Permit me to regale you with my very niche pet peeve: circular, two-dimensional wormhole entrances in science fiction. (Fantasy gets a pass; unless you’re trying to do science-y magic, the magic portal works however you want.) Usually combined with the problem where the inside of the wormhole looks like… well, a hole dug by a worm.
Why is this an issue, do you ask?
Because that’s not what it would look like.
I suspect the problem comes from the common depiction of a wormhole using a two-dimensional representation, like so:
Clearly, the wormhole is a tube with openings that look like circles! What am I complaining about???
Well… remember, that’s a wormhole in 2D space. All that “empty space” around the wormhole and above the flat plane… doesn’t exist. It isn’t somewhere you can go. It’s a 2D world: you’re a 2D creature stuck to the sheet. So, what do you see as you approach the wormhole, if you’re limited to two dimensions?
A line segment. You see a line segment from every direction, which would allow you to infer that the shape of the opening is a circle. If you think about how light would move through this space, you see the other location through that line segment… regardless of angle. Finally, if you were actually inside the wormhole, you’d see your origin point behind you, your destination ahead, and to your left and right, the light curves around in a circle… you’d see yourself, distorted and faded, many, many times, like a relativistic hall of mirrors. In other words, the inside of the wormhole lacks an edge for applying dramatic special effects.
Now, bump it up a dimension.
Instead of a line segment, the wormhole entrance appears as a circle. It’ll look like a circle from any angle – side, top, bottom, all the way around. Through the opening, you’ll see different angles on the destination at the other end of the wormhole. On the inside, going through, you’ll see very warped and twisted images of yourself, possibly with parts of your origin or destination depending on the exact angle where you’re looking.
In fact, some lovely folks have simulated this:
Of course, a real wormhole wouldn’t look quite like this. If we hand-wave the problem of needing negative energy or matter or something to hold it open, there’s still general relativity at play, so the warping of space-time would also change the colors of the light and have other fun effects. (Where “other fun” is “maybe time-travel.”)
With that in mind, let’s do a rundown on notable wormholes. Fictional, of course, since we’re rather short on real ones. For simplicity, I’m largely sticking to visual media. Please note that a rating here implies nothing about the quality of the show; I’ve watched/read and enjoyed most of these.
Stargate
It’s a flat circle. Fail.
Farscape
Great show, cool puppets, but wormhole fail.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Pretty, and a personal fave. Also fail.
Babylon 5
Fail again. Maybe we can handwave this one since the gates lead to another dimension entirely (hyperspace), but, still…
Doctor Who
Not graded, because it’s all wibbly-wobbly anyway. (But that looks like going through a tube, so… not good.)
The Bobiverse (Not Till We Are Lost)
A rare written example, but one where the author took pains to emphasize that holding a wormhole open requires weird physics and that the wormhole is spherical (it’s a wormhole from any direction). Grade A.
Marvel Cinematic Universe (Thor, Avengers: Infinity War, etc.)
Too magical to grade, but also, hahaha, no.
The Expanse
Gorgeous and pretty self-consistent, but again, fail.
Interstellar
At least they got the doggone wormhole right. And the black hole. The planetary science and the biology and the basic economics of moving everyone off of Earth instead of fixing things, on the other hand… that’s a whole separate rant.
Schlock Mercenary
A rare accurate presentation of wormholes: too small for anything bigger than a particle to fit, so you have to deconstruct and reconstruct anything you’re sending through. Gold star, A+, would archive binge again.
What About My Books?
My one published novel (The Cloak and Its Wizard) is very much urban fantasy that pokes a little fun (and some critique) at Marvel. As such, there are portals, which are explicitly not wormholes, and they… are flat circles that just work. No grade.
Among my unpublished manuscripts, one of my old ones explicitly uses a hemisphere on a platform as the wormhole/portal entrance. (There may be a second hemisphere underneath, but nobody’s walking through that.) That book’s not going to be published any time soon – it needs a lot of work – but I’m quite happy with how I described the portals. Still magic, so I’m not sure it counts for this rating system…