparable configurations should persist with fully quantized matter fields. That claim invites independent checks and extensions—more spinors, angular momentum, departures from spherical symmetry, and eventually coupling to the full Standard Model. The direction of travel is clear: fewer hand-wavy words about exotic matter, more concrete models where every term is familiar and calculable.

Bandwidth, noise, and the shape of an ansible

What kind of data rate could a microscopic throat sustain? The answer depends on geometry (throat radius and length), electromagnetic boundary conditions at the mouths, and how aggressively one can multiplex frequencies without destabilizing the configuration. In principle, multiple optical and RF channels could be modulated simultaneously, with electrons supplied in a synchronized current to maintain the throat. In practice, the first working device—if such a thing can be engineered—would likely be narrowband, low-bit-rate, and ravenous for power. A “carrier-plus-sustainer” architecture would blur the line between communications and device physics: the maintenance current is part of the channel, not merely an overhead.

The geometry also complicates synchronization. A network moving messages through curving spacetimes must prevent accidental formation of closed timelike curves by disallowing certain route compositions and must maintain robust clock discipline across mouths that may sit in different gravitational potentials. None of this violates relativity; all of it demands a level of relativistic networking sophistication that nobody has yet built.

Entanglement, ER = EPR, and the allure of a quantum periscope

A decade of work in quantum gravity has popularized the ER = EPR conjecture—the idea that entanglement and wormhole connectivity are two sides of the same coin. The EDM construction does not prove ER = EPR, but it resonates with the theme by correlating fermionic degrees of freedom across the throat; in the simplest reading, the two localized spinors form a paired state that “glues” geometry at the throat. Popular accounts sometimes overreach here, leaping from “entanglement builds spacetime” to “entanglement lets you send messages.” That leap still fails in ordinary quantum mechanics because entanglement alone cannot transmit information. A tiny traversable wormhole, by contrast, is a causal channel—if you can keep it open. ER = EPR provides framing, not a free lunch.

Are we already missing someone else’s wormhole traffic?

Search strategies in SETI assume beacons we know how to build: narrowband radio, optical lasers, broadband techno-signatures. If advanced civilizations favor microscopic wormhole links, their emissions might be spectrally odd, intermittent, or tuned to non-astrophysical wavelengths. Even if aliens used such links, we would still receive electrons or photons, so detection is possible in principle; perhaps we simply are not yet looking in all the right wavelengths. The provocative flip side is that a clever civilization could hide in plain sight by embedding its carriers in astrophysical backgrounds our instruments already monitor. Either way, the EDM model reframes SETI questions as instrumentation choices rather than metaphysics.

Toward tests and technology

What could we do now to probe the EDM idea? On the theory side, the next step is dynamical control: extend time-evolution studies to include feedback—actively adjusting fields in response to incipient collapse—and explore departures from strict spherical symmetry and the two-spinor setup. On the quantum side, replace wavefunctions with quantized fermion fields and evaluate whether vacuum fluctuations help or hinder throat stability. On the experimental side, analog-gravity platforms—superconducting circuits, metamaterials, cold-atom condensates—could emulate the equations that photons or quasiparticles “see,” testing the basic premise that a guided, charge-assisted throat can act as a conduit for waves without scattering or absorption that would kill a signal. Even null results would refine the parameter space and sharpen numerical targets.

A more speculative near-term prospect is observational astrophysics. If microscopic wormholes occur in extreme environments—near magnetars or within compact binaries—their presence might alter polarization, dispersion, or timing in ways distinct from plasma or lensing effects. Identifying such fingerprints would require careful modeling and, likely, cross-checking multiple messengers. None of this is easy; all of it is measurable.

The bottom line (revisited)

The center of gravity has shifted. Thanks to EDM wormholes, we no longer need to invoke impossible negative energies to discuss traversability; charged fermions and electric fields, arranged just so, can support smooth throats within plain-vanilla general relativity. The practical dream is not star-gates but signal-gates: nanoscale conduits for electrons and photons that could, in principle, deliver messages across astronomical distances with latencies set by geometry rather than straight-line distance. Morris expresses the idea with a pragmatic engineer’s clarity: if you can keep the throat open, “you would basically shoot both photons and electrons through it—and then it should work.”

Big questions remain. Dynamical studies raise the possibility that EDM throats collapse into black holes under time evolution, trapping would-be signals behind horizons. If that verdict holds broadly, wormhole communication would fail in practice even if static solutions exist in principle. The response from the community should be exactly what scientific progress demands: more simulations, more analytic control theorems, and more creative proposals for stabilizing feedback.

Meanwhile, the communication framing is already paying intellectual dividends. It forces clarity about carriers (electrons and photons), about resources (charge, power, and feedback), about clocks (relativistic synchronization), and about detectability (wavelength choices and signatures). It replaces a mythic portal with a noisy, finicky, engineerable device. And it nudges SETI, instrumentation, and theory toward a common target: a world where messages do not always march along the long corridors of space, but occasionally slip through a hidden door. For now, that door is a line in an action, a set of differential equations, and a numerical dataset. Tomorrow, with luck and labor, it might be a laboratory toy that hums.

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Notes & sources

• Brandon Q. Morris, “Tiny Wormholes May Be Usable for Interstellar Communication,” The Debrief (March 16, 2021).

• Brandon Q. Morris, “Interstellar Wormhole Communication”, Tim Ventura Interviews (March 16, 2021).

• J. L. Blázquez-Salcedo, C. Knoll, E. Radu, “Traversable Wormholes in Einstein–Dirac–Maxwell Theory,” Physical Review Letters 126, 101102 (2021); see also the arXiv version for technical details.

• Ben Kain, “Are Einstein–Dirac–Maxwell Wormholes Traversable?” Physical Review D 108, 044019 (2023).