The Ironic Process

In 1994, the social psychologist Daniel Wegner published a paper that formalised what most people already suspected: trying not to think of something makes you think of it more [1]. The theoretical model behind this has two components.

The first is an operating process: it actively generates mental content consistent with the intended state. You are trying to relax — the operating process searches for calming thoughts, slows your attention, tries to find the mood.

The second is a monitoring process: it runs in parallel, searching for evidence that the goal has not been achieved. Am I relaxed yet? No. Checking again. Still no. Its function is to detect failure early so the operating process can correct course.

Under normal conditions, the operating process dominates. You try to relax, the monitor runs quietly in the background, and eventually you converge on the intended state. Under conditions of cognitive load, stress, or self-consciousness — precisely the conditions under which someone might urgently need to relax — the balance shifts. The monitoring process, searching for signs of not-relaxing, finds them everywhere. The monitor activates the very content it is supposed to prevent. The harder you try, the louder the monitor, the further from the goal.

This is Wegner’s ironic process: the mechanism recruited to achieve a goal becomes the primary obstacle to that goal. It is not failure of will. It is a structural property of the system — and it applies to any goal whose target state is the absence of effortful activity. Trying to fall asleep. Trying not to feel anxious about a performance. Trying to be spontaneous. Trying, in the most purely paradoxical formulation, to relax.

The instruction “try to relax” is not bad advice because the advice-giver lacks empathy. It is bad advice because it is a category error: it applies an effort-based tool to a goal defined by the absence of effort. The monitoring process required to track progress toward the goal is precisely the kind of activity that constitutes not having reached it.

A Geometry That Does the Same Thing

The analogy I want to draw requires a brief detour into general relativity.

In 1988, Michael Morris and Kip Thorne published a paper with the unpromising title “Wormholes in spacetime and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity” [2]. It is, in the field’s understated way, one of the more consequential papers in the subject. Morris and Thorne asked: what would a traversable wormhole — one you could actually pass through — require, physically and mathematically?

The spacetime metric of a traversable wormhole in their formulation is:

where $\Phi(r)$ is the redshift function and $b(r)$ is the shape function. The throat of the wormhole sits at $r = r_0$, where $b(r_0) = r_0$. For anything to pass through in finite proper time, $\Phi$ must remain finite — no infinite redshift — and $b(r)/r$ must remain less than one away from the throat.

So far this is just geometry. The physics enters through the Einstein field equations, which connect the geometry to the matter and energy present. To maintain the wormhole throat against collapse — to hold it open — the stress-energy tensor of whatever matter fills the throat must satisfy:

for null vectors $k^\mu$ — what is called a violation of the null energy condition. In plain terms: the matter holding the wormhole open must have negative energy density. Not small energy density. Negative — less than nothing.

This is exotic matter. It does not appear in any tabletop experiment. Classical general relativity does not rule it out, but it does not provide it either.

Quantum mechanics is slightly more helpful: the Casimir effect produces measurable negative energy density between closely spaced conducting plates. The Hawking radiation calculation involves transient negative energy near black hole horizons. So quantum field theory permits negative energy — in principle. But Ford and Roman [3] showed that quantum field theory also strictly limits it: the integrated negative energy over any region is bounded by a quantum inequality. The shorter the burst of negative energy, the smaller it must be; the larger the region, the more constrained the magnitude. The result is that any realistic traversable wormhole would be either Planck-scale (far too small for anything but quantum information to traverse) or would require negative energy concentrated in a band many orders of magnitude thinner than the throat itself — an engineering requirement that borders on the physically absurd.

The wormhole, in other words, does something structurally similar to the monitoring process in Wegner’s model: the condition required to make it traversable actively resists being satisfied. The geometry that would allow passage tends toward collapse. The more you want the wormhole to be open and stable, the more the energy conditions conspire against you.

What the 2022 “Wormhole” Actually Was

In late 2022, a team including Daniel Jafferis, Alexander Zlokapa, and colleagues at Caltech and Google published a paper in Nature with the title “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor” [4]. Several major news outlets reported that scientists had created a wormhole. This was not accurate.

What the team actually did was implement a quantum circuit on Google’s Sycamore processor that simulates the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model — a quantum mechanical system of randomly interacting fermions that is holographically dual, via Maldacena’s AdS/CFT correspondence, to a nearly two-dimensional anti-de Sitter black hole geometry. Two coupled SYK systems are dual to a two-sided eternal black hole, which is connected in the bulk by an Einstein-Rosen bridge — a wormhole.

By coupling the two systems with a specific negative coupling (which corresponds, via ER=EPR, to injecting negative energy into the wormhole), the team made the bridge traversable in the holographic sense: information encoded in one quantum system propagated and was recovered in the other, consistent with traversal of the dual gravitational wormhole.

This is genuinely interesting physics. It is not a wormhole through our spacetime. The wormhole lives in the holographic dual geometry — a mathematical construct in a lower-dimensional theory of gravity, not a tunnel between two points in the universe you inhabit. Quantum teleportation occurred on a quantum chip via the ordinary mechanism of quantum entanglement. The gravitational language is a description of the same physics in a dual frame, not a shortcut through space.

The media confusion is itself instructive: “wormhole” has drifted far from its original meaning. In current physics, the word can refer to a Morris-Thorne traversable tunnel through spacetime, to the Einstein-Rosen bridge of an eternal black hole, to a holographic dual of quantum entanglement [5], or to saddle points in the Euclidean gravitational path integral relevant to the black hole information paradox. These are related by mathematics but quite different in what they physically represent. None of the last three are traversable shortcuts through the universe. The first is, in principle, but barely, and only at the cost of exotic matter physics that nobody knows how to achieve.

The harder physicists have worked to make the wormhole genuinely traversable and macroscopic, the more the mathematics has resisted. This is, at minimum, a suggestive pattern.

What 2025 Added

The field did not stand still after 2022. Three independent lines of work published in 2024 and 2025 have further complicated what a wormhole is — and in each case the complication pushes in the same direction: the geometry keeps refusing to be a shortcut.

The wormhole that does not connect two things. Maloney, Meruliya, and Van Raamsdonk [7] showed that Euclidean wormholes — saddle points in the gravitational path integral — appear generically in ordinary higher-dimensional gravity, without any special setup. The striking implication is that these wormholes do not bridge two separate universes or two separate theories; they encode statistical fluctuations within a single theory. The replica wormholes that resolved the Page curve for black hole radiation — one of the central recent results in the black hole information paradox — are of this type. The wormhole is not a connection between two things. It is a feature of how the theory sums over histories, a bookkeeping structure for correlations within one system. The physical picture of two mouths joined by a throat does not apply.

The wormhole that is not smooth. Magán, Sasieta, and Swingle [8] studied the interior geometry of the Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting typical entangled black holes — the configuration that is supposed, under ER=EPR, to be the gravitational dual of quantum entanglement. Their result, published in Physical Review Letters, is that this interior is not a smooth tunnel. It is long, irregular, and chaotic — an Einstein-Rosen caterpillar, as they call it. The quantum randomness of the entangled state maps directly onto geometric disorder in the interior: the more thermalized the state, the more disordered the bridge. A traversing observer, if one could exist, would not glide through a clean throat. They would navigate a geometry shaped by quantum chaos, growing longer and more disordered as the system evolves. This is ER=EPR taken seriously at the level of typical states rather than special ones, and the result is inhospitable to any ordinary notion of passage.

The wormhole that is not a tunnel at all. Gaztañaga, Kumar, and Marto [9] proposed a more radical reinterpretation: the Einstein-Rosen bridge, they argue, is not a connection between two separate spaces but a representation of time-reversal symmetry within a single quantum description. On this reading, there is only one space, and the bridge is an artefact of how you describe the time-symmetric structure of the quantum state. The paper, published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, attracted considerable press coverage. It sits somewhat outside the mainstream of holographic quantum gravity research, and the proposal has not yet been widely integrated into the community’s working framework — the language of two entangled systems and a connecting geometry remains the dominant picture in AdS/CFT calculations. But the direction it points is consistent with the other two results.

Taken together, these papers suggest that the word “wormhole” has been quietly revised from a noun into an adjective. Not a thing that exists somewhere, but a property of certain mathematical structures — one that describes correlation, disorder, or symmetry depending on which context you are working in. Each attempt to pin down what a wormhole is in practice finds something less traversable, less connected, and less tunnel-like than the previous attempt.

This is, to put it plainly, consistent with the theme of this article.

Causation Eating Its Own Tail

The wormhole’s physical problems become even sharper when you add time. A traversable wormhole connecting two different spacetime regions can in principle connect not just two different places but two different times — creating a closed timelike curve (CTC), a path through spacetime that loops back on itself. You leave on Tuesday and arrive last Thursday.

The standard paradoxes then apply. The grandfather paradox: you travel back in time, prevent an event that was a necessary precondition of your journey. The causal chain that produced the journey destroys the causal chain that produced the journey. The bootstrap paradox: an object or piece of information exists with no origin — passed back in time repeatedly, it has always already existed, created by nothing, caused by itself.

Friedman, Morris, Novikov and colleagues formalised what has become known as the Novikov self-consistency principle: the only physically admissible solutions are those in which the causal structure is globally consistent [6]. No grandfather paradox — not because you cannot go back, but because if you do, it turns out you were always part of the causal chain you thought you were disrupting. The time-traveller cannot prevent an event; they can only be the mechanism by which it occurred.

This is not resolution. It is constraint. The universe selects only the self-consistent loops, filtering out everything else. The causal structure enforces a particular kind of conservatism: only actions that were always going to happen can happen. There is no freedom in a closed timelike curve. Trying to change the loop from inside it is exactly like trying to relax by monitoring whether you have relaxed: the mechanism of change is part of the thing you are trying to change.

Rick Sanchez’s Particular Problem

Rick and Morty is, among other things, a sustained meditation on this structure — without ever calling it that.

Rick Sanchez is the smartest being in every universe. His portal gun creates traversable wormholes instantaneously and at negligible energy cost, which is exactly what general relativity and quantum field theory suggest should be impossible. The show waves this away; what it does not wave away is the psychological consequence of Rick’s capability.

Rick has thought his way to the conclusion that nothing matters. Infinite universes, infinite timelines, infinite Ricks: every moment is replaceable, every loss is recoverable somewhere else, every moral weight dissolves in the face of the combinatorial enormity of everything that exists. This is Rick’s version of relaxation — the nihilism that should follow from taking the multiverse seriously.

But the monitoring process runs. Rick checks whether he has achieved not-caring, finds that he cares (about Morty, about Beth, about being the smartest one in the room), and the caring becomes more vivid for having been suppressed. His nihilism is not peace. It is a performance of peace that is constantly undermined by the monitoring process watching for cracks.

Rick’s portal gun solves every spatial and temporal problem. It does not solve the ironic process. No level of intelligence, and no number of traversable wormholes, provides a shortcut past Wegner’s monitor. This is, I think, what makes the character work: the show’s impossible physics is the premise, but the actually impossible thing — the one the show treats as genuinely intractable — is the psychological paradox.

The Common Structure

These cases — the relaxation paradox, the traversable wormhole, the closed timelike curve — share a formal structure.

In each case, there is a desired end state (relaxation, passage through the wormhole, a changed past) and a mechanism for pursuing it (effortful monitoring, exotic matter, time travel). In each case, the mechanism required to pursue the end state is incompatible with the end state itself. The monitoring process that tracks “am I relaxed?” is the activity of not being relaxed. The exotic matter that holds the wormhole open is the physical condition that makes the geometry so extreme that traversal is barely possible. The attempt to change the past is always already part of the past you were trying to change.

The physicist’s version of this is the quantum measurement problem: the act of observing a system disturbs it. The observer cannot step outside the measurement. The psychologist’s version is the ironic process. The relativist’s version is the closed timelike curve. The narrative version is Rick Sanchez.

What Actually Works

Wegner’s answer to the ironic process is not to try harder with the operating system. It is to release the monitoring system — to stop checking whether the goal has been achieved. This is the core insight behind Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: you cannot think your way to not-thinking. The goal of not-thinking requires not-monitoring, which means not having the goal in the active, effortful sense at all.

This is harder than it sounds. It is a second-order intervention: instead of trying to relax, you try to stop trying to relax — which, done badly, just adds another monitoring process. But done well, it is the correct diagnosis: the category error was treating relaxation as an effortful goal in the first place.

For wormholes, the physics community has arrived at a related answer. The question “how do we make a macroscopic traversable wormhole in our spacetime?” may be the wrong question. The ER=EPR framework suggests that wormholes and quantum entanglement are two descriptions of the same thing. The question is not how to build a tunnel; it is what the entanglement structure of spacetime already is, and how information is already being transferred through it. The shortcut was never a shortcut. It was always just the ordinary geometry of entangled quantum systems, described in a language that made it look exotic.

For Rick Sanchez, the show has not found an answer. Which is, probably, the correct narrative decision.

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] 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

[3] 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

[4] Jafferis, D., Zlokapa, A., Lykken, J. D., Kolchmeyer, D. K., Davis, S. I., Lauk, N., Neven, H., & Spiropulu, M. (2022). Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor. Nature, 612, 51–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3

[5] Maldacena, J., & Susskind, L. (2013). Cool horizons for entangled black holes. Fortschritte der Physik, 61(9), 781–811. https://doi.org/10.1002/prop.201300020

[6] Friedman, J., Morris, M. S., Novikov, I. D., Echeverria, F., Klinkhammer, G., Thorne, K. S., & Yurtsever, U. (1990). Cauchy problem in spacetimes with closed timelike curves. Physical Review D, 42(6), 1915–1930. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.42.1915

[7] Maloney, A., Meruliya, V., & Van Raamsdonk, M. (2025). arXiv:2503.12227. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12227

[8] Magán, J. M., Sasieta, M., & Swingle, B. (2025). Einstein-Rosen caterpillar. Physical Review Letters, 135. https://doi.org/10.1103/btw6-44ry

[9] Gaztañaga, E., Kumar, A., & Marto, J. (2025). Classical and Quantum Gravity. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/ae3044