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There’s just one problem – the exact origins of dark energy are as yet unknown.

In the 1990s, astronomers discovered that the whole Universe is expanding under the antigravitational effect of so-called ‘dark energy’.

Amazingly, such energy is known to exist. While ordinary matter always generates a gravitational pull, the negative energy produced by this exotic matter generates an antigravitational repulsion. As its name suggests, this is pretty weird stuff – so weird it’s capable of bending the normal rules of gravity. For years, the most promising idea has been to support the bridge using a type of ‘exotic matter’ with negative energy. Jafferis is one of an elite group of theorists around the world searching for ways to dodge this problem. As Dr Daniel Jafferis, associate professor of physics at Harvard University explains: “We could jump in from opposite sides and meet in the connected interior, but then we would both be doomed.” Together with fellow theorist Robert Fuller, he showed that the Einstein-Rosen bridge would collapse almost as soon as it formed. It was a stunning idea, but in the early 1960s it was dealt a severe blow by John Wheeler, the brilliant US physicist who first coined the terms ‘black hole’ and ‘wormhole’. Now called the Einstein-Rosen bridge, this seemed to open the way to taking shortcuts through space and time, entering a black hole in one part of the Universe and emerging from another perhaps millions of light-years away, but without taking millions of years to do so – thus effectively travelling faster than the speed of light. They found that what we now call a black hole could be connected to another via a tube-like ‘throat’.