What is the common name for an Einstein-Rosen bridge?

The common name for an Einstein–Rosen bridge is a wormhole. It describes a hypothetical shortcut or tunnel connecting separate regions of spacetime.

Albert Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen discussed the idea in a 1935 paper while examining solutions to Einstein’s field equations. The bridge appears in the mathematical description of an idealized, eternal Schwarzschild black hole, linking two exterior regions in the fully extended spacetime diagram.

The name “wormhole” came later. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler popularized the term in 1957, drawing on the image of a worm tunneling through an apple to connect two points on its surface. The phrase is now used broadly for hypothetical spacetime structures, while “Einstein–Rosen bridge” refers to this historically specific type.

A common mistake is to equate a wormhole with a black hole, singularity or white hole. Those concepts can appear in related mathematical diagrams, but they are not synonyms. The original Einstein–Rosen bridge is also not a practical space tunnel: later analyses showed that it closes too quickly for light or matter to pass through.