Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How do you spot a wormhole?

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Daniel and Jorge ask if it's possible to tell if there's a wormhole nearby Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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universef aq.com. Thanks for your support. And if you have a hamster that can read, please let us know. We'd love to have them on the podcast. I do like to bungee jump. But is there a safety equipment here involved? Do I get to wear a helmet and have some liability insurance? Oh, no. There are absolutely no guarantees.

Just you and a wormhole. Are you going to take the jump? Just me and the wormhole and not even close? Am I wearing clothes? All right. I'll give you a space suit. All right. Well, that's a tough question, you know?

I mean, on the one hand, there could be something amazing on the other side. Exactly. On the other hand, I could, you know, be shredded to bits before I even go in. Or maybe the thing will collapse while I'm going through it. Or maybe it'll, I don't know, take me to a black hole. All right, well, you're standing on the edge. Time to make your decision. Are you going in?

I think I'll be polite and let the physicists go in first. After you, Daniel. Physicists are the scientists, not the subjects. Well, you can multitask. Then you can be the first to study it. Sending my paper from within the wormhole. You can have a loophole within the wormhole. 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 at UC Irvine, and I've never written a paper from inside a wormhole. Interesting. What holes have you written papers from inside of? Sometimes my office feels like a black hole. I'm stuck here. I can't actually get out. Oh, no information comes in. Grad students go in, nothing comes out. Undergrads come in, but they do escape and usually with actually more information than they came in. So maybe my office is actually a white hole. Yeah, maybe you're just admitting hawking radiation or hawking graduate students. White's in radiation, right?

Daniel teaches physics. It is a white hole because you're a white son. You're a son of white. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of iHeart radio. In which we emit all kinds of crazy radiation from our brains into yours. We try to boil down everything in the universe and, Explain what we know and what we don't know to you because the universe presents enormous cosmic, amazing mysteries that are just fun to think about, fun to explore, fun to wonder about. And that's what we do with this podcast is that we marinate in the joy of our cluelessness and the small amount of knowledge that we do have about the universe and share all of it with you.

Yeah, it is a wondrous universe and we like to dive in and take a journey and try to worm all of this information and knowledge into your ears and into your brain. You could say we are creating an informational wormhole from our brains to yours. Yeah, we're connecting all of these brains across the planet together in a way, right? Through electromagnetic radiation. Absolutely. And, you know, that's mostly a joke, but there are people out there who say that every bit of quantum entanglement, every bit of quantum interaction is actually a mini wormhole between particles. And so while we joke about it, it could technically actually be true that we are creating wormholes from our brains to our listeners. Yeah.

And so the universe has been surprising ever since we started studying it with interesting and incredible things like black holes and quasars and neutron stars. And so people and scientists wonder if there are more interesting kinds of things we still haven't seen out there. We know there are things out there we haven't seen. Every time we turn on a new kind of eyeball, look out in the universe with a new telescope, we find things out there that we never expected. So the story of the universe is one of constant surprise, of constantly going beyond the edge of our imagination. and shocking us with the crazy things that reality has waiting for us. Yeah, we are eager to discover these crazy surprises. And one of the things that might be out there that are pretty interesting

and could actually solve a lot of problems is this concept of a wormhole. Oh, yeah. What kind of problems could wormhole solve? Like vacuum cleaners? Well, you know, it could fertilize our space compost. That's what warbs do and they could feed the space birds. That brings up an interesting question because in compost piles it's mostly the worm castings to use the polite phrase that fertilize the ground. And so are you suggesting that wormholes

also like have some sort of product? Yeah. If you come out the other end of a wormhole, you are technically wormhole poop. You're transformed into something and nourishing now to fertilize the rest of space. And you probably have been scrambled. And so you are there for universe compost. I guess you could say that actually we are all made out of stars that have been composted, right, to allow for re-fertilization. And so we are all made out of of star compost. I think we're pushing now the analogy. But the idea is that there might be warm holes out there.

And, you know, I guess the problems I was thinking about was space travel, you know, like how are we ever going to get to another galaxy that's millions of light years away or even just to the other side of our galaxy, which is hundreds of thousands of light years away? Like even if you went at the speed of light, which is impossible, it would still take 400,000 years to get to the other side. Yeah, space is impossibly vast in the speed of light, though it seems fast. is actually slow compared to the distances involved. So you're right, actually getting around this incredible universe would require millions of years.

And so if we could somehow connect places in space from here to there, so the distances between them were shorter than we originally thought we could drive through a loophole using wormholes to get there. And so indeed, it would be exciting if wormholes were there. But on the other hand, it might be dangerous. It would mean that other places in the universe could come to find us more rapidly. What if we just don't answer the door, you know, or pinch the wormhole on our end? Yeah, I don't know that wormholes have doors or locks on them, right?

We can't just like, somebody's ringing the doorbell on the other side. You can't just like, you know, not answer it. Well, in movies and science fiction movies, they use wormholes a lot, I feel, especially recently, right? Because I feel like they don't use warp drives anymore. No, they use warm holes. And it always looks like a giant ring that opens up some kind of like energy door. And then you go through the door and you appear on the other side in another part of the galaxy. It's like Stargate or something.

Yeah, Stargate. That was the original wormhole, right? And they're all over the place in Rick and Morty. If you watch that show, it's like wormhole bonanza. Man, so they're used a lot, and they seem pretty simple on TV and on the movie screen, right? You just kind of walk through them. Yeah, you can look through them. You can toss stuff through them.

They seem to just sort of like connect to places in space and in time. And often they're like not surrounded by anything, you know, they're just there. Or maybe they have like a small mechanical frame for whatever device is creating them. So, yeah, they're pretty simple stuff. And so that would solve a lot of problems in terms of space travel and galactic travel and universe travel. But I guess the question is, do they really exist? And if they did, could we make one or find one at all? Right.

It's a fun question. Like, what if there are wormholes all over the universe? What if they exist naturally? Would we even know? Would it be possible? Could there be one floating around in our solar system? How could we even tell? So today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question.

How do you spot a wormhole? How do you find a spot in a wormhole or how do you find a spot in a wormhole? No, it's more like you're driving down the freeway and you're looking for an exit, you know, so you're like, where's my exit? So now you're like, I've got to get to Alpha Centauri. Where's the nearest subway station in Manhattan or something? You got to look for the little sign that tells you there steps down. Just follow the rats.

So the question is, how do you find a wormhole, especially, I guess, Even more difficult is how do you find a wormhole that takes you where you want to go? Yeah, that is a good question. I think let's start with like finding wormholes at all. And then we'll talk about planning trips and, you know, bringing lunch. Yeah, well, I kind of want to know where I'm going first, Daniel. You mean we're just going to jump into this podcast without knowing where we're going? That's another really funny question.

But, you know, look, we'll pack enough snacks. So we'll be fine no matter where we end up. All right, that's good. So anyways, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there maybe had an idea about how to find. a wormhole or had heard of an idea about how to find one. So Daniel went out there into the internet to ask people, could we ever detect a nearby wormhole? And so

in the depths of these strange times, I'm very grateful to everybody who's answering questions online and participating in the podcast. We are soon opening up campus here at UC Irvine. So I'll be walking around campus asking people in person. But if you'd like to participate online, you are still very welcome. Just write to me to questions at Danielanehorpe.com.

So think about it for a second. If you are looking for a wormhole, how would you find it? Here's what people had to say. Probably it's emitting some kind of radiation. If it's a wormhole, it's probably emitting some kind of light and maybe if it's interacting

with other very massive things than some gravitational radiation. What is lately a lot of movies showing UFOs and looks like the Navy, said, they confirmed that they are UFOs, they know, don't know what they are. Probably somebody came through a wormhole and forgot to close it. Well, technically, there's no way to know.

Well, unless you're on Earth and you have a very tiny black hole, which would take you. If outside this window, there was a wormhole. How would you know there was a wormhole over there? Well, all you have to do is open the window and watch. That's true. I do not think we could detect a nearby wormhole. Hmm, interesting question. I don't know if we could be able to detect a wormhole

because I don't even know if they emit any light or radiation. So I actually think if there were a wormhole nearby, that we probably wouldn't be able to detect it unless maybe we were super close and could observe some of the effects. directly? I'm not sure we wouldn't be able to detect it, but we might be able to observe it. For instance, if there was a new group of stars or a new constellation of stars that we've not seen before, maybe that could lead to the discovery of a wormhole. I think one possible way to do it is to basically shoot a beam of light and kind of measure

how far it goes into that wormhole. But actually thinking about it again, maybe a better response would be if we could detect the gravity coming from that location that we think that our own hole is there. Probably, I think, is the best response here. Well, I guess yes.

We would see the gravitational distortion. If there's something behind it, a cluster of stars or something, then we would see a sort of lensing effect. Yeah, if it collides with something big than like another wormhole. I guess we could have gravitational waves to see them, but I guess that's it.

All right. A lot of polarized questions. People are like, yes. Some people are like, no, impossible. Nobody said like, maybe, maybe? I don't know. There seem to be a lot of confidence here. Yeah, some people are skeptical

that wormholes could even exist in our universe. Right, right. And we have a whole podcast about what a wormhole is, right? Absolutely, we do. We talked about the science of it. We have another podcast about white holes and lots of podcast about black holes and all these fun concepts. Which holes haven't we talked about? Ooh, so many holes that we should never talk about.

Yeah, this is not that kind of podcast. We're not explaining that kind of universe. No, we've done the white, the black, the worm. There are no gray holes in physics as far as I'm aware. Blue holes, red holes. Somebody's got to come up with a theory of blue holes and red holes. You should just go with that, you know, do it the other way around. Start with a cool name and then form a physics.

theory around it. What do you mean? Start the other way around. That's how they usually start, man. People are like, super symmetry. Is that a thing? Let's make that a thing. That sounds cool.

That sounds cool. Let's devote my life to it. And for example, Higgs obviously had a name before he had a particle, right? So he's like, I'm going to invent the Higgs boson, whatever it is. Interesting. He knew when he was little that he was going to discover a particle. No, that story is totally bunk. He was not such an immodest person. He didn't name it to Higgs boson.

Somebody else coined that phrase later in the literature. So I do not mean to malign Peter Higgs. I see. Well, in your case, you should just study white holes because your name is Whiteson. So it could be the Whiteson white hole. No, I want to discover a particle and call it the Whiteson. Oh, there you go. So I already got my name picked out.

I just haven't found any particles yet. But then you're going to have anti-whitesons. Isn't that you? Aren't you an anti-whiteson? I'm not an anti-whiteson. A supersymmetry version? Yeah, I'm a swight son. There you go.

I'm a super symmetric white son. I'm like the other side of the coin. There you go. Together, we complete the universe. But I think we should recap today what a wormhole is because there might be people out there who didn't listen to that podcast episode. So I guess for our listeners, Daniel,

how would you explain what a wormhole is? Yeah, and I agree. It's important before we talk about how we find it. We talk about what exactly it is because understanding what it is and what it does is going to be crucial for figuring out how to see it. So the simplest way to think about a wormhole is just a connection between two points in space time. And, you know, we're used to stuff being connected, but usually those connections are simple.

Like you are in one point in space. You're connected to the points in space around you, meaning you can get to them. From here, you can go forwards, you can go backwards, you can go up, you can go down. You're like connected to the nearby points in space time. And so now imagine if instead of just being connected to things that are around you, you're somehow also connected to something which otherwise is very, very far away. These are like non-trivial connections. Instead

of space time just being like a nice mesh where everything is just connected to the things right next to it, instead you have these weird shortcuts where one point in space is connected to something which is otherwise very, very far away. Right. That's a pretty mind-blowing concept and a lot of people use this analogy

of living in a role of toilet paper, right? Like if our universe is sort of like if you imagine it to be like a sheet of paper, if you bring it down to two dimensions, like we're living on a sheet. And then what happens if you bend the sheet and make two points touch each other that are on paper far away from each other? Yeah, well, you just came up with another hole theory. This is Jorge's toilet hole theory of the universe. Yeah, no. I definitely have it on my bucket list to invent any toilet. And these are helpful analogies,

but they can also be a little bit misleading. That analogy is helpful because it makes you think about how points in space that are far away can be close together if you think in another dimension. Like you have a sheet of paper and you have two points in space that are far apart. Now fold that paper so those two points are close together. The thing that's misleading or confusing is that the connection is now in some third dimension. You're like folding this 2D sheet of paper in a third dimension, bringing it closer in that third dimension. The difference is that our space time doesn't fold in some higher dimension.

These connections we're talking about are intrinsic, not external. in some higher dimension. And so when we say this point in space is nearby, another point in space, we really just mean that the distance between these two points is now small. It's just the same way that like the bending of space time is intrinsic. It's not external. You know, we have these analogies where somebody puts a bowling ball on a rubber sheet to show you like the bending of space.

And again, it shows you the rubber sheet bending, but it's bending in some external third dimension. What really happens when you have a mass in space is that space bends in, intrinsically. It just changes the relative distance between points. There's no like super space in which space is hanging out in and bending in that other dimension. And so here for wormholes, it's helpful, you know, maybe to practice thinking in a higher dimension, but really this bending happens just in our own dimensions. It's just an internal intrinsic bending, a changing of the relative distances between two points in space. Right. Well, I feel like these analogies with the toilet paper

and the sheet of paper that bends, it just kind of kind of helps you make sense of it, right? Because otherwise, it just kind of feels like magic. Like, you're telling me, like, space is the same and it's not bent like a sheet of paper. It's just the way it is. But somehow magically, my pointer on the right is somehow connected to Alpha Centauri. Do you know what I mean? Like, it feels like magic. It feels like magic. But that's because space is different from what you imagine. Space can do things like that. Like, it can change the distance between points. That's what space bending is. Space can also ripple and it can expand. So it feels like magic because it's

counterintuitive, but space can do things that are not intuitive, that are new and weird to us because we only recently have a sense for what space is. Are you saying then that, you know, maybe this point on my right here is bent so much that it actually touches another point in Alpha Centauri? I'm saying that space can do things like bend, which change the relative distance between points, so that photon, for example, appears to curve when it goes near a planet, but also space can be connected in non-trivial ways, that the connection space can have are not just like a big mesh where everything is connected only to the things next to it,

but these connections can be weird and non-trivial. General relativity, which tells us the rules for how space works and what the curvature is, says that that kind of connection, that kind of shape, right? Not just like the curvature, but the shape of space is allowed to have these weird connections. Interesting. Theoretically, I guess.

Like there's nothing in the theories that says that they can't be connected in this way through wormholes, but it's not. something we see every day, right? Exactly. It's not something we've ever seen. These are only theoretical. But you know, theoretical explorations of general relativity are really interesting and very fruitful. That's how we discovered the idea of a black hole, that people were looking at the equations and said, you know, if these equations are true, if these are the ones that tell us what space can do, then they allow space to do this really, really weird thing, like accumulating a huge

amount of mass and having an event horizon. So that's where the concept of a black hole came from, from these theoretical explorations of what can space do? So it's a very fruitful way to explore like the physics of the possible universe. Right, except that on our last episode, you kind of convinced me that black holes don't exist. So now I don't believe anything you say. Now I convinced you that black holes might not exist in our universe, but they definitely exist in the universe of general relativity.

We just don't know if that actually is our universe. I see. There's a loophole here. There's another hole. Another hole within the hole. Is that loophole going to take you to the toilet hole or the white hole or the wormhole? Hopefully a hole we can get out of. I know, but you have to listen to the whole episode to find out.

Nice. Right. And also, wormholes are pretty interesting because they can not just connect points in space that are far apart. They can also connect points in time. Yes, exactly. These are constructs in space time, right? Where we're imagining space as three of the dimensions of a four-dimensional object called space time, where time is the fourth dimension.

mention. And we know that relativity is this theory about how events in space time are connected, you know, how information propagates through space. It takes time to do so. And so wormholes connect points in space time, which technically means that one end of the wormhole might be at a different time than the other end of the wormhole. Wow, that's mind blowing. And that's sort of like one way you could make time travel possible, right, without generating any paradoxes. Like if you have a wormhole that takes you to another point in time, you could travel in time and go back and or forward. There are people out there who think that time traveling wormholes might actually be a possibility. Of course, they do potentially lead to paradoxes. So it's confusing. And it's sort of

like this conflict in the theory itself. So it's not something we know exactly how to resolve. If you found a wormhole and it lets you go back in time, then we would have lots of questions about why there aren't paradoxes or maybe we would create paradoxes and destroy the universe. So, hey, think twice before jumping in. Right. It's a whole rabbit hole. And we won't get into today. But I guess the big question is, are they real? And if they are real, could we ever find them? So let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break.

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All right, we're talking about wormholes and how to find a wormhole. We think they might exist. The question, though, is will we ever find one or could we ever find one or how do you even look for a wormhole? So, Daniel, we talked about what they are generally, that they're theoretical, they're theoretically allowed, but we have an absurd. of them. And the other interesting thing about them is that they're sort of related to something called a white hole. Yeah. So there's a whole family of related topics here. And there's a few different ways to think about these things. You know, there are wormholes that are just wormholes, just connections between points in space that in theory you might be able to go through in both

directions. And then there are also separately other things where you have a black hole on one side and a white hole on the other side. And those two are connected by a wormhole. So the things that fall into the black hole might be emitted out the white hole on the other side. That would be one directional because you can't go into a white hole the same way you can't escape a black hole. And then there are pairs of black holes where people think maybe the singularities at the hearts of these two black holes are connected by a wormhole also. So there's a whole variety of different kinds of wormholes that you can imagine in theoretical

physics. So you can have a wormhole without a black hole or a white hole. In theory you can. It requires something sort of. special. Like to make this connection between two points in space, you need some kind of weird matter. Like, remember the way general relativity works is it says if you have a configuration of matter and energy, it will tell you how space bends. Now, if you want space to bend in a certain way, general relativity doesn't necessarily tell you like what mass and energy configuration you

need to make in order for that to happen. But people have figured out a few solutions. And one solution for just a normal vanilla wormhole all by itself in space requires something that we don't know if it exists in the universe. It requires having something with negative mass, like particles that don't have mass like you and I, but have negative mass. This is called exotic matter. And you need those to create this connection and to keep it open, to keep it from collapsing. I see. So to make a wormhole, like it's not just like a magic reconnection of space or magic like, I don't know, rewiring of space. It's like you really have to bend the space. that we have in order for these two faraway points to bend so much that they actually touch each other.

Yeah, and you need some weird kind of matter to keep that connection there for space to not just like snap back to where it was before. You need some weird kind of matter that has a property we've never seen before that it's like repulsive gravity. You know, like everything that we've seen has mass and gravity is always attractive. It pulls things towards itself. You never see gravity pushing things away. And so here you'd create this wormhole and then you'd need to put something in it.

to keep the wormhole from collapsing, which normally would just, like, fall apart and snap back to where it was. Here, to keep that tunnel, to keep that tube that connects the two points in space open, you need to put something in there that repels space, that pushes it away. So that would be like some sort of negative mass object,

like a particle with negative mass. But I guess how would this even work? Like, I'm here, and I gather a bunch of this imaginary mass that we haven't discovered yet. And then I want to connect a wormhole to Alpha Centauri. Is someone in Alpha Centauri need to also be doing that and then somehow we connect somehow? Or do I, you know, build up this massive with negative mass? And then somehow that opens a portal into to Alpha Centauri.

Like what's the instruction manual here, Daniel? As far as I know, there is no instruction manual. All we have is if there were a wormhole, how would you keep it open? There's no recipe for like, how do you go from a universe without a wormhole to a universe with a wormhole, step-by-step instructions for your favorite cartoonist slash engineer that we do not have you know and that's a whole other question you know like you might discover okay here's a solution that lets two black holes orbit each other cool how do i make two black holes and get them into orbit is a totally separate problem so what we've done is we figured out you know can this solution happen is it theoretically possible to do we haven't figured out at all like how to actually assemble that in our universe yeah i guess that would be the the trick right that would be the most interesting part is how do you control these wormholes. Exactly. And so adding to our instruction manual

for supervillains, we do not yet have a recipe for supervillains out there who want to create a portal between here and the sun, for example, and, you know, channel super hot plasma as a weapon. I was just saying for you physicists, but if you want to equate physicists to supervillains, go ahead. We are the lackeys of

supervillains. You know, we are creating tools they use to destroy the world. You're the minions. Exactly. Do you wear overalls also and monocles? Only in the lab. Only in the lab. I guess what you're saying is we don't know how to make a wormhole.

But the question I guess we're tackling today is that if there are wormholes out there, how would we even find them? All right. So then how do we detect a wormhole? Well, it depends on the kind of wormhole we're talking about. Let's talk about first the simplest kind of wormhole, which is just like a connection between two points in space. These things would not be that easy to see because there's nothing like around them necessarily.

They're just like a connection between here and there. So they're not like directly visible. They're just like this fold in space. So you would have to see them only because you see something like go in or something come out. Or you see like the distortion they have on things behind them. Right. Sort of like can you see a transparent lens? The material itself is invisible, but it has an effect on the light going through it.

Then you can tell something is there without directly seeing it. Right. And the other problem is that they might be super small. small, right? The theory doesn't predict giant wormholes. It predicts tiny little wormholes. The theory allows for its super tiny wormholes like 10 to the minus 35 meters, you know, plank scale size wormholes. But it also allows for larger wormholes that potentially you could even send a person through. Okay, now we're cooking. But you're saying they wouldn't be easy to see because it's sort of like, how do you see a hole in space, right? Like it would just

sort of look like if you put a TV out in space with a with a picture of more stars, it would be hard to tell it's there. Yeah. And so what you'd need to do is see some sort of inconsistency, right? Like if you had a TV out in space with an image of stars on it and you changed your angle, then the image would no longer be appropriate. Or if the stars behind it were moving and the image didn't catch up, then you would see this like inconsistency between the image you're looking at and what's in the background. And that's what you'd need to spot a wormhole because wormhole would in theory be sending you light and information from a different part of the universe. And so as you look at the wormhole, you're looking at stars whose light has come through the wormhole.

So you're looking at another part of the universe. So you need to somehow identify the boundary, right, to know that the stars you're looking at in the center are in the other part of the universe connected by the wormhole. And the stars outside this circle are, you know, in your local neighborhood and to see like a discontinuity. But I think what you're saying is that a wormhole wouldn't have any substance to it, right? Like they wouldn't, you know, be bumping into things or wouldn't be exerting gravity on the things around it. We'd just have to look for, like you said, some kind of inconsistency or maybe

see like a row of space tourist trying to get into it. Yeah, a pure wormhole. It's not like part of a black hole white hole system or connected to black holes in any other way would have no strong gravitational effects. So, you know, like black holes also technically invisible. You can't see them directly, but you can spot them because they suck stuff up and they have these accretion disks of matter glowing red hot from the friction and the crazy intense gravity. Wormholes don't have that they don't necessarily have any strong gravity around them they're not slurping stuff up and so there are no accretion disks to identify so it's just sort of like seeing a very clear lens out in space distorting things yeah or space tourists that's another great way coming out of the subway

yeah you can see all the space rats scurring in do you think space rats eat space pizza well uh if there are no space worms maybe but i guess would a wormhole glow you know and the movies the wormholes always glow. They look like glowing, you know, circles or something. Would a wormhole, because of this magic energy with negative mass, would somehow glow or emit radiation? We don't think so. We don't think the pure wormholes would emit any radiation.

A wormhole that's part of a black hole, white hole system, then yeah, it would look just like a black hole on one side. And so you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell it's a wormhole. But it would look just like a black hole. And black holes do emit a lot of radiation. Again, because of the stuff that's around the black hole, the intensely high temperature gas that's emitting a lot of light. And so we see black holes throughout the universe. They are called quasars because they emit this crazy radiation.

But the pure wormhole wouldn't emit any radiation necessarily. But a wormhole that's part of a black hole system might. Right. What about one that is part of a white hole black hole system? Wouldn't we see stuff coming out of the white hole, like constantly? Like we'd have to wonder where all this energy is coming from. Yeah. If you see a white hole, then you're basically.

particularly already seeing a wormhole because a white hole doesn't just like generate random stuff. It emits stuff that came through the black hole side. And so it's a black hole, wormhole, white hole situation. So if you see a white hole, then you're also discovering a wormhole because it's a connection between those two points in space connected by the singularity at the heart of the black hole and this weird heart of the white hole. But remember, white holes, we don't even know if those actually exist. They're a very fuzzy theoretical object.

People aren't even sure, you know, what to make of them in the theoretical. I see. So all white holes are wormholes, but not all wormholes are white holes. That's right. Yeah, exactly. The taxonomy of holes, holonomy. It's the holy trinity. Or I guess we're doing holography. Yeah, and that's the whole truth. All right, so then what's another way that we could detect a wormhole? Do they like bend space time in a particular way that we could maybe see evidence of? People think that it might be possible. And I was reading this crazy paper where somebody was suggesting an experiment to detect wormholes because you're right. the wormholes, they do bend space, right? In order to connect space here with space somewhere else, you're talking about space being bent. And space can never be discontinuous. You can't just have like a boundary where space is doing one thing here and then something totally different on the

other side of it. Space is always smooth, right? So to have a connection between here and somewhere else, space has to be bending, which means it's going to be bending the most at the actual wormhole and then less and less as you go away. But it can't be like a kink there in space. And so people think that maybe you could detect wormholes by detecting this bending of space before you actually fall in. You don't have to go to the wormhole and throw something in. You could see that there's a wormhole nearby. It's like a nearby wormhole detector by measuring this bending of space. Interesting. There are no kinky wormholes, is what you're saying. Not on this podcast. That's right. This is the safer work. But you know, everything out there that has mass also

bend space, like the sun bend space and the earth bend space and you bend space. So in this paper, they talk about how to tell if the bending of space you're measuring is due to wormholes or due to just like the normal bending of space from everyday objects. Because I guess everyday objects would bend it due to gravity, but a wormhole would do bending it because of something totally different. Yeah, it has negative repulsive gravity inside it to keep it open. And so the shape of the bending would be a little bit different. And specifically, it would be different in a way that light passes through it a little bit differently. When light travels through space, it doesn't just wiggle. It also spins, right?

Light is actually a vector, for those of you, into the math of the electromagnetic field. There's this phase it has, and it can be like polarized in one way or polarized in another way or linearly polarized or whatever. There's this extra bit of information that light is always carrying with it. And so in this experiment, they think that if a wormhole is nearby, it would change how light propagates through that space. So what you need are like two satellites flying through space, shooting laser beams back and forth at each other, and constantly measuring those laser beams to see if the phase of the light has changed in a way that suggests that there's a wormhole nearby. Whoa.

And then these two satellites would have to scan the entire universe to find a wormhole, right? Well, they would be sensitive to wormholes nearby. And so it's sort of like your nose, right? You can sniff and tell like, hmm, somebody's eating a cinnamon roll. You can't necessarily tell where it is. And if you walk around and the smell gets stronger, you can tell you're getting closer. And if the smell gets weaker, you can tell you're getting closer. further. So this would operate the same way. They can sort of tell how close are you to a wormhole?

And then as they drift around, they can tell if they're getting closer or further. So yeah, they'd have to sort of like, you know, you'd have to send lots of these things out just floating out through space, hoping that one of them finds one and then you can sort of like zoom in on it. Would it bend space that much? Like would the radius, would the range of effect be so large that you could add this is actually feasible? Well, it depends on the size of the wormhole. Bigger wormholes, easier to find. Small wormholes, harder to find. Fortunately, we're interested in bigger wormholes,

but then again, we also think bigger wormholes, probably rarer. So, you know, this is a very exploratory idea, you know, a concept. Is it actually practical? Should somebody spend these billions of dollars building these satellites and sending them out to space? No, but it's sort of theoretically showing that it might be possible to detect a nearby wormhole. Yeah, interesting. Did you just say physics is not practical? I just said physics is not practical.

Exactly. If you were looking to explore the universe and maybe have no impact on humanity, come join us. All right. So that's maybe one way that we could see a wormhole is through their effects on space, whether it's maybe emitting stuff, or maybe we can send satellites to go look for them. So let's get into whether or now we have seen any out there in space. Maybe we have or not. But first, let's take another quick break. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

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Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie. Monica Patton. Elaine Welter-a. I'm Jessica Voss.

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Hello, Puzzlers. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy truthers who say that you were given all the answers believe in... I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. Are there jeopardy truthers? Are there people who say that it was rigged?

Yeah, ever since I was first on, people are like, they gave you the answers, right? And then there's the other ones which are like, they gave you the answers and you still blew it. Don't miss Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings on our special game show week of The Puzzler podcast. The Puzzler is the best place to get your daily word puzzle fix. Listen on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The U.S. Open is here, and on my podcast, Good Game with Sarah Spain, I'm breaking down the players from rising stars to legends chasing history. the predictions, well, we see a first-time winner, and the pressure. Billy Jean King says pressure is a privilege, you know.

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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. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. All right, we're looking for wormholes, Daniel, because I guess we're eager to get to the other side of the galaxy somehow. And the question is, how do we find them? How do you spot them? How do you know you found one?

And we talked about a few ways that you could do that. But have we found any so far? We have not identified any wormholes. We have exactly zero positively identified wormholes on our list. And, you know, we don't even necessarily know that we've seen any black holes. if you listen to the last episode about Dark Stars, we're not even 100% sure about those. So it would be pretty amazing

if we had any wormholes on our list. I guess the question is, have we been looking for wormholes? I've been looking for wormholes. I thought you were looking also. Are you telling me this whole time you've been doing nothing? I was looking for other kinds of holes. Legal loopholes and, you know, holes in logic.

No, we have been, as a species, collectively, all been looking for wormholes, Not by sending out these crazy satellites, but by doing what we talked about earlier, looking for distortions in space. Because we're good at this. We could actually tell if there are invisible things floating in space, distorting the path of light. This is one way, for example, we know that dark matter is out there. Dark matter, some invisible kind of matter that has gravity. And so changes the curvature of space and bends light as it passes through.

So even though dark matter itself is invisible, we can see its effect on light. by seeing this gravitational lensing. And so we've done something similar for looking for wormholes. We've asked if there was a wormhole between us and this very bright quasar out there, what impact would it have on that light? How would it look different? And then let's look to see if we can find any quasars that are distorted in just that way. Interesting.

So there are physicists out there, like, whose portfolio include looking for wormholes. It's not just like we're looking for weird things out there. It's like they're actually hunting them. They're actually hunting them. There's a fun paper from an astronomical survey, the LSST, that very specifically did this. You know, they have a huge data set of looking at big patches of the sky for a long time. And so they can look through that data set and ask like, are there any objects in here, which look like they've been distorted by wormholes? And so that's very helpful.

If you can come up with a specific prediction, you say a wormhole would look like this. It would distort the light from this galaxy in this way. Then you can hunt for that signature in the sky. Interesting. So you said that they do that by looking at quasars. They've looked at 50,000 quasars. And they looked at to see if the light from those quasars is somehow distorted in a special way that only a wormhole might distort it. Yeah, because remember, wormholes have this negative mass. And so they have a different kind of curvature of space than, for example, dark matter or something else. So we see lots of distortion out there in the sky due to dark matter and other things which distort space in one way. But wormholes would have a very distinctive. signature and how they bend space. And you're right, they look through this catalog of 50,000 quasars, which is mind-blowing already because that means that's 50,000 galaxies, each with a super

massive black hole at its center, sending us an incredible beam of light across billions and billions of light years, right? Like, just imagine, hold that picture in your mind for a moment of like the earth being pinioned by these beams of light coming from all over the universe. And now we're asking whether those beams of light have been like tweaked in any tiny little way, so there might be a wormhole along that line between us and one of those distant quasars. Interesting. So I guess how do we expect the light to be different if it had gone through or near a wormhole on its way here? Like, you know, if it goes through negative mass, does it get lighter? Does light get lighter? Well, you know, if it goes through dark matter, then it gets sort of

like focused, like dark matter acts like a lens and it can make very specific distortions. And so we have these codes that allow us to do calculations. It's not something we can write down with pencil and paper because general relativity is so complicated. But we have these computer codes that allows to do calculations and predict what pattern it would have. You know, just the same way you can say, if I shine a light through a concave lens, it's going to make one image. Well, if you shine a light through a convex lens, it's going to make a totally different image. And so that's sort of the same relationship between what dark matter and a wormhole would do to a quasar. It would definitely have a different pattern.

It doesn't just like bend the light out and spread it out. It also twists it in a weird way because, as we said before, it changes the electromagnetic phase of the light. So is that what we're looking for? We're looking for changes in the light itself or also, in addition to that, we're looking for this lensing effect. Yeah, we're looking for both. But this survey in particular was mostly looking for these lensing effects.

All right. So then we haven't seen any wormholes, even though we've looked at 50,000 quasars. But I guess that doesn't mean that there aren't out there, right? That doesn't mean they're not out there. It means that we didn't see any, right? And you can't prove a negative because there could be just one and just didn't happen to cross this meme from a quasar to Earth. So it's certainly possible that they're still out there.

Or there could be lots of them and they just didn't cross these beams. What you can do when you don't see one is you can set a limit on how many there could be. You could say, well, if wormholes were everywhere, we would have seen them. So what we can do is rule out the universe being like totally jam packed with wormholes. And that's not nothing, right? That is definitely information. It means that if there are wormholes out there, you have to explain why none of them have ever, like, tripped one of these, like, lasers between the quasar and us. Hmm.

I guess if this light is coming from another galaxy, isn't it mostly empty space between here and other galaxies? Like, did we expect to find wormholes in the middle of nowhere? We don't know where to expect to find wormholes. But yeah, it is mostly empty space between here and there. But it also passes through the galaxy, right? Like, our galaxy is fairly thick. And so for the light to get here from another galaxy, it has to pass. a significant fraction of the way through our galaxy as well.

So you really are exploring lots of different kinds of space when you look at quasars. All right, we haven't seen any, but there is sort of a theory, right? You were telling me about a black hole that might be really close to us. Yeah, if you saw the movie Contact, then, you know, in that movie Contact, there's this, like, network of wormholes that connect galaxies. And I think aren't they like at the center of the galaxy where the black hole, the center of the galaxy is actually an opening into a wormhole network? work that lets you go all around the universe? I don't remember the details in that movie well enough,

but there are people out there who are asking that question about the black hole at the center of our galaxy. They're wondering, it's a black hole, but is it also maybe a wormhole? At least the entrance to a wormhole, right? Because if it's a black hole, it can be the exit of a wormhole. Yeah, this is one very particular kind of idea where it might be a pair of black holes that have their singularities overlap, so they're connected by a wormhole. But the wormhole itself might be slightly bigger than the black holes. So the black holes are sort of like inside the wormhole, allowing some stuff to come out sort of sneaking around the black holes.

So this is a weird black hole wormhole combination idea. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think you just took a jump there. So you're saying that the black hole at the center of our galaxy might actually be two black holes. Yeah, the black hole, the center of our galaxy might be connected to another black hole somewhere else in the universe. And the two might be sort of like connected by this wormhole.

which is big enough to have the black holes connected, but also for other stuff to get through the wormhole without falling into the black hole. Oh, I see what you're saying. So this is the regular type of wormhole that doesn't start in a black hole. You're just saying that there might be a wormhole next to or sort of enveloping the black hole

at the center of our galaxy. This is like a mega wormhole. This would be a mega wormhole, exactly. This is like a dune size wormhole. And at its throat, right, its throat is larger than this black hole at the center of the Milky Way, but the black hole is like sitting at the mouth of the wormhole, but not completely blocking it.

So the wormhole is not totally inside the black hole. It's sort of like a basketball fits through a hoop, right? The basketball is smaller than the hoop. So now imagine, right, the black hole is like the basketball and the wormhole is like the basketball hoop. Interesting. And then just on the other side of the wormhole is maybe another black hole in another galaxy or somewhere else? Yeah, another black hole.

probably in another galaxy because these supermassive black holes tend to only form at the hearts of galaxies, but we don't know until we send our favorite cartoonist in. Right, or our favorite physicist. Or our least favorite cartoonist, either one. Yeah, let's take a vote. But this is a crazy idea, Daniel. Why would people think this is what's happening?

I don't know that anybody thinks it's what's happening, but some people wrote a paper asking, if this was what's happening, how could we figure it out? and sort of like trying to work out the mathematics of if you could tell if there was a wormhole there, which I think is really fun to think about, you know, like what are we capable of discovering

in the universe? If the universe was this way or that way, how could we tell the difference? It's a really fun mental exercise and so this paper is a little bit out there but I enjoyed reading it. It's like here's something that could be true because we just haven't seen that closely to the center of our galaxy. What if

there's a ginormous wormhole connecting our black hole to another black hole in another galaxy. Yeah, and it could just be a bunch of physicists, watch contact, and they had an argument afterwards about whether that could actually be possible, and somebody came up with this idea, they're like, wait, what if?

There's a black hole inside a big wormhole. And somebody else said, you know what? That might be true. I bet I could write a paper about it. You know, that's how watching science fiction and smoking banana peels leads to real progress in science. I wouldn't recommend that in general. Smoking anything sounds kind of dangerous.

But then what would the ramifications be? Like what would they be the consequences, right? That means that our galaxy is connected to another galaxy. So we could maybe travel to that other galaxy. Yeah, absolutely. If you could get close enough to this black hole without getting shredded, remember we talked about how big black holes are actually easier to get close to. People out there are aware that even if you're near a black hole without going inside it,

there's very, very strong gravity that could pull you apart because of the tidal forces, spaghettification. That's actually less of a concern near very big. black holes because their event horizons are so far from the core that the tidal forces actually aren't strong enough to tear you apart. So if it really is a wormhole surrounding these black holes, then yes, potentially we could send something through it and travel the galaxy. The question is, how could we figure out if there's a wormhole there without dropping somebody inside? Well, physicists aren't somebody, so, you know. But so what's the theory? There's a whole

bunch of negative mass at the center of our galaxy, creating a wormhole near our black hole. Somehow. And they don't have a theory for how this wormhole got formed or even what's holding it open. They're just presuming like, if there's a wormhole there, how could we tell? And so they played this mental game and they realized, well, you know, if there's a wormhole here, that means that information can pass through from that galaxy to our galaxy. Like, yeah, I can jump in and go to the other galaxy, but also things information can pass through the wormhole because the throat is larger than the black hole, right? And so to go from the other

galaxy to here, you just need to pass through the wormhole and like avoid the black holes. And that information is potentially including things like gravity. So if there's a black hole on the other side and there are stars orbiting that black hole, then as those stars orbit the black hole, we should be able to feel the gravitational pull of stars on the other side of the wormhole affecting things on this side. Whoa, yeah, I guess the wormhole is just connecting space, it would transmit gravity too, right? So if like you see the orbit of the stars around our black hole

somehow being kind of wobbly or skewed, maybe there's something sucking them through the wormhole. Yeah, and we happen to have a great way to test this because there's a star that passes very, very close to the black hole the center of our galaxy. It's called S2, and it whips around that black hole once every 16 years, and we're able to calculate its orbit very, very precisely. And so if it goes off orbit, if it's like skews or jitters a little bit, that might be evidence

that there's something tugging on it from the other side of the wormhole. That's wild. That sounds like a great scheme to get funding for 16 years. It's wild. It's also, you know, a fun theoretical idea, but experimentally might not be practical. Because in order to conclude that the star is being wiggled by something on the other side of this hyper, pathetical wormhole, you have to be able to account for everything else that might also be wiggling it on our side of the wormhole, which means you need to know the position and location

and velocity of every other gravitational object nearby. And that's a hard area to map out. It's very close to the center of the galaxy. There's a lot of gas and dust there. And so you need to like know everything else very, very precisely to conclude that something invisible through a wormhole is also tugging on this star. And even if it does wiggle, it would be wiggle like a super tiny amount, right? Yeah, exactly. We're talking like a millionth of a meter per second squared would be the change of the acceleration on this star from some stars on the other side of this wormhole.

So you need very, very precise measurements of this star and very precise measurements of everything else affecting this star. So it's not something we can do today. But it wouldn't, I guess, cost that much. You just have to look at the stars to see if it wiggles a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And that's the kind of thing we want to do anyway. We're studying these black holes and measuring the trajectory of stars

that go around it and asking all sorts of, of questions by numerical general relativity. So it's definitely something we want anyways. Detailed information about the path of stars around black holes. And even if there is a wormhole there, it's still pretty far away from here, right? Like, I probably would never be able to jump into it, even if I wanted to, because it's still like tens of thousands of light years away, right? Yeah, the center of the galaxy is not that close, which we should be grateful for,

because the center of the galaxy is not a very hospitable place. There's intense radiation from all the processes at the center of the galaxy. So we wouldn't be able to survive for very long, even just because of that radiation. So, yeah, not something to worry about. If aliens are passing through that wormhole, they're still really, really far away. And possibly getting shredded too, right? I mean, it's sort of hard to go around a couple of black holes. Yeah, well, I'm not an expert on alien biology, but I imagine it's possible for them to survive nearby these big black holes.

Because remember, big black holes are safer to be near than small black holes. All right. Well, I guess that sort of answers our question. How do you spot a wormhole? You look close at the distortions it makes to the rest of the universe because they would distort things in very specific ways. That's right. They're not going to jump out at you and advertise themselves.

But if they are out there, they will have subtle effects on the way light travels, the way particles move through space. And, you know, somebody might jump out of it and say, hey, help me out. I got questions about Earth. Hopefully it's a cartoonist and alien cartoonist because they're just more fun, you know? I see. So when we're sending people in, you want to throw in physicists,

but when aliens are sending people in, you're hoping they throw the kryptonists. Yes. Yes, because they're aliens, you know. Maybe on the alien planet, physicists are the most fun. Right, right, yeah. But then, you know, that's theoretically impossible, Dan.

I'm going to work on a theory to disprove that. Yeah, why not? If you can look for impossible wormholes, why not look for impossible physics humor? You've got to set your sides high in science. You could win that Nobel Prize in humor. All right. We hope you enjoyed that, and I guess the next time you look up at this guy, you have to wonder a little bit.

Are we looking maybe at a wormhole and is that star you're looking at? Maybe actually a star in the whole other part of the universe. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. like we're talking. You know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up. And you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race. All the Smoke featuring Michelle Obama. To hear this podcast and more, open your free IHeart Radio app. Search all the smoke and listen now.

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. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, right?

On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Volisha 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. From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Valicia's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. Listen to Culture raises us on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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