The physics of space and time travel, explained by Taylor Swift

Testing teleportation theories from Swift’s most recent “Willow” music video

Photo // YouTube

We open with Taylor Swift looking directly into the camera, a glowing yellow string shimmering between her fingers. Swift follows the string all the way into the lid of her piano and climbs in. When she crawls out, she’s inside the hollowed-out center of a tree, nowhere near the dimly-lit cabin in which she started out.

In Taylor Swift’s most recent “Willow” music video, the singer transports herself to several different locations and points in time by following a magical golden string. As viewers, we suspend our disbelief and go along on the journey—it is a surprise single (and album) from Taylor Swift, after all. But if the mechanics of Swift’s travels were limited by the science we have today, would they still be possible? And if so, how?

What you’re looking for, has been here the (worm)hole time

In the “Willow” music video, Swift travels from one point in space to the other almost instantaneously. While we don’t have the technology to enable this today, we do have the theory for it. Swift could be traveling through a wormhole: a tunnel that connects two different points in space and time. While black holes suck in matter and energy like a vacuum, preventing anything from getting out, wormholes release energy, but prevent anything from getting in. Wormholes do theoretically have the power to transport Taylor Swift from her cabin to the woods, but they are highly unstable, and would very likely collapse before she made it from one place to the other.

To stay open, wormholes need exotic matter, a special type of matter that doesn’t follow gravity’s rules. Exotic matter has a negative mass. Instead of producing a gravitational force that attracts other objects to it, like how the Earth’s gravity keeps us planted on the ground, exotic matter repels other objects with its gravitational force. That repelling force could be just the thing to hold a wormhole open and permit travel between two points in space.

So, did Taylor Swift successfully travel through a wormhole? Maybe, if the glittering particles on her mysterious string are indeed exotic matter, which scientists are currently studying and recently created aboard the International Space Station.

We were both young, when I first saw you… again

Photo // YouTube

About a minute into the video, Swift follows her golden string into a pool of water and comes back out in a blanket fort—only this time, it’s a 7-year old version of herself from the past. This next transition has taken her to a different place in both space and in time.

Like with wormholes, time travel is theoretically possible, but not yet proven. According to

Einstein’s calculations, it is possible for an object to travel through space and time in a loop called a closed time-like curve, eventually ending up in a place and time that it has already been in before. Additionally, every object in the universe exerts the force of gravity onto space and time. With all of that force, it might be possible to warp or even twist spacetime using a laser, creating a time loop where we could travel forward and backward. This is a theory that physicist Ron Mallett has been playing with as he tries to make a time machine of his own—though at the moment, the scientific schematics would only allow someone to send information back to the instant his machine was turned on.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of Taylor Swift zapping herself back to her adolescent years is pretty slim with the understanding of spacetime we have right now. Maybe the technology will be a bit more refined by the time she drops her next surprise album.

Invisible string theory

The end of the “Willow” video sees Swift following the golden string back into her cabin, where she reunites with the man she has been searching for throughout her travels. This single golden string seems to have connected her to several different universes, eventually taking her back to her home once again. A version of this string is a hot topic in physics today.

Traditional ideas about matter represent all the different particles in our universe as individual entities: protons, electrons, quarks, and the like. By the laws of string theory, however, these particles don’t exist. According to the theory, all matter is made up of one-dimensional vibrating objects called strings. The specific pattern of vibration for a string is what determines the charge and mass of whatever it represents. With this logic, protons, electrons, and quarks are all just strings with varying types of vibration, causing the particles to differ in nature.

String theory points to the existence of a world with many dimensions, with several parallel universes curled up into each other—much like the different worlds in the Willow video. If correct, it could help us encapsulate the workings of our universe. But as the theory exists now, it is difficult to conduct an experiment that would either prove or disprove it, making it challenging to confirm. The idea of Swift using a single vibrating string to access this multiverse remains limited to her visual effects team for the time being.

When Taylor Swift storyboarded her music video for the lead single on her newest album, “evermore,” she may not have been thinking about its adherence to the rules of astrophysics. While the existence of wormholes, magical strings, and time travel are not yet proven, her musical journey hints at theories that might be supported with scientific evidence sometime in the future. In the words of Swift, this might not yet be an open-shut case.