Someone, at some point in your life, has told you to relax. They may have specified that you should try to relax, as though relaxation were an effortful target you could reach by checking your progress more intensely. That instruction can backfire. Psychology has a model for why.

Wormholes do not have psychology. They do, however, provide an irresistible analogy: the geometry wanted by the science-fiction traveller comes with conditions that make the construction physically forbidding. I originally wrote as though these were instances of one deep structure. They are not. The useful comparison begins once that limit is visible.

The Ironic Process

Daniel Wegner’s ironic-process theory describes two processes recruited during intentional mental control [[1]]. An effortful operating process searches for content consistent with the intended state. A less demanding monitoring process searches for evidence that control is failing.

Under cognitive load, the operating process may lose capacity while the monitor continues to make unwanted content accessible. Experiments discussed by Wegner found counter-intentional effects in tasks involving thought suppression, mood, and action. A later meta-analysis found small-to-moderate ironic effects of thought suppression across the included studies, with substantial variation by design and timing [[2]].

That evidence does not make every instruction to relax harmful, or prove that monitoring is the cause whenever relaxation fails. It supports a narrower claim: deliberately checking for an unwanted thought or state can keep its representation active, especially when cognitive resources are strained.

A Geometry With Different Constraints

Morris and Thorne’s 1988 pedagogical construction considers a static, spherically symmetric traversable wormhole with metric [[3]]

$$ ds^2 = -e^{2\Phi(r)}dt^2

  • \frac{dr^2}{1-b(r)/r}
  • r^2d\Omega^2. $$

Here \(\Phi(r)\) is the redshift function and \(b(r)\) is the shape function. A throat at \(r=r_0\) satisfies \(b(r_0)=r_0\). Avoiding a horizon requires finite \(\Phi\); traversability also imposes constraints on proper distance, travel time, acceleration, and tidal forces.

Within classical general relativity, the throat’s flare-out condition implies violation of the null energy condition for an appropriate null vector near the throat:

$$ T_{\mu\nu}k^\mu k^\nu < 0. $$

This is not identical to saying that every observer measures a simple lump of “negative mass.” It says that the required stress-energy lies outside the classical null-energy condition used by many familiar matter models.

Quantum field theory permits locally negative renormalised energy densities in some states and arrangements; the Casimir effect is the standard laboratory example. That does not hand us a material that can be poured around a macroscopic throat. Quantum inequalities constrain the magnitude and duration of sampled negative energy in the field theories and regimes for which they have been derived. Ford and Roman applied such a bound to static wormhole geometries and found severe scale-separation constraints under their assumptions [[4]]. The result is powerful, but it is not a theorem that every possible quantum-gravity wormhole must be Planck-sized.

The comparison with Wegner is therefore metaphorical. In psychology, a process recruited by an intention can help produce the counter-intended content. In the wormhole calculation, nobody’s intention changes the geometry; the field equations relate a chosen geometry to difficult stress-energy requirements. Both reward attention to constraints. They do not share a causal mechanism.

What the Quantum Processor Demonstrated

In 2022, Jafferis and colleagues implemented a teleportation protocol for a sparsified, machine-learned Hamiltonian on Google’s Sycamore processor [[5]]. The experiment probed dynamics that the authors interpreted using a traversable-wormhole dual description. It did not create a tunnel through our spacetime.

Even the stronger claim—how faithfully the small learned Hamiltonian exhibits the relevant SYK and gravitational dynamics—is contested. Kobrin, Schuster, and Yao argued that the model did not thermalise as claimed, generalised poorly beyond trained operators, and displayed features generic to small commuting models [[6]]. The original authors replied that the criticism agreed on the implemented protocol’s size-winding mechanism and that its counterfactual tests did not negate their gravitational interpretation at the teleportation time [[7]]. A 2025 author correction clarified a Figure 3b caption; it did not settle that scientific disagreement [[8]].

The defensible description is consequently modest: a quantum processor implemented a small teleportation experiment with a proposed holographic wormhole interpretation. Information moved by an ordinary quantum protocol in the laboratory description. Whether “wormhole dynamics” is the most illuminating dual description remains a live interpretive question.

Closed Timelike Curves Are Another Case

A traversable wormhole whose mouths undergo suitable relative motion could, in the idealised analysis, be converted into a spacetime containing closed timelike curves. Morris, Thorne, and Yurtsever presented this as a conditional: if traversable wormholes can be created and maintained, causality raises further quantum-field and gravity questions [[9]].

Friedman and colleagues studied the Cauchy problem in spacetimes with closed timelike curves [[10]]. The Novikov self-consistency principle is often used to describe globally consistent histories, but it is not an experimentally established rule by which “the universe selects” only one loop. Nor does a self-consistent solution prove that a traveller lacks agency. Those are philosophical additions to a mathematical consistency condition.

The grandfather paradox still has the intended logical form: an action is specified that would remove a precondition of that action. That resembles a self-undermining instruction on paper. It does not show that time travel and thought suppression are governed by the same mathematics.

Rick Sanchez’s Particular Problem

Rick and Morty is freer to ignore those distinctions. Rick’s portal gun makes the engineering constraint disappear, while his performance of indifference keeps failing around Beth and Morty. Reading this through Wegner is literary interpretation, not evidence about mental health or multiverse physics.

It is still the part of the analogy I like. The fictional machine removes distance at negligible cost. It cannot remove attachment. Rick repeatedly announces that nothing matters and then behaves as though particular people matter a great deal. The joke survives the scientific correction.

The Limit of the Analogy

“Try to relax” can be an ironic instruction because monitoring the target can keep failure salient. A Morris-Thorne wormhole is difficult because a selected geometry demands unusual stress-energy and must satisfy stability and quantum-field constraints. A closed timelike curve is paradoxical because its global causal history must be consistent.

These are three different statements. Putting them next to one another can make the role of constraints vivid, but resemblance is not explanation. The psychology does not prove the physics; the physics does not prescribe a therapy; Rick proves nothing except that a joke can carry more than one model at once.

Literature checked through 2026-07-11.

References

[1] Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.34

[2] Wang, D., Hagger, M. S., & Chatzisarantis, N. L. D. (2020). Ironic effects of thought suppression: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(3), 778–793. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619898795

[3] Morris, M. S., & Thorne, K. S. (1988). Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity. American Journal of Physics, 56(5), 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.15620

[4] Ford, L. H., & Roman, T. A. (1996). Quantum field theory constrains traversable wormhole geometries. Physical Review D, 53(10), 5496–5507. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.53.5496

[5] Jafferis, D., Zlokapa, A., Lykken, J. D., et al. (2022). Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor. Nature, 612, 51–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3

[6] Kobrin, B., Schuster, T., & Yao, N. Y. (2023). Comment on “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor.” arXiv:2302.07897 [quant-ph]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07897

[7] Jafferis, D., Zlokapa, A., Lykken, J. D., et al. (2023). Comment on “Comment on ‘Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor’.” arXiv:2303.15423 [quant-ph]. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15423

[8] Jafferis, D., Zlokapa, A., Lykken, J. D., et al. (2025). Author Correction: Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor. Nature, 640, E32. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08788-4

[9] Morris, M. S., Thorne, K. S., & Yurtsever, U. (1988). Wormholes, time machines, and the weak energy condition. Physical Review Letters, 61(13), 1446–1449. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.61.1446

[10] Friedman, J. L., Morris, M. S., Novikov, I. D., et al. (1990). Cauchy problem in spacetimes with closed timelike curves. Physical Review D, 42(6), 1915–1930. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.42.1915

Changelog

  • 2026-07-11: Recast the claimed shared mechanism as a limited analogy; corrected the null-energy and quantum-inequality descriptions; added the scientific dispute and 2025 correction around the processor experiment; removed unsupported 2025 wormhole synthesis, measurement-problem, and therapy claims; and bounded closed-timelike-curve conclusions.