Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can we escape a black hole with a warp drive or wormhole?

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about whether loopholes and wormholes will let you escape black holes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm thinking about thieves that use science fiction to steal stuff, like opening a wormhole into a bank vault. Hmm. Don't that doesn't Marvel do that already? Marvel does everything. The wizards count as scientists. Or instead of being a science thief, you could maybe use science fiction to protect your valuable stuff.

Oh, I like it. that maybe I could hide all my gold inside a black hole. Yeah, you might never see it, but it'll be safe at least. I'll know that it's growing in there. Yeah, I guess it's accruing, isn't it? It's a creeding interest. It's compounding for sure. of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine and sadly I have no skills that can contribute to a bank heist. And not even driving. You can't drive. You could be the getaway driver on a spaceship, maybe. I'm a very, very safe driver. So I'd be like stopping at all the crosswalks, you know, observing all the traffic rules. Yeah, yeah, you're fired, Daniel, for my

high stand. I can't say I'm sorry about that. But wouldn't physicists be good at planning the Heist, you know, aren't you good at, like, you know, thinking things through and being analytical and, you know, being detailed oriented? Yeah, I can make a university budget for our bank heist that includes, like, an 80% overhead rate and stretches out over five years. That sounds great. Yeah, or you could write the grant proposal for a startup fund, you know, to the mafia. What experts are they going to get to review that? They're all in jail, you know, so they're easy to get to. You could apply to the National Stealing Foundation.

But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio. In which we attempt to steal all of the jewels of knowledge that the universe has hidden away here and there. We take your mind to the inside of black holes. We drop them through wormholes and do crazy new locations in the universe. We try to snatch all the juicy tidbits that explain how the universe actually works, how it got to be the way that it is, and what its crazy future holds. and we explain all of them to you. Yeah, because it is a pretty amazing universe

full of incredible and valuable discoveries out there, just sitting there, just waiting for a crafty physicist to crack the save and get to all that shiny knowledge. I like thinking of the secrets of the universe as valuable. Like I could auction them off as NFTs or something. You would profit from these, Daniel? You wouldn't just be like a Robin Hood physicist where you steal from the universe

and then you distribute it to people in need? Well, that's the really, cool thing about knowledge is that if you share it with people, it doesn't get diluted, right? You have a pile of gold and you give half of it to somebody. You have as much gold. But if you know the secrets of the universe and you share it with somebody, then you have somebody to talk to about it. So it's like even more valuable. Right. But then if you make it into an NFT, that's the opposite of that. Isn't it? That's why I wouldn't turn the secrets of the universe into NFTs. That's why we share them freely on this podcast. Yeah. And that's why we don't

make a lot of money, I guess. Because this podcast is. for free. Because making money is not the goal here. The goal is to celebrate knowledge. That's right. This podcast is a steal in itself. That's right. You are stealing knowledge from our brains. You stole my punchline, Daniel. But it is a pretty incredible universe full of interesting places. And some places are sort of harder to get to than others. In fact, there are places in the universe that might be impossible to get to, or at least to get knowledge out of. Yes, the jewels of knowledge are not just littered on the,

the streets. They are sometimes hard to find and you actually do need a physicist or two on your team, Oceans 13 or Oceans 19 or whatever the sequel will be in order to extract those jewels from the universe. Sometimes you just have to perform a clever experiment. Sometimes it seems like the universe is doing its best to keep its jewels hidden from us. Yeah. And Daniel, how many people work in your collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider? Like a few thousand? You know, I'm not even sure what the number is to within a hundred. It's somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 authors on every single paper. I see.

So your sequel would be Oceans 5,500 plus or minus 500. Your movie title needs an error bar. That's right. What's another 100 authors on a paper anyway, really, between friends? Yeah, although sometimes it seems like no matter how many henchmen you have in your gang, it seems that nature sort of, like you're saying, has places in the universe that it just doesn't seem to want to let you get to. And it's especially tantalizing and frustrating when we know the secret is in there, when we have found this physics vault and we just don't know how to crack it. We know that the answers are waiting behind a wall.

And if we could only get in there, we could learn something deep and true about the universe. Like the ultimate heist. I am warming up to this movie idea. It's starting to seem interesting. Sci-fi heist. Dr. Strange's Ocean. Well, I think one of these places that are really hard to get to in the universe, as you mentioned, are black holes. Black holes are extremely difficult to get to, or at least survive getting into, and maybe even impossible to get anything out of.

And yet we know that hidden inside a black hole are critical details that will reveal to us the true nature of space and time. How does space come together? Is gravity a quantum force or the curvature of space time? And what is the smallest unit of space? What is actually going on inside a black hole? All of those answers are available to anyone who falls into a black hole. Yeah. But just to be clear, Daniel, it's not like you go into a black hole and it's all there on a textbook or, you know, a sign. It's like you want to get into a black hole just so you can do experiments there and see what, you know,

how these rules of the universe change inside one. Experiments. I'm expecting a TED talk when I get there. By who? by the physicist that I threw in before me. That's what I have students and postdocs for. Right, right. I thought you were going in first, Daniel.

I'm never going in first. You know that when the aliens arrive, we're sending other people first. I'm going to be in like the fifth wave. Another reason why I'm not in a bank heist. That's right. You just want to sit at home and count the knowledge later. But you're right that the secrets of the universe are not just laid out for us in an already written paper or a TED talk.

We would have to do some observations. but I don't think it would be that tricky. There are some really big questions. The different ideas about what might be going on inside a black hole are extremely diverse from there's a tiny singularity of infinite density to there is nothing inside a black hole because everything smeared along its surface. And so a lot of things could be very quickly ruled out once you get inside. I wonder if it's possible for you to get into a black hole, get ready to do your experiments

and to figure out that you didn't bring the right equipment. You just have no idea how to test. these things. Yeah, well, people can always throw stuff in after you go, right? So if I ever go to a black hole, I would just want my students to just keep throwing equipment in after me in in case I need more stuff. Just in case. I see, because you wouldn't be able to like tell them possibly what you need, right? But you know, as computers get better, I want them to just keep thrown in more computer. So I keep doing more analysis. Also, maybe some lunch, you know, a little charcutory table would be nice. Maybe a bed. That might be good, too.

But yeah, it's interesting to think about what's inside of a black hole. And it's sort of frustrating to think that even if you do get in and even if you bring the right equipment and do the right experiments and figure out how the universe actually works, you might not be able to come out and tell other people. It's incredibly frustrating. You know, there are some kinds of knowledge that we know are out there. We also know that eventually we'll get them. Like, for example, what's going on on the surface of exoplanets fairly nearby? We don't have the technology today, but eventually we'll have powerful telescopes to image those surfaces. We'll send robotic probes.

We'll figure it out. We might even get some samples returned in the far, far future. But black holes are so much more frustrating because it seems like it might actually be impossible to get the information out of there. Or maybe not. Yeah, according to the theory, black holes are space time. I don't wish you can't get out of. But there are sort of loopholes in the theory that might lead you. come out. I love loopholes in physics theory. Instead of being like a physics bank heist,

sometimes I want to be a physics lawyer. I want to like argue in front of the court of the universe. Like actually your honor, it says here. I think you mean actually your honor, according to this paper from 30 years ago. And hey, we do discover these loopholes. And sometimes these loopholes are really important. Like we all know that you can't travel faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, it seems like it might be theoretically possible for for things to move away from each other faster than the speed of light if the space between them expands. It's an awesome kind of loophole because it solves the problem. You don't actually want to travel through space faster than light. You just want to get somewhere faster than light could have.

So that's a really wonderful kind of loophole and the kind that we might be able to use to crack open a black hole. Yeah, because space is a pretty interesting thing. It's not just like an emptiness out there. It's sort of this thing that can squish and bend and sometimes maybe even have shortcuts in It's a really difficult concept for people to grasp. I think a lot of people are still stuck with sort of Isaac Newton's idea of space. It's like the emptiness, the backdrop, the stage on which the universe happens, not actually a part of the universe. But now, as you say, we know, it's a dynamical thing that responds to the stuff that's in it. Yeah.

And in particular, it sort of allows for two things that may let you come out of a black hole. And those two things are warp drives and wormholes, which I'm still waiting, Daniel, for you guys to, to make it a reality. Well, I sent that grant application to the Daniel Science Foundation and to the National Thieves Foundation and I'll let you know when I hear. No, it's a National Stealing Foundation.

That's why he's haven't heard that. Oh, man. The wrong email address. But you're right that these are theoretically allowed in the universe. General relativity and our knowledge of physics says that it might be possible to shortcut two places in space

to get from one to the other without going through all the space in between. That's a wormhole. Or to squeeze space in front of you and expand it behind you to create a warp bubble and get places faster than light could have. That's a warp drive. They might theoretically be allowed. Yeah, and we've talked about both of those things in our podcast.

If you're interested in going deeper, you can search for those episodes. But we didn't sort of talk about maybe using them to get out of a black hole. And a lot of folks out there have been writing in asking me if it's possible to use warp drives and wormholes as a loophole into black holes. And so today on the podcast we'll be tackling, can you escape a black hole with a warp drive or wormhole? Now, Daniel, are people asking you this because they're thinking of going to a black hole or are they stuck in a black hole? And if they're stuck in a black hole, how did they get the message to

you? I got this weird email with no return address. You know, it's just like, diness from like three trillion years ago no i think people are planning their vacations and you know they want to think about what happens if my family and i fall into that black hole and you've got to be prepared you know some people are really safety conscious like how many people can i bring back and can i you know maybe leave some of them behind hopefully no that's kind of that's kind of dark i think listeners are really curious about this seeming impenetrability anytime you hear about something being totally impossible in physics, it makes you wonder if there's not just like another clever angle or some loophole to exploit. And of course, we're all curious about what's

inside black holes. And so if you found a way to siphon off that information, it would be pretty fascinating. Yeah. And so this is pretty mind bending and space bending stuff. You know, black holes bent space a lot and warp drives and warm holes also bend space. So, you know, I can see how people might think like, hey, what if I use one to solve the other? And so we were one. wondering how many people had thought about this possible combination of things, black holes, warped rice, and warm holes, and how they can be used together or used against each other. So Daniel went out there into the wilds of the internet to ask people this question.

And thanks very much to all of you who volunteered to answer crazy unexpected questions about loopholes in general relativity without any chance to prepare or take a graduate level class in advance. And if that sounds fun to you, please don't be shy. write to me to questions at danielanhorpe.com and i'll set you up with some crazy questions so think about it for a second do you think you can escape a black hole with a warp drive or a warm hole here's what people had to say i'm not really sure how a warp drive works but if you are changing the shape of space or of space time then it seems like you could get yourself into a position where the gravity of the black hole

doesn't hold you as tightly as it does in normal space. Well, for sure, Jean-Lau Picard would try to use the warp drive depending how close we would be to the black hole. But if we are in the no escape area where the light doesn't go out, I don't see how we can get out of there. I think even if your maths and simulations tell you there's some way to escape a black hole, the fact that you've been spaghatified is going to slow you down to some extent. I don't think you could use a wormhole, but I'm pretty sure you could use a warp drive.

I think a warp drive would do it. But unfortunately, I can't tell you why I think that because of the prime directive. Well, since warp drives are fantasy at this point and wormholes are theoretical at best, I would say no, you cannot because we do not know much about these modes of travel. I am going to say no, because I don't think anything can escape a black hole. All right, not a lot of optimism here. Some people are like, nope, nope, don't think so. I like the person who said, John Luke Picard when he uses a warp drive. I think that could be a good life philosophy, you know. What would John Luke Picard do?

Yeah, and it made me wonder, I've seen a lot of episodes of Star Trek the next generation, but I don't remember one where they fall into a black hole and use a warp drive to escape. Even on that show where the science is like, how can we say, very flexible? I don't remember them using this particular trick. Oh, interesting. They didn't make it so. But of course, there's probably a listener out there who's seen every episode 10 times and can correct me. So if the Enterprise uses a warp drive to escape a black hole, please send us a note.

I think they used to, didn't in one of the movies, didn't they use something to slingshot like around the sun or something and then to go faster than light and travel back in time? Wasn't that a plot of one of the movies? Yeah, they did go back to present day San Francisco to save the humpback whales in one of them. And they did that by going faster than the speed of light to go back in time. But I don't think a wormhole or warp drive was used. Yeah, I guess a warp drive is pretty normal for them. Like, they just have one in their ship. Everybody has one.

Yeah, which makes you wonder, why do they need to slingshot around the sun in order to go fast in the speed of light when they got the warp drive right there. But as we say, the science is flexible. I see. It's a black hole of real science. No, I love that show. You don't have to be all hard science fiction, have a good time. But it does help, right, to have more fun.

It's a different kind of universe. And I like all the universes. From the true physics universe, we actually live in to the crazy goofy universe of Star Trek. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into this question, Daniel. Can we use a warm hole or warp drive to get out of a black hole? Maybe step us through this first.

Why is it hard to get out of a black hole in the first place? Black holes are hard to escape because they do more than just pull on you. Everything that has gravity is pulling on you. Like the sun is pulling on you. The earth is pulling on you. Black holes are a great example of how gravity is more than just a force. It's actually the changing of the shape and the organization of space itself. So the reason that we feel gravity is not because there's a Newtonian force between stuff,

but because having mass in space changes the shape of space. And when the shape of space changes, you get this fictitious force, this feeling that there's a force there changing the paths of particles. And that's what gravity is. It's a fictitious force which appears when space is curved. And black holes are the most incredibly intense curvature. They change the shape of space so much that space becomes one directional inside the black hole. Every future you have inside a black hole only moves you closer to the center.

Yeah, it's like being sort of trapped in a bubble of space. Although, Daniel, just to be clear, I know that the gravity as a space, time bending thing is sort of the prevailing view. But like you were saying, there are some questions about gravity that we still don't know, right? Like there's still the possibility that gravity is a force and it has a force particle. 100%. That's the description we get from general relativity, which so far have survived every experimental test we've thrown at it. Even really, really precise ones about the warping of space and frame dragging. Check out our episode on Gravity Probe B.

It predicted the existence of block holes, which appeared. However, the place where we expect general relativity to break down is when it gets really, really intense over really, really short distances, when quantum gravity becomes relevant, when we need to understand how quantum particles interact gravitationally. For example, inside a black hole. So the best place to figure out why general relativity is probably wrong is inside a black hole. So you're right, this description of gravity as a bending of space time is very effective, but it is a classical theory and is likely in fact. correct. Yeah, it's the new classical theory, I guess, because there's a previous classic, there's like a classic classic theory, which is a Newtonian view, right? That's right. But by classical, we don't mean the old delicious formula that you loved when you were a kid. We mean

that it's not quantum mechanical. General relativity as we use, it assumes that space is smooth and continuous. There's an infinite number of locations between every two points, that objects have perfect paths that if they are here and then they are there, they must have followed a path in between, but we know the universe is different from that. We have strong evidence that quantum mechanics is the nature of space time. We just don't know how to unify those pictures. Yeah, it's sort of like the neoclassical view now because we know that there might be big changes coming soon. Yeah, and specifically, general relativity predicts that the heart of a black hole is a singularity, but it's not really fair to call it a prediction. It's more like a failure. General relativity

predicts something which is essentially impossible, an infinitely dense point. So most, Those theorists see this as the breakdown of general relativity. This is the point where general relativity no longer works and has to be replaced by a quantum theory. So it's not like we really expect there to be a singularity at the heart of these black holes because that's what Einstein predicted. We expect to find something else which helps us change general relativity, which shows us how to refine it and extend it so that it does apply to those crazy circumstances. But I guess even before you get to that singularity, a black hole is such that even if you get near it, you're sort of trapped inside of it. If you get beyond the event horizon of the black hole, you're saying

that there's just like nowhere for you to go because all of space time sort of curves around you and anywhere you try to go, it just pulls you closer to the center. Yeah. And people think about the inside of a black hole as this barrier past the event horizon. Remember, the event horizon is not like a physical place. It's not like there's a gate there with some guard locks you in and you can't leave. It's just an effective location. It's just if you venture past this point, then your light cone, your future, everything that you can affect in the universe is now trapped inside this radius around the black hole. So it's sort of like a point of no return. It's like if you're trying to drive fast around an icy turn, you know when you've lost traction and you're

just not going to make it and you're going to slide out. That's the point of no return. The event horizon is sort of like that. You got a little too close and now all of space is leading you eventually towards the center. Yeah, I think of it also is kind of like if you're trapped in a pit on the ground. And it's sort of like the point where the walls of the pit go beyond vertical. Like once they're vertical or more than vertical or leaning towards you, there's almost no way you can climb out. And so according to classical general relativity, everything that happens inside the event horizon eventually hits the singularity. And so there's no way for information to pass out of the event horizon, including you or any signal.

you want to send or any notes or TED Talks you compose while you're inside the black hole. Yeah, or any science fiction novels or TV shows that you come up with in there. All right, so that's a black hole. And so theoretically, it's all sort of impossible to get out of it. Or so we thought there are sort of loopholes to this theory that might let you get out, maybe a warm hole or a warp drive. And so let's get into whether or not we can use them to get out of a black hole. But first, let's take a quick break. How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious.

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All right, Daniel, help. I'm stuck inside of a black hole. What can I do? And if you can hear me, you're probably in here with me, in which case, we're both doomed. Exactly. That's never the phone call I want to get. The call is coming from inside the black hole. You're inside the black hole, too. That's the combination sci-fi horror movie genre. Yeah, well, there you go. That's the first scene in your movie. Somebody has to steal us out of that black hole. It's a rescue movie, exactly. Oh, which is what John is. Whoa. Now we can cast the rock.

I would rather put my fate in the rock's hand than John Sina. I don't know how about you. How do you feel about that? Oh, boy, who would win in an arm wrestling contest or a physics test? The rock for sure. No, we're a big fan of the rock. How about both? We could get them both in the movie.

One of them could play you, the other one could play me. I think you have an over-density of muscle. You might create your own black hole. and then it would be counterproductive. They'll have to dye it maybe or stop working out. But I'm curious about your suggestion there. If you had to choose, who would you prefer plays you in the movie? The Rock or John Cena?

Oh, the Rock for sure, yeah. Are you going to shave your head so he can play you? I think it'd be easier to get him a wig. But either way, I guess we would need one of their help to get out of the black hole because black holes are almost maybe impossible to get out of. Except that maybe there's the idea that we could use a loophole in the theory. three, one or two loopholes, either a wormhole or a warp drive. So maybe let's go through one at a time.

Daniel, how does a warp drive even work? So warp drive is a really cool idea, and let me stress that it's theoretical. We have these equations that suggest it might be possible, but there's a whole lot of question marks and engineering hurdles to overcome before we actually build a warp drive and use it to shoot off and explore the universe. The basic idea is that if you can manipulate, the curvature of space, you might be able to accomplish what you want, which is to get from here to somewhere really, really far away without having to travel through all of that space.

And the idea is that space is flexible. And so, for example, if you can squeeze the space between here and your destination, and at the same time, expand the space behind you, you can effectively move a little bubble of space faster than the speed of light. Because while there are rules about how fast you can go through space. There are no rules about how fast the curvature of space can change. Yeah. So this is kind of one flavor of war drives. You know, it's all sort of fantastical at this point and theoretical. And there are many different ways to kind of pull off a warp drive, right? I mean, we talked about this in one of the chapters in our book, frequently asked questions about the universe. Yeah, there are lots of crazy ideas out there. I think the one that's

closest to plausible is called the Alcubia drive, named after a Mexican, physicist who came up with this idea, he discovered that there's a solution to Einstein's equations for general relativity, which can accomplish this. So if you could bend space in this way, then theoretically, you could take a little bubble and warp it across the universe. The question at the end of his paper, though, is can you bend space in this way? You know, Einstein's equations are very tough to solve, and it's not always clear that you can accomplish this kind of curvature just because you want to. Whoa.

Okay, first of all, if you're interested in learning about all the other crazy ideas for Warped Rides, please check out our book, frequently asked questions about the universe, and B, there is an actual paper

where someone proposes a war drive? Is this like a subgenre of physics papers? This is a subgenre of physics papers, and it's one that's growing recently. People are working on all sorts of crazy stuff, exploring the potential consequences for faster than light travel or closed time-like curves

in general relativity. A lot of people are exploring sort of the edges of the fabric of GR, what it can predict and how it can be manipulated. This is a paper that came out more than 10 years ago. So it's been around for a while. Oh, man, that means that somebody has had 10 years to be working on this. This is not the fringe, right? This is sort of like between the mainstream and the fringe.

But these ideas are being taken seriously. And I mean, this paper is correct. If you could bend space in this way, it would accomplish that. But, you know, of course, there's no guarantee that you can bend space in this way. Einstein's equations say, if you have an arrangement of matter and energy in a certain way, they tell you how space bends. This is sort of going the opposite direction. It says, oh, I want space to bend this way. What arrangement of mass and energy do I need?

And unfortunately, the answer in the paper is you need some weird stuff like negative energy matter, like matter with negative mass, which we don't know if it exists in the universe. Well, okay, let's take a step back though first and maybe step through this idea. So you're saying that one way to do a warp drive is to somehow, like if I want to get from here to another star, one way to do that is to squish, like, move forward, but squish the space in front of me so that it's smaller or shorter so that if I take like one step, I'm actually going 10,000 steps or something like that. And in the meantime, to like make up for it, I have to expand the space behind me because I'll step through this crunch space and then I have to let it go back to normal behind me. Well, you don't want to actually step through the scrunch space because then you get torn apart by these tidal forces. But what you can do is have a little bubble and that bubble can get closer to your destination. So imagine, for example, you step into a warp bubble and then you squeeze the space between you and Alpha Centauri. And then you step out of the warp bubble.

It's sort of like stepping onto a moving walkway. So you step sideways into the bubble. You compress the space in front of you and then you step sideways out of the bubble again. So you're saying the bubble moves? Yes, the bubble moves. Yes. So you don't actually go through crunch space. You don't go through crunch space.

You don't want to. Like that space is extraordinarily curved and you would feel very strong forces. So in this version, the warp bubble, you don't actually go through crunch space. The bubble itself moves, right? And space can do this kind of thing. Space can distort. It can bend. It can twist.

You can get reconnected. All sorts of crazy stuff. I see. Like you sort of, I guess I'm having to try to visualize. this bubble. So like inside the bubble is regular space that is comfortable for me, but just outside of the bubble, you're saying space is crunch. And then somehow the bubble moves, but I don't move. Or the bubble moves, but I stay in place. That's right. You have an inertial frame inside the bubble. So you're not moving relative to the bubble, but the bubble is

moving relative to the rest of space. And that's accomplished also because there's a part of space behind you that's expanding. So that's what this bubble does is it compresses the space in front of you and expands the space behind you. I don't need to move? Like, wouldn't the bubble move away from me or past me? You're inside the bubble. And so you have no velocities, no forces on you relative to the bubble. The whole bubble moves, including you.

Whoa. It's almost like, I guess, you're trying to go on a train track and you're, what, you're like, you're scrunching all the tracks in front of you? Yes. It's a lot like sitting on a train, right? On a train, you don't move relative to the train. The train moves relative to the track. So that's what you're trying to accomplish here.

I see. The bubble is the train and space is the track and I'm scrunching the track in front of the train and then the train moves through the scrunch space. And one complication is, of course, how do you get space to scrunch in front of you and to expand behind you? Right, because it has to scrunch ahead of you before you get there. And here's a key problem is that you inside the bubble can't do anything to the universe outside the bubble while you're inside. So if you need space to be scrunched in front of you, you need space. some sort of space scrunching device in front of you, which either has to travel faster than the speed of light. If you know how to do that already, you don't need a warp bubble. Or you need to, like, lay a track in advance. Someone that's like, go before you and build this space

crunching track between you and Alpha Centauri in order to accomplish this scrunching. Right. Oh, I get it. Yeah, because you're in the train moving. Like, you can't reach out, like, you can't have an arm sticking out of the train ahead at like 70 miles ahead of you and scrunch the tracks in front of you because if you get an arm out that far, you might as well just hop on the arm and go forward. Exactly. Maybe the rock can do that, right? Yeah, with the help of John Cena.

One of them could toss the other. There you go. Now it's a train heist rescue movie. Throw John Cena from the train, yeah. Okay, so you're saying in this version of a war drive, which is kind of like the frontrunner in terms of the theory in the community, you kind of have to like build a track ahead of. the time, sort of like a, like a tunnel almost in space before you can war drive. It's not like you

can just warp drive anywhere. You have to lay down this magical track. Yeah, it's sort of like a hyperloop. And let's clarify, like the idea that's out there is if you can bend space in this way, you can move a warp bubble through space. The question is then how do you bend space in this way? And one idea people have is make this basically like hyperloop train track that bends space and find matter with negative energy density to bend the space behind you, there might be other ways to accomplish this curvature. That's just one idea how to accomplish this particular curvature of space that would effectively give you a warp bubble. But I guess how would this work? So let's say we lay out this hyperloop or warp drive loop from here to Alpha Centauri. And along

this tunnel, there's some sort of like device or material that somehow like puts out negative mass energy. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. The whole. warp bubble needs to be surrounded by weird negative energy density to separate the bubble from the rest of the universe so it can move faster than light. There's a strange connection between negative energy density and faster than light travel. But the theorists tell me that this is not something that's actually well understood, even theoretically. And we have no idea how to make something with negative energy density anyway. Right. But I guess what I'm saying is that it would need to be somehow selectively activated, right?

Like this tunnel would need to be lined with this negative energy matter or generators, and then you need to sort of like activate them as your bubble goes along. I think that's true because what you want is space to be curved right in front of your bubble and space to be expanded right behind your bubble. And so it sounds like a pretty complicated engineering problem. A little bit, a little bit. There's definitely some details to work out here. Although, you know, they have made some progress.

And the first generation of the idea, they thought it would take as much matters as is contained in the observable universe to accomplish the squeezing of space. Now they've got it down to like some fraction of the mass in Jupiter. So, you know, that's progress. Yeah, that's a huge amount. That's a huge difference. It's huge savings. That's right. We've broadened it down from $72 gazillion to only $16 billion.

That's right. Yeah, we've gone from a rock salary to some B-actor salary. But I think what you're saying is that the main problem. is that it depends on this weird thing, which is something with negative energy, which we don't even know if it's possible or we have no idea how to do. There's only one scenario in general relativity as far as we understand it, where space can expand. And that's if you have a lot of potential energy inside some quantum field in space. We talked about this as a potential source for inflation in the very early universe.

When the universe did exactly that, it expanded. And the inflaton field with a lot of potential energy might have accomplished that. And currently today, the universe is expanding fairly gently thanks maybe to the cosmological constant, which might be a source of potential energy in space driving dark energy. So we do see that the universe is expanding. Space can expand, although controlling dark energy is not even an engineering problem. It's just fantasy. Whoa.

All right. I have a question about that. And also let's get into whether you can use maybe warm holes instead to get out of a black hole. But first, let's take another quick break. How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious. One in ten kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure, like yourself. Not the seriously know-at-all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster.

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Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know. Plus, the stories and events off the court, and of course the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very fancy, wonderfully experienced sporting event. I mean, listen, the whole aim is to be accessible and inclusive for all tennis fans, whether you play tennis or not.

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production in partnership with deep blue sports and entertainment on the I-heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you at your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I would love for you to share your breakdown on pivoting. We feel sometimes like we're leaving a part of us behind when we enter a new space, but we're just building.

On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Valicia Butterfield, media founder, political strategist, and tech powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling, impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman who worked really hard to be able to say that. I'd love for you to break down why it was so important for you to do C. You can't win as something you didn't create. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Melicia's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change.

A very fake, capital-driven environment and society will have a lot of people tell half-truths. I'm telling you, I'm on the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. On Pretty Private, we'll explore the untold experiences of women of color who faced it all. Childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, incarceration, grief, mental health struggles, and more.

And found the shrimp to make it to the other side. My dad was shot and killed in his house. Yes, he was a drug dealer. Yes, he was a confidential informant, but he wasn't shot on a street corner. He wasn't shot in the middle of a drug deal. He was shot in his house unarmed. Pretty Private isn't just a podcast. It's your personal guide for turning storylines into lifelines.

Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. All right, we're trying to get out of a black hole, Daniel, And we can't afford The Rock or John Cena to help us here, even on a train. Low-budget black hole escape heist movie. Awesome. That's right. We only have enough money to fill up Jupiter. It makes me kind of wonder, like, you know, you're talking about dark energy and how it's expanding space and whether or now we can maybe harness some of this negative energy that might exist to maybe create a warp drive.

Could we just use dark energy or this negative energy to just basically like punch a hole in a black hole. You know what I mean? Like could we just, you know, use somehow theoretically, is it possible to manipulate this and just kind of create an escape hatch? Potentially. And that's sort of what a warp drive might be doing. Now, in our universe, there is dark energy. Space is expanding. And so, for example, black holes that exist out there in our universe right now, they're existing in the context of space that is expanding underneath them. And people write to me sometimes, they ask like, can dark energy pull apart a black hole. As far as we know, black holes do survive dark energy because they're out there in the universe and they've lasted for billions of years. And the effect of dark

energy, remember, is to expand space. And so fundamentally, if you have a homogenous, if you're like expanding all of space at the same time, you're just stretching the black hole. You're just moving the event horizon further out. It's like expanding the black hole. Nothing that was inside the event horizon ever gets out of the event horizon. If you're smoothly expanding all. of space. What we're talking about with a warp drive, though, is like, could you expand just part of space? Could you, like, distort it, make like this weird bubble or divot? So the event horizon actually, like, changes. It's no longer a sphere. And you can, like, slip it behind you. You can get out from inside the black hole. Yeah. It's theoretically possible, right? Like, because the black hole

is bending space itself, but then you're sort of bending it back in certain places. It's not even theoretically possible. I would say it's like maybe potentially, theoretically possible. There's a lot of issues there. Right, but maybe theoretically possible. It's still theoretically possible. It may be theoretically possible. Expanding the space behind you can sort of like move you further from the center of the black hole, right? If you specifically expand that space that's between you and the singularity and not the spaces between you and the event horizon, then you're sort of moving closer to the event horizon. If you do that enough, you might be able to pop out of the event horizon. But according to some particle theorists that I've talked,

to, if you do that, then you don't really have a black hole. To them, a black hole is something with an event horizon that nothing can escape from. And so if you, like, construct a warp tunnel out of a black hole, they say, well, then it wasn't really a black hole. Oh, man. They're purists, I see. They're black hole purists. They're like, well, if you can escape one, then it's not a black hole. Yeah, exactly. But the bigger problem is an engineering one, which is how do you build the track? If you are inside a black hole and you want to warp bubble out of the black hole, then you need this warp drive track, this hyperloop we talked about,

this construction of this crazy matter to get you out. And if you're inside, then you can't go out to build this track. So you sort of can't build your way out of it. I see. If it's possible, then it's not impossible. So you could sort of do it if you built the warp drive track in advance. Like you see a black hole, you build this warp drive track into the black hole. Then you can jump in and ride it back out, but the particle theory purists would say, well, when you built that warp drive track, you sort of like created a divot in the black hole already and you didn't really go into the event horizon.

Yeah. It's like you punched the hole in it and you went into the hole of the black hole, but you didn't actually touch the black hole. Exactly. So either you bend it in advance and you're sort of sitting in the dip in the event horizon or you go inside, but then you can no longer build your way out. I feel like that's a loophole in the loophole of the loophole. There are a lot of holes in this theory, Daniel. There are a lot of holes. We haven't even talked about wormholes yet.

Yeah, let's get into our last kind of hole for a black hole because that would make it all whole. And that is a warm hole, which is maybe another possible way to get out of a black hole. And so, Daniel, we've talked about warm holes before and how they're maybe at the center of black holes. I'm actually more optimistic about the wormhole approach than the warp drive approach. You're more optimistic. I'm more optimistic.

I'm more optimistic. I'm less optimistic. But let's let's find out. Well, there's lots of different varieties of wormholes. So the variety of wormholes that are inside a black hole, sometimes called an Einstein Rosenbridge, is a tricky concept. Some theorists say it's just a mathematical artifact of choosing a weird coordinate system. It can't actually exist in nature. But the idea is to connect black hole interiors.

So you have like two black holes and they have the same singularity and the same interior, the same event horizon. even though one is in one place in the universe and the other is in another place in the universe. That's not very useful. It just means that if you fell into a black hole, it turns out you're inside two black holes. But you could change black holes in case you get bored of one, you know, kind of like during the pandemic,

you'd just change rooms you work in just for some variety. But you're just still home, man. You didn't go anywhere. That's the problem. All right, so that kind of wormhole wouldn't help you. There's another kind of wormhole. You have a black hole where the singularity is connected to a different kind of object called a white hole, which is like the opposite of a black hole.

Black hole is something you fall into and can't escape. A white hole is something you can shoot out of, but you can't ever go into. So these are like one-way tunnels in space theoretically. Nobody's ever seen a white hole or a wormhole. But in principle, you could fall into that black hole and then get shot out the other side of the white hole. Right. Like one of them, the black hole is this hole that's sucking in. stuff in and the white hole it is presumably other point in space as you spewing out stuff

constantly. Yeah. And so you could go into the black hole and you couldn't leave the black hole itself. You couldn't pass through the event horizon the other direction, but you are no longer inside the black hole. So that sort of counts. Yeah, I guess. And you would be, you would shoot out of the white hole, I guess, on the other side. Wherever that is. But that's not so useful again, because you don't know where that is. That doesn't solve the problem of I've fallen into a black hole, and I can't get up, right? Well, it does solve it. You just end up somewhere else.

You have no idea where you are. Yeah, that's true. Oh, I'm in the other side of the universe. Yeah, it looks like I'm still going to miss lunch. Yeah, and I still can't tell anybody. Exactly. But a more exciting possibility is to use sort of a generic wormhole, a wormhole that doesn't require a black hole.

A wormhole most generically is just a connection between two points in space. Let's say these two points are effectively next to each other. If you're in one spot, you can just sort of step to the next one. And these two points in space don't have to be like normally near each other. You can have this point in our solar system, just be connected to that point in another solar system. We don't know how to build a wormhole like that, but theoretically they are possible. We think they can exist. So the idea is maybe you're inside a black hole.

You somehow make this kind of wormhole appear so you can just sort of like step through it and appear on the other side of the wormhole. I see. So you're saying that not all. warm holes happen at the center of black holes. Like, theoretically, I could have a warm hole right next to me right here and not die. But it would just be this weird arrangement where, like, I stick my hand in to the warm hole and it's connected to, you know, another point in space where you'd see my hand sticking out. It sounds like totally bonkers science fiction, but it's a solution to Einstein's

equations. And again, we don't know how to make it happen. Keeping one open also requires negative energy density matter, which, again, may not exist. But if it did, then the wormhole itself is not inconsistent with the rules of general relativity. And recently, there's been some progress in understanding black holes that suggests that this might really be possible. Interesting. So, okay, so maybe step me through the solution here. You're saying that I would maybe, if I'm able to create the warm holes, I would make create one that starts here next to me. And, and the other side of the wormhole is like maybe just

inside the event horizon of a black hole. Is that what you're saying? Like, so I stick my hand in and my hand would be inside of a black hole but I'm able to pull it out. Yeah, so you stick your hand in and you have your phone inside the black hole. You take a bunch of pictures, you pull it back out, you have pictures from the inside of a black hole. Right. They're all black obviously.

I don't think my phone has any kind of special graviton detecting sensors. Oh, that's coming out in the next Apple iPhone, I think. Oh, I see. I think the Samsung ones already have it. There's an app for that. Yeah, they just keep sticking more and more

cameras in the back of your phone. Now, that sounds like crazy science fiction, and it probably is because we don't know how to build a wormhole. We don't know how to make that happen to say, I want a wormhole from here to the center of that black hole. But in principle, there's nothing preventing us, except that we don't know how to do it. However, recently we talked about whether maybe information can leak out of a black hole, whether maybe like there's a quantum entanglement between the hawking radiation generated the event horizon and the stuff that fell into the black hole a long time ago. And theorists now think that that quantum entanglement might be accomplished by

wormholes, that there might effectively be information wormholes that connect the inside and the outside of black holes. And so potentially if you're inside a black hole, there are already these wormholes you need to get information out. Other theorists think that this is complete and utter nonsense. Wait, what? You're saying that maybe wormholes are like maybe black holes already have wormholes in them? that hawking radiation, this faint, these faint emission of particles at the edge of black holes might be leaking out information that fell into the black hole. Remember the black hole information paradox is information can't be deleted from the universe, but stuff falls into a black

hole and then it evaporates where that information go. Recently people think, oh, probably that information is encoded in the hawking radiation that was emitted, which means they must be somehow quantum entangled and they suspect that's done with wormholes. So, we think that nature maybe already has wormholes from the inside to the outside of black holes so that that information can leak out before the black hole disappears. Other theorists think that this is complete and utter nonsense. So you might not be able to stick your hand inside a black hole, but you might be able to like transform it into information, send it inside the black hole and then send it back

somehow, like some sort of weird wormhole based information teleportation. Right. But I guess wouldn't, aren't these hawking radiation, you know, isn't it sort of like random on the surface of a black hole? It's not like there's a hole in the black hole where stuff is radiating. It's like it sort of happens randomly all over the black hole. Well, that's what Hawking thought. Hawking thought that the radiation was random. That it didn't reveal anything about what happened inside the black hole. It was only dependent on the black hole's mass and temperature. But these recent developments suggest that it might not be random, that it might actually be indicating information about what's inside the black hole. the black hole. But it's all very exploratory and none of that is final. It's like maybe theoretically possible. I'd say two maybes, maybe. But even if it is possible, it's not something you could use to get out of the black hole, right? Like it maybe allows information to come out, but like sticking a whole Daniel through it might not be possible. But what am I other than information, right? If you could tear me apart, read all my quantum information, send that information outside the black hole, reassemble me. That would be me getting out of a black hole. Well, but

But you would still be in the black hole. Like that version of you is still stuck in there. We just get a fresh copy of you. No, because when you read the quantum information of something, it destroys it. That's the no cloning theorem that says you can read and transmit quantum information, but doing so destroys the original. So it'd be sort of like beaming out of a black hole. And so then there's a philosophical question about whether the original you was killed

and the new you is actually you or not. but your information will have been teleported out of the black hole. Whoa, that's wild. But again, that's assuming you can somehow control this hawking radiation. And we don't even know if it happens like, you can establish like a channel for it, right? Like it could just be happening all over the black hole. Yeah, and nobody even seen hawking radiation. So this is like beyond theoretical.

This is speculation on speculation to the speculation squared. I see. But I guess even if you warm hole into a black hole, wouldn't you get destroyed at some point? Or would you say you sort of warm hole to a point inside the black hole where you can still survive? Yeah, really big black holes. You can survive near the event horizon without getting pulled apart by the tidal forces. So that is potentially possible. Although whether you could assemble the delicate machinery you need to read your entire quantum state and teleport it back out of the black hole, yeah, that seems like a stretch.

Oh, you just poke the hole in the hole of the hole of the loophole. Holy cow. Holy Moli. Holy Dwayne Johnson. All right. Well, it sounds like maybe there is a way to get out of a black hole. You know, maybe it won't be through a war drive. Although, if we figure out negative energy and how to make it, it might be possible.

And it might be possible through a warm hole, although it's going to be pretty hard. And we have no idea how to do it. It's going to be tricky. But it might be that getting information or people or phones out of black hole, moves from the category of totally impossible to really impractical. We don't see how this is going to happen, but maybe in a thousand years. Which is a big step forward. Very special thanks to Barak Shoshini, who consulted on this episode.

Any inaccuracies in the physics are our responsibility, not his. Yeah. And then we'll take a big step back when all the physicists say, well, but that's not a black hole, then you can get something out of it. It stops being a black hole if you can get anything out of it. That's right. That's the most annoying answer possible. Actually, there's a loophole.

Well, actually, your loophole means it's not a black hole. But then if there's a loophole, then it's not a loophole anymore. That's right. I'm going to escape that loophole. I don't even know what I just said. All right. Well, something to think about. And maybe there's hope for those of us who plan to go into a black hole in the future.

Or for those of us who just desperately want to know what is the fundamental nature of space and time. Very special thanks to Barak Shoshini, who consulted on this episode, With any inaccuracies in the physics are our responsibility, not his. How does this universe actually work at the lowest level? What really is the fabric of reality? The answer is waiting for us inside a black hole. Yeah, just make sure you have a good getaway car. And the latest phone.

Thanks for joining us. Hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort.

Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious. One in 10 kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure, like yourself. Not the seriously no-it-all sports dad, or the seriously smart podcaster? It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously. The best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit talk about vaping.org.

Brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. The U.S. Open is here and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain. I'm breaking down the players, the predictions, the pressure. And of course, the honey deuses, the signature cocktail of the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open has gotten to be a very wonderfully experiential sporting event. To hear this and more, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an IHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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