Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can we build a wormhole?

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about the latest ideas for how to make human portals to distant space. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey Jorge, did you figure out how to build a wormhole yet? What? You're expecting me to do it? I was hoping you draw on your engineering background. Shouldn't it be physicists trying to figure this out? Now, we've already done our part. What do you mean? Well, we proved it's theoretically possible. Isn't that enough? That's all you have to do?

Prove that it's not theoretically prohibited? Yeah, you know, the rest is just engineering. Actually, like, making it happen. Just engineering? It seems like it's most of the work, to be honest. That's probably true. Maybe we should, you know, work on flying cars and feeding the world first. All right.

Well, you know, just let me know when I could place an order for my wormhole. All right. You just let me know when you've proven flying cars and feeding the world all possible. It's a deal. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor of physics. at UC Irvine, and I'm a bunch of particles that likes to think about particles.

You're just a bunch of particles? Is that what you're saying? That's all there is, man. Do you have soul particles, too? It's particles all the way down, if you ask me. Were you saying these particles like to study particles? Yeah, I'm a bunch of particles that likes to think about and talk about and study particles. Whoa. It's kind of meta. Meta particles.

It's particles really all the way down, down to the philosophy of it. I'm particularly interested in particle philosophy. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeartRadio. In which we take the entire universe and break it into its fundamental particles. We take apart all of the big ideas of physics, the age of the universe, the reason the universe exists, how it got to look the way that it does today, what it's made out of. And we break all of these ideas down into tiny little particles of understanding. We bounce them around, wrap them up in some dad jokes, and send them along the audio waves to you.

That's right. because we are not particular about the scale of the questions we have about the universe. We wonder about the little tiny things that the universe is made out of. And we also wonder about the entire universe. How do we get to the far corners of this cosmos? And what are we going to find there? We've sort of woken up as an intelligent species and discovered that we are in this one tiny little corner of an incredibly vast universe. And we're now learning the rules of how that universe works, how it's put together, how you can move around it, how you can't move around it.

And of course, we wonder, are there loopholes in those rules? Is it possible to get from here to there without spending millions of years on a slow rocket chip? Make it sound like we're a little planet in a big universe. It sounds like a premise for a movie or something. You know, the little planet goes to the big city. Yeah, it reminds me of that great book we talked about once, Long Journey to the Small Angry Planet. But we are a tiny little planet, and it is an incredibly vast universe.

And some of the answers to the questions that we struggle with, with the ones that keep us up late at night, you know, what's inside a black hole, or what's at the center of the galaxy, or what's at the far reaches of the universe, or are there aliens? Some of these questions could be rapidly answered if only we could get to other parts of the universe to just look at the answers. Yeah, because we can learn a lot just from here on Earth, looking through our telescopes and our antennas. We can learn a lot about the universe, but it's just not quite the same as actually getting there or seeing it with your own eyes or being able to touch other planets. or shake the hands or tentacles of other aliens. Because if there are, for example, aliens on other planets, then photons leaving those planets are hitting us here on Earth.

It's possible that a photon that left some alien tentacle flew through space and then landed on your eyeball. But of course, it's difficult to know that because it's mixed in with so many other photons that it's basically impossible to distinguish. So even with our most powerful telescopes, we can't see what's going on on the surfaces of other planets yet. So wouldn't it be great? if instead we could just pop on over.

Yep. Unfortunately, it is a pretty big universe, and it takes a long, long time just to get to the nearest star. There are millions of light years to other galaxies, tens of light years to other planets. And so even if we were able to go at the speed of light, it would still take a long time in a spaceship to get there. Amazon Prime has not yet conquered free same-day delivery to Andromeda. You need Amazon Prime Prime.

You haven't unlocked that in your account? No, I haven't paid the $10 billion. our annual fee yet to get intergalactic deliveries. It's coming, though, only for billionaires. Billionaire podcasters. Faster than light drones. But yeah, it would be great if we could get to other stars and other galaxies to explore the universe, to see what's out there, to get a closer look at things like black holes

and other planets and neutron stars. But, you know, space is what it is. You can't move through it faster than the speed of light. And that's a pretty hard and fast rule. We know that no matter who you are and how hard you push and how big your rocket, You can't get going faster than the speed of light. It's sort of strange to think about because you can add energy to things. Like at the large Hadron Collider, we can pour more and more energy into particles.

There's no limit on how energetic a proton can get in an accelerator. But even though they get more energetic, they just don't get going faster. They very slowly approach the speed of light. So it's a hard and a fast rule and one that physics says just cannot be broken. We've been looking all over the universe and nothing has ever broken that rule. But there are loopholes. there might be other ways to accomplish those goals without breaking that rule. Not a way to move faster than light, but to avoid having to go through as much space in

order to get to your destination. That's right. Physicists have read the fine print of the universe and it seems there's a, you know, a loophole, something that you can use to warm your way to other parts of the universe. Because when physicists and lawyers get together, ooh boy, you never know what you're going to invent. It's like matter and antimatter. colliding. It's pure invention energy is what comes out. Pure energy, no ethics. Exactly. And it

turns out that the rules of space and time do allow for some crazy possibilities. We know that space can do all sorts of things that our ancestors and even genius physicists from the past never imagined. It can bend and it can twist and it can be rearranged in all sorts of complicated ways. Yeah. And this special loophole is called a wormhole, a special tunnel through space in time that maybe we can use to get to other spaces or even other times. But the big question is, can we make one? Is it possible to make one? Yeah, it's easy.

All you do is you call up your favorite cartoonist slash engineer and say, where's my wormhole? I thought you just had to call some worms. My wife is deep into the composting. So she's got a big hole in our backyard filled with worms. So I guess you could say she's already invented a wormhole. There you go. Now we just need a cosmic compost bin.

Well, our solar system is a cosmic compost because we are the leftover remnants of previous solar systems, having been spewed out into the cosmos to fertilize new systems. I guess with the second law of thermodynamics, everything's, you know, increasing in entropy. So technically the whole universe is like a compost bin. There you go. Who knew the universe was so green? And smelt so weird. Yeah, and so today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question.

we build a wormhole? Interesting. I guess, first of all, do you build a wormhole or do you have to dig a wormhole in space? Let's figure out the verb first. Then we'll deal with the other technical issues. Let's get the question right. Like, how do you build a hole? Maybe you spin a wormhole. Maybe it's more like knitting or sewing, you know? It's still, I feel like a hole is an emptiness, right? How do you build one or even knit one? Yeah. Or put one together? Yeah, well, you know, we make light of it, but it is a fascinating leap to say something is allowed in the universe to figuring out how to actually make it happen. You know, you might, for example, know that soufflays can be made. Maybe you had one at a restaurant.

That doesn't mean you know how to go home and actually make that souffle in your kitchen. Knowing it could exist in the universe and figuring out how to make one happen from the current situation are two very different things. Yep, so then we can put this in the recipe book for the universe. Warm hole suflays. Worm hole suflays. Don't accidentally add too much chocolate and make it a black hole suflay. That's very dangerous. Yeah.

Or dark chocolate matter. Suflet. Dark chocolate matter. Wow. Is that a phrase anybody's ever said before? Dark matter chocolate. I mean, technically you might be able to make dark matter chocolate, right? Wow.

You know, I wonder if there's a chocolate brand out there called dark matter. You might need a whole different recipe book for that. I'd like to toss that one in my mouth hole. Well, it is an interesting question because we know that wormholes are technically theoretically possible, and this has been worked out in the math of the laws of physics, but the bigger question is how do you make one and how do you make one big enough for people to go through it? Exactly. It's the next frontier in understanding wormholes, and it's a crucial step in getting us to the place where we can step through a portal and walk on an alien planet.

So as usual, we were wondering how many people either had thought about this question of how to build or dig or excavate a warm hole out there in space. And so Daniel went out there into the internet to ask people, could we actually make a wormhole? So thank you to everybody who answered these crazy questions without any chance to prepare. If you'd like to participate for a future episode of the podcast, I can't encourage you enough and we'd love to hear some new fresh voices. So please write to us to Questions at Danielanhorpe.com.

Think about it for a second. How would you make a wormhole? Here's what people had to say. We can make a wormhole. We can do anything we set a fine too, honestly. I don't have anything else to add. I think this is theoretically possible, and I give us a thousand years until we achieve it.

Sure, why not? If we can understand it, we can conceive the technology to do it. I doubt we have the technology right now, and I don't even know what that technology would be. No idea at all. Concentrate a bunch of matter into one place, and instead of it becoming a black hole, it becomes a wormhole. Maybe you spin a bunch of things in a spinny way to make a vortex

that everybody gets sucked down and through to another place. I would like to think we could. Maybe not yet, but soon. And Daniel, I know that you love Interstellar. I remember that you were talking about it earlier, one of the podcasts. I could imagine it's something like that, like bending space somewhere, maybe even in our own solar system. And we really don't know lots about like dark metal or what's inside the black hole or there's really still loads of secrets around in the universe.

So I'm pretty sure that we can find some surprises there as well. And maybe with that information, we get closer and closer to actually be able to make a wormhole. I don't think we have enough energy right now, but eventually we could. I'm not even sure wormholes are real. Nobody's ever observed one or measured one or studied one. I know they're a mathematical thing, but I'm not even sure they're real. But if they were real, there's no way we could deal with those types of energies because what's the most popular thing humans ever made?

The Large Hadron Collider, Nuclear Weapons. I mean, if you take all the Hodron Collider, all the nuclear weapons ever exploded or ever there are ever on Earth, those energies don't compare anything to the sun. And when you're dealing with wormholes, you're dealing with black holes and things that are thousands and millions of times of more mass the sun. So I think it's impossible for humans to ever create or make or manifest or manage or anything. with a wormhole. It's too big. Theoretically, it's possible, but we don't have the technology.

So my answer is yes, but not at the moment. All right. Pretty good answers here. I feel like, I'm not sure they quite answered your question because I think you asked the question, could we actually make a wormhole? And so people just said, yes, why not? Sure. Instead of actually giving us ideas for how to make a wormhole. Oh, they didn't take it as a homework project, like go and give me the recipe, figure it out right now. want the answer today. That's right.

They read the fine print in the question. And the question only asked, could we make a wormhole, which is a yes or no answer? Well, but again, knowing that something can exist in the universe doesn't mean we know how to make it. Right. It's not always easy to assemble something, even if you know that it can exist. Right, right. So I guess let's dig into this topic and no pun intended.

And so let's start with the basics, I guess. What is a wormhole exactly? and what do we know about it? So Wormhole is a fascinating idea, and it comes out of the basic realization from general relativity, which tells us that space itself is not nothingness. It's not like the background in which the universe actions happen,

which is sort of the way that Newton saw space. He saw space is like absolute and fundamental as sort of like the stage of the universe on which things move and shift. So he thought space and time were just these sort of eternal basics to the universe. And then Einstein showed us that that's not true at all. That space and time are actually dynamic, that they change in response to what's in them. So you put a blob of mass in space, for example, it curves space. And then that curvature tells those masses how to move. So it's not like space is the background. It's instead one of the players on the stage. And mass and space interact with each other to create all the crazy dynamics, the orbits, the black holes, everything that we see. And Einstein gave us these equations to tell us what space can do. As long as space follows those equations, everything that the equations predicts

should be possible to exist in the universe. And that includes really simple stuff like you have an empty universe. Okay, so space is just totally flat. There's nothing interesting there. Or you have a singularity, a point of infinite density, mass with zero volume, in which case you get crazy things like an event horizon. And so general relativity tells us that space can do all sorts of crazy things, and wormholes are just one of those predictions. Yeah, people often make the analogy that we're like fish swimming in water. And, you know, we thought we were like swimming in emptiness, but actually we're swimming in something and that something can sort of like band and pushes and compressed and

make swirls and everything. I guess maybe a difficult thing to think about, though, is like you can imagine space bending and distorting, but it's kind of hard to imagine poking a hole in it. Like, it's hard to imagine poking a hole in water. It is hard to imagine poking a hole in water, but that's because if you're a fish, all you can think about are the basic things that you've seen water do. But if you are a sort of water scientist, you know that under different configurations, under different circumstances, water can do other things. It can be crazy. It can form solids, right?

It can form drops and fall from the sky. It can even form a gas and expand. And so we're stretching the analogy a little bit, but the idea is that under different circumstances, space can do other things. And I think this is a real demonstration of the power of theoretical physics because this is a case where theoretical physics really is leading the charge. You know, we take these like abstract principles, these mathematical equations that Einstein came up with to describe the things we had already seen in the universe. And then we explored the predictions of them. We said, well, if these are true, if these really are the rules of the universe, what else can they do? And for example, we discovered black holes in this way.

We discovered them theoretically as like a consequence of these laws. And then went out in the universe and found them to be real. So it's a really powerful way to do science. One is go out in the universe and find crazy stuff and try to explain it. The other is look at the crazy consequences of the rules you have already gathered from your experiments and see if you can predict interesting, fascinating things. So wormholes are that kind of example where people have tried to find weird corners of Einstein's equations that tell us that it's possible.

Right, right. Although, to be fair, not everything theorists come up with turns out to be true. No, right? Almost nothing, in fact, that they think about is true. Like, of all the theories out there about what new particles might be, I bet none of them are true. I don't think that the real theory of nature and particles is in any human mind right now. But that doesn't stop them from being creative and coming up with lots of ideas. But wormholes are fascinating because it's not just like one idea.

It's more like a category of ideas. The basic concept of wormhole is, say you have a patch of space in one spot, you have a patch of space in another spot. Is it possible to connect them? Is it possible to make it so that this one patch of space A is like next to patch of space B, even though they're otherwise separated, maybe by light years of distance or even by time? Is it possible to build a tunnel so that one patch of flat space is now connected to another? And this is sort of like the overarching theme of a wormhole. And people have explored this for decades now,

and they've come up with a few possible ways to connect patch of space A and patch of space B. And there's sort of very different ideas you may have heard. There are several different ones which sound contradictory, and the reason is that there are different ideas for what a wormhole might be like. There are different flavors of this wormhole moose. You know, there's earthworms, holes, and then there's ringworm holes,

and all sorts of different kind of worms. Oh, boy, this is getting a little uncomfortable. Yeah, so there's different flavors of wormholes. But I guess, you know, it's sort of strange how it, like, what is it about the theory that allows wormholes? Like, you know, doesn't the theory sort of treat space says like the thing where other particles move around and how does it actually allow you know you to make discontinuities in this space well singularities are inherently like a discontinuity

there are a very weird point in the theory and so the very first idea for a wormhole was imagine two black holes which share a singularity you know which have the same singularity so you have like a black hole with two exteriors and a common interior like it just overlaps I see because I guess if you have space you know people usually imagine it as like a giant rubber sheet and you can have maybe a black hole something so heavy and intense that it kind of makes this dip in the rubber sheet and it ends in a singularity maybe

and so that's kind of where the idea came from like what if this singularity down at the bottom of the rubber sheet somehow connected to another singularity from another black hole somewhere else in space and that rubber sheet analogy is useful for getting you thinking about how space bends, but it's a little bit misleading sometimes because it suggests that space bends like into some other direction. Like in the rubber sheet analogy, the universe is a two-dimensional rubber sheet and it's bending in a third dimension. In our universe, it is three dimensions of space,

but doesn't bend in some like other weird fourth dimension. The bending is intrinsic, meaning it's all about the changing of the relative distances of points in space. And we don't know what it is that ties space together. Like, why is this bit of space next to that bit of space next to that bit of space. And so what we're doing when we're making wormholes is we're just like fundamentally reorganizing the arrangement of space. We're saying this bit of space is now next to that bit of space. It's like you're sewing the universe together.

You know, you're knitting and you just sort of like make a stitch from the front of your sweater to the back of your sweater. And you say, these two things are now next to each other on my sweater. Right. It's like you're taking the singularity from one black hole and then you're taking another singularity from another black hole and then you're joining them together. But doesn't that seem sort of implausible? Like, isn't the point of a singularity is that it's single?

You know what I mean? Like, it's supposed to be, like, unique and, you know, a singular point. Like, how do you make two points meet up? Oh, man. I love that idea. No, you're right. It's a funny name because there's not just one singularity in the universe, right? There's a singularity at the heart of every black hole.

And so we shouldn't be called them singularities. They should be called, like, what, multiple eularities or many ulleries? Swingularities apparently. Because apparently they're not exclusive. But the idea of a singularity just implies that something is becoming infinite. In that case, the idea is the density. The density is becoming infinite. So it's a singularity in that sense.

Right. That's what I mean. It's like, how do you take an infinite dense point and connect it to another infinite dense point? Like, what are the chances they're going to meet up together? Yeah, well, we don't know. But it's possible. Like, if you plug that into Einstein's equation, it comes out with a checkmark.

Like if you shape space in that way and you say, can space have this shape? Einstein's equation says, yes, you absolutely can. It's like, can you mold a block of clay into a donut? The answer is yes. And so therefore, donuts are possible. Just because that configuration satisfies Einstein's equations doesn't tell you how to actually make it real. Because in order to make something, every step along the way also has to satisfy the laws of physics, right?

It's sort of like if you want to build an arch, like a Roman arch, where you have those bricks that suspend each other. Yeah, you know, that works if you can get it up there. But you can't just, like, put one brick up there and have it levitate while you assemble the other bricks below it. Every step in between also has to satisfy the laws of physics. And that's the tricky part, finding a recipe to go from you don't have a wormhole to now you do have a wormhole. Even if you know the last step is allowed, every step in between also has to be allowed. Interesting. All right, let's get into the different flavors of wormholes. And let's get into the problems of making one. But first, let's take a quick break.

December 29th, 1979, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion, actually, impelled metal glass.

The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order. criminal justice system on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now i'm seriously suspicious oh wait a minute sam maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit well dakota it's back to school week on the okay story time podcast so we'll find out soon this person writes my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot he doesn't think it's a problem but i don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him

because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane

and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control.

And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these.

Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get. your podcasts.

I had this like overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit

fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month. So join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know.

I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, Daniel, we are worming our way into the hearts and minds of audiences everywhere, and we're talking about wormholes. Maybe a possible way for us to get to other galaxies or other parts of the universe through a loophole in the space-time fabric of the universe. And so you mentioned there are different flavors of wormholes.

Like you can order a vanilla wormhole and a chocolate wormhole. I recommend mint chip, really. It's the tastiest meal. Oh, no, not mint. Well, exactly. And because people might be wondering, hey, if I want to get from here to Alpha Centauri, are you telling me I have to use a wormhole,

which has two black holes on it? Because if you fall into a black hole, you're not coming out the other side, right? Yeah. And so that's why this wormhole is more like a category of ideas. And the kind we're looking for is a traversable wormhole, one that you can go into and actually come out the other side. Not every wormhole you can imagine in physics satisfies that requirement.

For example, when we have two black holes with a common singularity, definitely not a trip I would recommend. But there are other flavors of wormholes. One we've talked about in the podcast before is a black hole with a singularity. And on the other side, instead of being another black hole is now a white hole, something which is like the inverse of a black hole. Instead of something that's impossible to escape, it's something that's impossible to fall into.

So you fall into the black hole side of it, pass through somehow, and then come out the white hole side, some other place in the universe. I see. So this is like the chocolate vanilla swirl flavor, the formal. Yeah, but they don't swirl, right? There's a singularity of the heart there that keeps them apart, which is the best kind because if you order chocolate and vanilla swirl, you don't want them mixed together because then it's just like sort of, you know, light chocolate. You want the contrast. Right. Maybe it's more like cookies and cream then.

well so you're saying that another type of wormhole is one that connects a black hole to a white hole now white holes are sort of like the inverse of a black hole where it doesn't suck things in it actually spews things out and these are also theoretically possible but unlike black holes we've never observed any white holes right that's right black holes theoretically possible and observed we're pretty sure they exist though check out some of our episodes about like quantum stars and darkinos about whether they actually are out there in the universe but wormholes and white holes still purely theoretical. Nobody's ever seen one. We don't actually know if they can exist in the universe, although the math suggests that they are possible. I see. So you could maybe take the singularity from a white hole and connect it to a singularity from a black hole. But wouldn't they be sort of different kinds of singularities or it's still allowed by the theory? No, it's a single singularity. In fact, if you look at like the penrose diagram for a black hole, this is something that's pretty cool. It lets you like think about the shape of space in the vicinity of a black hole. there's sort of a gap on the other side of the Penrose diagram.

If the black hole in our universe, which is centered around the singularity, and then the diagram has this gap, you're like, hmm, what's on the other side? And that's sort of the genesis of the idea of a white hole. It's like the other side of the singularity. And so it would be very natural for a black hole on a white hole to be connected by a singularity. But again, this wouldn't necessarily be a traversable wormhole, right? Because like you've got to pass through a singularity, that sounds like a pretty tight squeeze. Yeah, yeah, you'd have to really lose a lot of weight.

to be that single. And so that's also not a reversible wormhole one that you'd like to pass through. But there are other kinds of ideas about wormholes. And these are a little bit more exotic, but they're also maybe more promising because it turns out to have a connection between two points in space.

You don't necessarily even need any mass. You might not even need a singularity at all. What do you mean? Like, how can you have a wormhole without a singularity or without a hole? Well, it's just a question of having space be curved in the right way that this patch of space and that patch of space can connect to each other. And so people talk about whether that's possible. Obviously, singularities are incredibly

dense sources of mass can curve space, but that's not the only way to get space to be curved. And it's possible to have curved space without necessarily having any mass. So for example, in the vicinity of a black hole where you don't actually have any mass, space is still curved, right? There's like complex, interesting geometry near a black hole, even though you're not actually in the massive part of it. And so it's a bit of a stretch, but if you might be able to come up with some solutions to the Einstein equations that connect two portions of space without actually having any huge amounts of mass, without any singularities at all. And so this is the kind of wormhole, which might actually be traversable. I see. You're saying, like, we know that

space is kind of bendable and squishy, so why not? Like, it's theoretically possible you could just squish it all the way into a tunnel without needing a black hole. But, but, you're saying, like, we know, So you have no idea how to do that, though. I have no idea how to do that. I mean, I have some ideas how to do that. I have no plausible ideas or how to do that. I don't have a recipe that one can follow. And before you even get there, there are theoretical problems with these kinds of wormholes.

One is that these kind of wormholes, when people play with them in the equations, they tend to try to like snap shut immediately. They're not stable. It's not like a black hole, which can sit there forever, essentially sucking stuff up. These kind of wormholes, when you set them up, they collapse. They're like pinch closed. These tubes don't like to just sort of like hang out connecting two parts of space. They pinch off almost immediately. You mean like if I just take space and I dig a hole or connect two faraway points together,

your equations actually tell you that it's not stable? Like, why wouldn't it be stable? Wouldn't space just sit there and stay bent? It's a great question. And just to clarify, like, we don't know how to dig this hole. But say you started with the universe where that hole existed. We don't know how to go from there's no hole to there is a hole. But say you had a universe with one of these wormholes in it.

space already came built that way, then we can play with it and say, what would happen in this scenario? I see. Just like, I don't know how to make two black holes collide, but, you know, if it's already happening in the universe, our calculations can tell you what to expect. I see. It's like you bought a house and you discovered it has a secret tunnel in the middle of your house. Yes. And then we can ask, well, what would happen? And the calculations suggest that it would pinch closed immediately because like the pressure from the curving of space would immediately collapse this. Interesting. Meaning that space doesn't like to be bent. It's not stable, right?

I mean, I don't want to say what space likes if it likes mint chip or if it likes vanilla, you know, but it doesn't stay that way. It's not stable unless you add something to your wormhole. Like it's not stable. Like the equations tell you that in the next instant in time, curvature would snap back into flat space. Mm-hmm. Just like if you put a particle near a black hole, that's not a stable configuration. The particle will roll into the black hole eventually, right? You can't just have it hanging out there.

The dynamics predict that things will. will change. You know, some things are stable, like a particle, can be an orbit around a black hole. That is a stable configuration. So there are some stable solutions to the Einstein equations, but there are also some that are unstable. They won't just like hang out with the same solution forever. But Kip Thorne and some friends came up with the idea of how to keep that throat from collapsing. Interesting. Just get a bigger worm. They said actually get a negative worm. What they discovered is that you need some sort of like repulsion, right? Gravity tends to be attractive. I'm attracted by the earth and the earth is attracted by the sun and the sun is attracted by the

Milky Way. We tend to see gravity as an attractive force in the universe. Here, what we need is like repulsion. We need something like pressing on the edges of the throat of the wormhole to keep it open. And to do that, you need gravity to do the opposite of what it usually does. And so they thought, well, perhaps if you had like negative energy density, something with like negative mass instead of positive mass, you would apply some sort of like pressure on the edges of this wormhole and it would keep it open. It would keep it from collapsing gravitationally. Wouldn't that be the same as sort of like a white hole, right? Like something that's the opposite of super heavy? It's the opposite, but in another direction, right? A white hole is the opposite of a black hole and then it's like the inverted

shape of space time. But here it's the opposite of mass. I think it's pretty cool though in particle physics. We have lots of like opposites. You have matter and antimatter. You have positive mass and negative mass. You have, you know, electrons and different flavors of electrons, muons and tows. There's so many different reflections. Physicists and engineers. Engineers and mint chip engineers, you know. That's right. And lawyers. And lawyers. Exactly. And so the idea is if you have some kind of matter with negative energy density to it, you know, like a particle with negative mass, which is something we've never seen, and you threaded that through your wormhole, then that configuration is actually stable. It will keep the wormholes open. Interesting. So are we still talking about like a big

tunnel in space or are we talking about a wormhole that only like a single particle can go through? That's the other problem is that in their calculations, this is like particle level wormholes. We're talking microscopic wormholes. And so, you know, if we're going to send Jorge to Alpha Centauri, we would have to combine this with some machine that like disintegrated you into your particles or your information and then like beamed photons through it and reassembled you on the other end. This is not something you could like pass a living object or a macroscopic object through. I see. Well, I mean, I guess paint a picture to me, like, how do we keep it open?

Then do you have to keep feeding it this negative mass, this inverse negative energy matter through it? Like there has to be a stream of it or it's like it's like the scaffolding that holds it open and it's there. And then we pass kind of in the middle of it. Yeah, it's more like the scaffolding. As long as it hangs out inside the wormhole, it should keep it open. But again, we don't know that negative mass exists. So this was sort of the forefront of current thinking until a few years ago. people thought, well, wormholes maybe they exist, but they need us to use this kind of exotic matter,

which is theoretical, which might not exist in the universe. But which is theoretically possible? It's theoretically possible, yeah, that we've never seen it. It would be really weird. And we actually have a whole podcast episode about exotic matter and how strange it might be. So check that out if you like. But now people are thinking about other ways to maybe keep wormholes open and maybe to make them larger, to make them macroscopic so you can put like real people and objects and, you know, your suitcase.

through it. Interesting. So we have some new ideas. And so this is something physicists actually work on. Like, you know, it's not just science fiction authors and TV writers that think about these things. It's like a field. They're a wormhole physicist. There are. This is not like the lunatic fringe, like people at the very end of their careers noodling around with crazy ideas. They daren't mention otherwise. These are prominent folks. You know, Kip Thorne is like mainstream physicist. You won a Nobel Prize. There's guys like Juan Maldesna, who's one of the smartest guys in the universe at the Institute for Advanced Science, cutting edge string theorist works on this kind of stuff.

It's a really interesting area because it's not just like, hey, can we get to other places in the universe? It touches really deep questions about the nature of space and time itself and connects to questions in string theory and quantum information and black hole information paradoxes. And so wormholes have become like really core to a lot of these questions. If you remember that episode we had recently about the potential solution to the black hole information paradox. One of those solutions implies that there's like a wormhole that connects the

inside of the black hole to your simulation of a black hole on your computer, like an informational wormhole. And so these wormholes are like popping up everywhere these days on the forefront of theoretical physics. Interesting. All right. So what are some of these new ideas about wormholes? So one of the new ideas about how to keep a wormhole open says, well, let's not try to use something that doesn't exist in the universe like negative mass matter because maybe that doesn't exist and so it's not practical. Instead, let's try to use some of the cool features of quantum mechanics to maybe keep this wormhole open. So quantum mechanics has really fascinating properties. And one of the most interesting is something called entanglement. When you connect two particles, which can be really

far apart, but you have their fates intertwined. So for example, maybe you have a photon which decays to two electrons. And those two electrons have to like satisfy one of the rules of the original photon. You know, The photon had no spin, for example, then the two electrons together have to have no spin when you add them up, which means if one electron is spin up, the other one has to be spin down. So you have these two electrons and maybe they're now like really far apart. They're a light year apart in the universe. As soon as you know, one of them is spin up, the other one has to be spin down. Quantum mechanics tells you that both of them can be in either state.

And until you measure electron A, you don't actually know what's going on with electron B. So these two particles are entangled. There's some weird, spooky connection between them because as soon as you ask about electron A and discover, oh, it's spin up or oh, it's spin down, now you know something about electron B. So this is like a way to connect two places in space somehow across vast distances. And this collapse, this coordination of their results seems to be instantaneous. So this is a starting place to think about like how to maybe make connections between two points in space using quantum mechanics rather than general relativity. I see. All right. So these two electrons are tied together by some rule of quantum mechanics. And now how do you use them to keep a wormhole open? So this is going to sound bonkers, right? Even on top of all the bonkers stuff we've been talking about today. The idea is if you can entangle the two edges of the wormhole. So take your wormhole, which otherwise would have collapsed and somehow entangle the two boundaries. Like you have a boundary of the wormhole is in this part of space and the edge of the wormhole and the other part of space somehow quantum.

entangled those two boundaries so they're like linked by quantum mechanics then there's going to be a connection between them that entanglement between them creates like a special field which creates negative energy density inside the wormhole which is equivalent to having negative mass in there so it does the same job as negative mass matter but without actually having to have any negative mass wait what all right so you're saying that if i entangle two electrons right like have two electrons entangle and I have one here and I have one there where you are, you know, 50 miles away, you're saying there's some kind of like energy link to them, some energy, some negative energy linking them together or there's some negative energy in between us? Yeah, there's a negative energy field in between these two objects. Like a real tangible field or like a theoretical field. It's like a theoretical field. I mean, nobody really understands quantum entanglement, frankly. It's a mystery. It's not something that we, you know, really understand what's going on. And in the various interpretations of course, quantum mechanics, there are different explanations for it. And there are even viable theories of quantum mechanics that suggest that entanglement can be explained by like hidden variables, that there is no

randomness. Anyway, a lot of this is still theoretical, but it doesn't involve invoking negative mass particles. Just negative energy. Which do we don't know exist? But which in these calculations does come out of this special entanglement. If you entangle two sides of a wormhole, the idea is that now they are connected in this special way and that keeps them from collapsing. Oh, interesting. Like there's actual like energy between them that is somehow keeping this wormhole open. Yeah, there's some way that these two are connected now, right? Because if you have two electrons that have their fates entangled, they are part of the same wave function. And that wave function is a ripple in some quantum field. And so there's a field that now goes through the wormhole connecting these two electrons and basically keeps them from

snapping shut. The way I think about it in my mind is like, you have this warm. hole which wants to close down, but there's a thread that's through it. And that thread is the entanglement of these two particles, and it keeps it from closing. Why wouldn't it just close? Cut the cord. And break the rules of quantum mechanics, sir. Why not? What are you talking about?

That's crazy. We're inventing things left and right here. I'm going to invent the quantum scissors that the universe has to do what it wants. Well, nobody knows if this is real. And, you know, this is a calculation in a paper by Juan Maldesana. Again, one of the real smarty pants in the universe. And I took this paper to some theoretical physicists I know. And frankly, a lot of them said, you know, I don't understand this paper.

But Juan Mondecena is a really smart guy, so I believe it's true. I see. He's like negative energy. He's got to assume he exists and is right. He's never made a mistake before. So people trust his calculations. I didn't understand the details of the paper. Theoretical physicists I talked to also admitted not understanding how the calculations work.

But this is a prediction of those calculations. Okay. So that's one way to keep a wormhole open. And so there are other ways, including using dark matter. Let's get into those other ways to make wormholes. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush.

Parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the T.W. a terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder. to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating.

He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK. Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, do this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it in my eyes closed. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these.

Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. See?

Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are struggling to keep wormholes open because the universe wants to shut them down.

If there is a path between two distant points in space, some kind of tunnel, the universe actually wants to close them. It wants to zip up that hole. And so the big problem with making wormholes is how to keep them open. So we talked about maybe using quantum entanglement, which is very theoretical. But there might be a way to do it with dark matter, Daniel, right? Well, we talked about how to maybe keep them open using quantum entanglement, which is super fun. And before we move on to how to make them large and macroscopic using dark matter, I just want to talk about one more advantage of that solution,

which is that it might solve this time travel paradox. We've talked about sometimes how wormholes might be a way to travel through time because one edge of the wormhole might be in the present and the other edge might be in the past somehow. If you like boost the edge of the wormhole so it's going at relativistic speeds, you can take advantage of special relativity and the two sides of the wormhole could be at different times. The cool thing about quantum entanglement as a way to keep the wormhole open is that it prevents any of those paradoxes from happening. Because now you've made like a direct link, a connection between the two boundaries of the wormhole and actually prevents any time travel paradoxes from happening.

So it's sort of cool in that way, sort of neat, you see a solution to a problem also prevent other problems from cropping up. It's sometimes a hint that maybe you're going in the right direction. I didn't know that paradoxes were possible with wormholes. I thought that, you know, they might connect space time, which means you can travel back in time, but since you're all part of the same universe, you can't sort of change the past. Well, that's true in some other configurations of general relativity like closed time-like curves, which put you in like a forever loop where you're repeating yourself.

Wormholes, however, do potentially open the door to paradoxes because if you can travel, into the past, you're not in that past limited to repeating what you did last time. So it's not something people understand how to reconcile wormholes with paradoxes and causality. But this solution to keeping wormholes open does actually rectify that because by directly connecting the two edges of the wormhole using quantum entanglement, you prevent any of these paradoxes from happening. That's good news, I guess. We don't want to crash the universe. It's good news for your grandfather because you can no longer go back in time and kill him. Or you're going to grandkids can use for you because your grandkids might come back too that's right exactly you ate

all the mint chip you jerk it's a capital offense the other problem we're trying to solve with wormholes is not just to keep them open but to make them big enough for us to go inside we talked about how they're just like particle sized these kind of wormholes we're talking about are like big enough to send one particle through so another thing people are working on is like how do you make a wormhole whose throat is macroscopic it's like you know two meters wide so that like a person or a spaceship or a rocket could go through them. And that's the solution we try to address by adding dark matter to the equation. Right. Because all of the ones that we've talked about before, you can only send like literally one particle at a time. You can't send two particles next to each other, only one behind the

other. And so how do you make one big enough to like fit a spaceship through? Well, nobody knows, but in the same paper, Juan Maldesana worked on this problem. And he thought, well, let's try to come up with a way to make them larger. And let's again not use like crazy invented exotic matter that we don't know exists. Let's think about the things that do exist in the universe. So he explored what would happen if you use dark matter, but again, not just like normal everyday dark matter. He was considering dark matter in combination with another idea of additional spatial dimensions. We've talked on this podcast about how the universe seems to have three directions you can go in space, but there are some parts of physics that suggest there should be other directions you

should move in. String theory, for example, you know, likes 11 or 26 dimensions, which would mean And they're like, you know, not just up and down, left and right and forward and backwards, but other weird little dimensions that some particles can move through. We wouldn't be able to notice them or see them or move in them, but it would be features of space. So he explored the idea that if there are these other features of space, it would change sort of how particles move through that space. And it would change how gravity works, which means it would change how space is bent. So if you combine dark matter with these weird extra dimensions, then you can use them to build a worm. hole, which is really, really wide, big enough that you could actually pass a person through.

Hmm. Well, how does it work? What's the theory prescribed? What are the instructions in this paper to make a wormhole wide? So you need a lot of dark matter. And they go through the calculation in order to have a wormhole whose mouth is wide enough for a human to fit. But not just that for a human to pass through without being torn apart by the tidal forces, and these incredible forces of gravity that tug on you more strongly at your feet than on your head and would tear you apart.

you got close to a black hole, if you want a wormhole that's big enough for a human to go through and wouldn't tear you apart, then the mouth of it needs to be 3,000 light years wide, which means constructing something out of dark matter. It's 3,000 light years in diameter. Wow. That's like much bigger than our galaxy, right? Or even like, you know, take up like a corner of the known universe. Well, our galaxy is something like 100,000 light years across, but it's definitely much bigger than our solar system. So we're talking about a massive engineering project. You know, but hey, this is like the first paper on it.

The next one, it'll only be 1,000 light years wide. And then eventually somebody will figure out how to make it one light year wide. And then, you know, the engineers will take over and they'll figure out how to actually build this thing. It'll be as wide as your phone. Well, but I guess what's the actual recipe? Like, you have to take dark matter and shape it somehow or just put it all in one place or be lucky that it somehow just exists with this wormhole with dark matter in it? Like, what do you have to do to make this wormhole work?

So again, he doesn't sketch out a recipe for building this thing. Just that if you have a wormhole and space has these extra dimensions and you have dark matter inside this wormhole and you have the two edges of the wormholes quantum mechanically entangled, then that solution is stable and would allow for people to pass through it. So there's no recipe for like, here's how you put this thing together or here's the configuration of dark matter you need in order to make this happen. It's just like this configuration would satisfy the equations and meet all of these constraints of being large enough and being stable. I see. But what's the dark matter doing? Like, is it just sitting in the middle of it? Is it shaped like a tube? Is it just hanging out at the ends of it? Is there any sort of specifications about this? Or is just a very abstract idea? It's just sort of an abstract idea. The dark matter is there in order to explain why you have these extra dimensions of space and time and to reconcile all that together with all the other astronomical observations we have about the nature of the universe. And so the game I think Juan Melesana was playing was like, can I use things that we already know exist in the universe? and features of those theories to try to construct a wormhole which works. There's no description in this paper of like what shape the dark matter has to be in or where the dark matter needs to go or what this wormhole would look like.

I see. In fact, here's a quote from the paper. He says, quote, another problem seems to be producing the wormhole in the first place. This seems difficult. So when one of the smartest guys in the universe says, this seems difficult, you know it's not an easy problem. I see. I feel like he's giving us a recipe for a souffle, but he's just saying, hey, maybe, maybe if you throw in some flour, maybe, and some cream and maybe some, you know, some sugar.

Maybe you can make a souffle, but good luck with that. You know, the cutting edge souffle theorists, that's how they get started. They're like, you know, what are the ingredients of a souffle? We don't even know. Is it possible theoretically? And, you know, eventually 100 years later, we have a recipe for a souffle. Interesting. All right.

So another way to make a wormhole and maybe keep it open and make it big enough for us to fit through. So what are some of the problems with that? Well, one problem is we don't know how to build that thing, right? We're talking again about a solution that we know, might satisfy the equations, but we don't know how to go from here to there. Another issue is if you have these kind of entrances to the wormhole, we're talking about space being really, really curved. And when space is curved, it doesn't just affect where you go. It also affect how time passes. We talked on the podcast once about gravitational time dilation. Anytime you're in a place where space is curved,

your clock moves more slowly. And so for example, if you go through this wormhole, it might be that your clock slows down. And so even though you can pass through the wormhole, In what feels to you like an instant, to someone on the outside, you would slow down and almost freeze as you pass through the wormhole. And then when you come at the other side, you'd be moving super slow in time also. So according to their calculations, you can't actually get from one place to another faster than light would have gone because of these time dilation effects. I see. So like if I have the opening of a wormhole in front of me and you go through it and I shoot a flashlight to the other end, which is like maybe a couple miles away, you were saying my light, my flashlight would actually get there.

Like, I could have gone there faster without going through the wormhole. Exactly. So in that sense, they're theoretically awesome, but totally useless. Because the time dilation effect, which is really a pretty big deal, you know. That's like a very important piece of fine print. Right. So I would flash my flashlight and I would see you go in, but then I would see you sort of freeze at the mouth of it, kind of, right? Sort of like you freeze when you fall into a black hole.

Exactly. At least to the people outside of the black hole, I would see you. just get stuck in the hole. Yeah, exactly. Wow, that is the least useful wormhole ever. Yeah, exactly. It's like a Star Trek teleporter, but they just freeze you into a block of ice and then put you on a carrier ship and like, you know, ship you over there and then thaw you out. So it's not very useful at all. No, no. I mean, I would never see you go through, right? Is that what you're saying? Or would just be super slow? The time would actually freeze?

It would just be super slow. The time doesn't actually freeze. It doesn't actually stop, but it would take you longer to go through the wormhole than if you went around the wormhole. What if I just make it bigger? Well, the time dilation effect gets stronger as the wormhole gets more powerful because the curvature increases. I see. All right. So that's another problem is that it's not useful at all. But I guess the point is that, you know, time doesn't slow down for the person going through the tunnel. So like the person going through the tunnel to another galaxy, it would just be like a breeze except you wouldn't have to be asleep or cryogenic sleep for like thousands or millions of years.

Yeah. Just like if you somehow got up to the speed of light, traveling across the galaxy would seem to you like it didn't take very much time because for you, the galaxy would be Lawrence contracted. It would be like shortened. So it doesn't seem like you're going as far. So for you, you could survive, travel to really, really, really distant parts of the galaxy. It's just that if you walk through the wormhole and then you came back, you know, millions of years might have passed. So, you know, say goodbye to your family before you step in. Yeah. Or say hello to your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren when you come out the other end. Yeah, if you're so lucky. Yeah. So what are some of the other problems? Well, another problem is the temperature. You know, as you fall into this wormhole, you're accelerated by the curvature of space. So they did this calculation in this paper and you get like an energy boost of a factor of two trillion. So a particle gets like really sped up as it enters.

So one has this other quote in his paper, which I found hilarious. He says, so one would have to put the huge black hole inside a refrigerator in order to prevent this. So not only is he speculating about a three. 3,000 light year wide wormhole, but a refrigerator that you could put that entire wormhole into. I feel like my freezer is a black hole in my kitchen right now. But you're saying like that it does sort of act like a black hole and that like if you're near the mouth of the wormhole, it would suck you in kind of. Is that what you're saying? And accelerate you to fast speeds.

And it would be fast in your frame of reference, right? From the outside, you would still be time slowed down. So you wouldn't be moving that fast from somebody else's point of view. But from your point of view, you would be moving quickly. towards the mouth of the wormhole. Which would be very exciting. Like, that would make it fun, right? You'd be like, wow.

Makes for a better ride. But you're saying the problem is that that's dangerous somehow to be moving that fast? Or are you saying, like, we would heat up somehow? Yeah, you're basically giving a high temperature to these objects. And you might not worry about that because, you know, like, energy is frame dependent. I'm not moving at any speed in my reference frame. Somebody flying by me near the speed of light sees me moving at almost the speed of light. So you could argue that I have, like, a very high temperature.

In that frame of reference, it doesn't bother me at all in my frame because I see myself as moving at zero velocity. So temperature and energy are sort of frame dependent. So not necessarily something I think you should worry about. I just enjoy thinking about a 3,000 light year wide refrigerator. He's not just the smartest man on earth. He's also pretty funny, I guess. But wouldn't you slow down when you come out the other end?

Like, as you come out with this blinding speed, wouldn't the other mouth of the wormhole slow you down, like try to suck you back in? Yeah, sort of like rolling down a hit. hill on a roller coaster and then you roll up the other side. So you gain speed as you fall in and then you lose the speed as you come out. And so in theory, you know, sort of like jumping through a hole in the earth. You should come out the other side with no velocity. Right, right. And so then they would have to make the black hole big enough, not just to fit you, but also for you to raise her hands, right, like in a roller coaster for the thrill. Exactly. And they'd have to put a camera somewhere to

capture you screaming as you go in. And then sell it to you for $50 on the other side. All right. Well, so wormholes are possible and it might be possible to make one and keep one open and make one big enough for us to fit in. But it requires some of these sort of extreme theories and some of these extreme theoretical concepts to be true. So Daniel, what does it all mean? What does it mean about our understanding about how space works? It's a really exciting field to try to keep up with because people are really like playing with what space can do. And every time they develop one of these theories, they get like more insight into like what space is and how it works. And so it's sort of like space engineering, you know, or space time engineering. I think it's pretty fun stuff. And there's an idea like around the edges of this, which has been bubbling around in theoretical physics for a long time, which I think is really deep and is connected to this. And that's the idea that space itself might be built using wormholes. Like we talked earlier about how space is connected. And this piece is connected to that piece. And you know, you are in a part of space. You can go to the part of space that's next to you. You can't just jump from here to Alpha Centauri. There's this connectedness in space. People don't

really understand what that is or how it works. One idea of what space is is that maybe it's these like little space pixels that are somehow woven together to make this fabric of space. And the thing that does that weaving, perhaps, is quantum entanglement. Like maybe this bit of space is entangled with that bit of space. And it might just be that at the fundamental level, that entanglement is accomplished by wormholes. Like maybe the idea is keep a wormhole open by quantum entangling its edges, maybe that's the way wormholes are. Maybe all of the universe, every bit of space is just like a bunch of wormholes connected together. Every pixel wormholed together with all of its neighboring pixels.

Well, that's crazy. You're saying like instead of space being this giant blob or something, maybe it's just a whole bunch of little blobs that are pixel size, which is the smallest unit of space, and they're all sort of a threat together by wormholes. Yeah. Otherwise, they would all just be disconnected. And maybe the whole idea of space as this like thing you can move through comes out of weaving space together into this fabric. And it might be that wormholes are the things that weave it together that connect various pieces of space.

And so then if we try to build a wormhole between like our space and some space somewhere in Alpha Centauri, it could be a very natural thing to do. Because what we're doing is like just sort of like engineering the fundamental structure of space time itself. Interesting. You just need like a special quantum needle. Exactly. and entangled threads. Exactly. Weaving singularities.

So it's space might be all wormholes basically, right? Like when I move from here to my house or here to the bathroom, I'm actually sort of like weaving through tiny little wormholes all the time. It certainly could be. All right. Well, I guess these are all pretty exciting ideas and makes me think that maybe it is possible to get to other parts of the universe using wormholes. Sounds like it's theoretically possible.

And there are some pretty smart people thinking about how to make one and keep one open. Exactly. It's a really fun area. and I'm pretty sure that in a hundred years, people look back at these ideas and think, those were foolish, naive ideas. But these are the ideas along the path to figuring it out. You can't just go from here to a deep understanding of the universe. You've got to somehow assemble that understanding.

You've got to go step by step. And so we're on step one of an unknown number of steps. Yep. And all we need is 3,000 light year wide hole using dark matter, which we don't understand. Yet. Inside a refrigerator. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

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