Have you ever read Carl Sagan’s 1985 science fiction novel ‘Contact’? Or have you seen the film of the same name starring Jodie Foster? If you have, then you will remember the scene near the end of the film, when the heroine travels to the star Vega, twenty-six light years away from Earth, through a wormhole in space. Just a story, you think. But is it?

不知你是否有读过卡尔萨根写于1985年的科幻小说《接触》，或者看过朱迪·福斯特主演的同名电影。假如你有看过，你一定会记得影片快结尾的时的那个场景：女英雄穿越宇宙的虫洞，前往离地球26光年的织女星。你觉得这只不过是个故事。事实是否如此呢？

The truth is that the scene described above is a serious scientific picture of travel through spacetime using a wormhole. When Sagan was writing the book, he asked an American scientist, Kip Thorne, to give him an idea for a way of travelling long distances through space that was scientifically possible. Thorne thought about it for a long time and then had the idea of using a wormhole. He then looked again at Einstein’s theories and the accepted rules of physics and was surprised to see that wormholes really could be used to travel through space.

事实上，上文描述通过虫洞穿越时空的情景确实是有科学依据的。萨根在写这本书的时候咨询过美国科学家基普·索恩，希望他帮忙构想一种科学的并且有实现可能的方法进行远距离时空穿梭。索恩思考了很长时间，想到了这种利用虫洞的方式。于是他重新研究了爱因斯坦的理论和现有的物理定律，结果惊讶地发现虫洞真的可以用于时空穿梭。

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