Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - How is general relativity wrong?

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Daniel and Jorge talk about why we think Einstein was wrong about the nature of the Universe.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Yeah, they would just publish the papers themselves. Or physicists never retire. Maybe only engineers are smart enough to never retire. We just radiate away. But do you read these emails or do you just, you know, send them to your tribut? No, I give each of them like 10 or 15 minutes, see maybe if they're on to something. Oh, wow, 10 to 15 minutes. That's a pretty good amount.

Do you do it because you think they might be right? Well, I believe in curiosity and maybe somebody out there does have a great idea. I mean, there's hearts in the right place, even if usually the details are wrong. So you do think they might be right. Well, they're definitely right that Einstein was wrong. It's just so happens that so are most of these engineers. Well, I guess it's wrong as Einstein is not a bad title. I mean, if he couldn't get it right, at least the engineers are trying.

Eventually, one of these engineers is going to figure it out. But what if they figure it out on like the 16th minute of their paper? Maybe you should double your efforts until you retire. There you go. That's going to retire me. Hi, I'm Horan May Cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I want to be around when we figure out how Einstein was wrong. But you don't want to be the one who figures it out? You just want to be around. I just want to cling on to my tenured position for long enough to be here for the party when somebody else figures it out.

Now, I'd love to figure it out myself. I'm just not that egotistical. Do you think there'll be a big party when they prove Einstein was wrong? Wouldn't that be sort of like, you know, spinning on the grave of a great genius? No, I think it was a tremendous accomplishment when Einstein proved Newton wrong and no shade on Newton. You know, Newton made a huge advance, a big leap forward, just not all the way to the final truth. And same way it's Einstein. And, you know, the history of physics is littered with these pivotal moments when we made a leap forward in understanding. I want to be around when we have one of those.

But do you think Iceland held a party? Like a Newton was wrong party? A Newton was wrong party? I don't know if he put it that way, you know. But when his theory of John relativity was so publicly proven right by the eclipse and the visible bending of light, I bet he had a glass of champagne or something. Or maybe he was, you know, nice enough not to dis on Newton. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

We don't have to denigrate those giants. That's right. You only like to stand under grave and dance. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we try to climb onto the shoulders of those giants with you, to bring you along on this fascinating journey that humans have been engaged in for thousands of years

to try to understand the nature of our universe. Is there a single law that explains how everything works out there? Is there a final truth for us to discover, are we on the path to deeply understanding, the nature of reality, or is an endless quest, a long ladder of improvements without ever actually reaching the truth. That's right, because as much as science has discovered about the universe, about how it all works, why it's all made of, there's still a whole bunch of stuff that we don't know about,

big mysteries out there in the cosmos that we are still trying to figure out and that we have lots of ideas for, but sometimes those ideas are not quite right. Because science is a process, not a destination, and we are continually updating, improving, and revising our theories for how things work. We think we understand something, and then a decade later, an engineer shows us we were wrong. As is always the case. But those are happy moments in science.

Those are the critical, pivotal steps forward. Those bring us closer to the truth. We're not here to defend the ideas of the ancients, to hold up Aristotelian physics for everybody to believe in, but to bring ourselves closer to the truth by revising the ideas of geniuses who have come before us. Yeah, I feel like that's a very, core principle of science that makes it so special is that there's always the possibility that

you could be wrong. Yeah, in fact, probably everything we know about science is wrong in some sense. Everything we do is some approximation of the truth, which we might never actually reach. What do you mean never reach? Are you giving up now? I'm not giving up. I'm promising job security for future physicists. I'm saying it's an infinite task. You're saying if you're a physicist, you're never going to retire. So choose engineering if you want to at some point stop working. I'm just trying to be humble. You know, every idea we've had in physics has eventually been supplanted by something more precise, something we think is more deeply true.

It would be really egotistical to say, well, the idea we have now, now this is the one that's going to hold up forever. Well, this has been going on for centuries and maybe even thousands of years and even big names like Einstein people think might not be quite right. Some of these theories we've developed are not just very, very accurate. They're beautiful. They give us deep insights into how the universe might work. They tell us a story about how the universe functions, sometimes in a way that's very surprising and intuitive for us. So it's hard to believe, but we think most of these theories might still be wrong. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question.

How is general relativity wrong? Should we meet first talk about how it's right? We should, but I just... Is that what we've been doing for the last 500 episodes? Yeah, the last 100 years has been how general relativity is right. But I was going to say, welcome to the group of retired engineers. But then I realized, are you a retired engineer, Jorge? I am an engineer, technically, I guess you don't lose the title.

Yeah, I'm not quite retired. I'm not sure anyone would trust me to design a bridge or any kind of car or anything. Maybe a robot? Robots, I mean, what could go wrong with missing a robot. Exactly. I've never read a story about robots. Yeah, there you go. Robots are totally safe.

But yeah, no, but I look forward to the day when I can retire, for sure. Then I can send you questions. You'll get your 15 minutes. just like everybody else. My 50 minutes of physics. Yes, exactly. That's right. Most people along for 15 minutes of fame.

Retired engineer is long for 15 minutes of a physicist's time. But yeah, this is an interesting question to talk about how general relativity, which is, I guess, the main theory, or one of the main theories that Einstein discovered, right? Yeah, Einstein made lots of contributions to physics, even inspiring quantum mechanics with this explanation of the photoelectric effect, which is what he actually won. the Nobel Prize for, but a lot of people think that his greatest contribution to physics really were the theories of special relativity and then general relativity that tell us about how light operates, what space time really is, and explain that gravity is not actually a force. It's just a product of the curvature of space and time. I would have thought his greatest contribution was his hairdo. You know, I feel like it's so iconic in the culture and it's given permission to every

physicists since then to not get a haircut. But it's so effortless, right? That's the whole point of his hairdo. It's like, I don't even care what it looks like up there. I don't have to look at it. You got to look at it. That's what I mean. That's what I mean. Keep permission for the rest of you. Oh, I see. To give all

all of the other physicists standing on his shoulders to just let it all hang out. Well, you're standing on his shoulders. You've got your head stuck right in that hair. You know, you can't really avoid it. It's everywhere. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't drop a pen or anything. You might lose it. in that hair. Well, as usually we're wondering how many people out there had thought about the idea

that Einstein might be wrong, that general relativity is not quite right. And in which way, isn't it right? So thanks very much to everybody who answers these questions. If you would like to join our group of volunteers, please write to me to questions at Danielanhorpe.com. We'd love to hear your voice. But do you have to be a retired engineer to join the group? You can be a current engineer, you can be a retired engineer, you can be an aspiring engineer, you can be a chocolate engineer, any kind of engineer is welcome, even non-engineers. Well, think about it for a second. How do you think general relativity might be wrong?

Here's what people have to say. And I think general relativity is wrong or has to be wrong because in its sort of proposition of singularity in the middle of black holes, because that's just like impossible, right? somehow that has got to be not true. I'm entirely sure how general relativity is wrong. It's actually been something that's bothering me, so I'll be very interested to hear.

And I suspect it is quantum physics that has disproved it. So I'm not entirely sure how, though. Hi, Daniel and Hawaii. Love your show. Keep up the great work. I think the biggest thing that seems off with general relativity to me is the idea that there is an infinity. If you think about other concepts like absolute zero, there's reasons in real life why we can't reach that

temperature. And I think if we can understand what those reasons are for black holes, for example, then maybe we'll be able to understand what the problem is with general relativity. Well, it doesn't account for quantum physics and quantum particles. And I think with how the Big Bang started, it doesn't account for the very initial moments after the Big Bang because that includes quantum particles. All right. I feel like maybe we've talked about this enough in our podcast that people seem pretty familiar with this idea. Yeah, I think we've been sort of gently negging general relativity for a while now. So people have some clues. We're trying to seduce general relativity here?

What are we, what's your plan here? No, we've been sort of warming people up to the idea that maybe general relativity isn't telling us the truth about nature. Well, let's dig into it, Daniel. First of all, what is general relativity and how is it different than other kinds of relativity? So Einstein's first theory of relativity. was special relativity, and this was in response to weird mysteries about the speed of light, the Michelson-Morley experiment, electromagnetism, and frame dependence and all that stuff. And the theory of special relativity is the one that tells us that light moves at the same speed

for all observers. And it leads us to understand how time flows and how events can be simultaneous for one person and not simultaneous for another, and things get shorter at high speeds, and there's a maximum speed at which things can travel. That's all the fascinating physics of special relativity, which already was like a huge brain twist for people back then, right? It was very hard to accept a very new idea for how the universe worked. That was special relativity.

But why is it called special relativity? What is it special from or about? Because it's only relevant in one particular circumstance. And that's when you assume that space is flat. That space has no curvature to it. General relativity is his generalization of special relativity to a much broader set of cases, scenarios where the universe has big lumps of mass in it and that mass curves space. Instead of thinking about light pulses moving through space in straight lines and staying parallel to each other,

now he developed the mathematics to consider what happened when space itself was curved, when light moved in what seemed like curved paths. But did he call it special relativity when he came up with it? Like, did he know as a special case and maybe it wouldn't, didn't apply to the rest of the universe? I'm sure some of our German listeners will know how to say it in German because these original papers, of course, were not in English. But yeah, he originally called it special relativity and then general relativity. But does that mean then that special relativity is automatically wrong?

Because it only works when space is flat, but space is never flat, is it? Yeah, that's a great question. And it sort of begs the philosophical question, what do we mean by wrong? because the universe is never totally empty. Space is always a little bit curved here, a little bit curved there. I mean, even if you just have a photon passing through space, that is curving space itself, right? Because photons have energy.

So in that sense, special relativity is approximately right. It's never deeply, truly right, because it doesn't describe our universe. That doesn't mean the rules of special relativity are wrong, right? It could be that the rules of special relativity are correct. They're just never applicable because the situation it describes an energy, energy-less universe never actually arises. Wait, so special relativity sort of only works in a Newtonian kind of universe? Like, you have to assume that Newton was right first?

Well, no, Newton had a different theory of space and time. He thought that space and time were absolute backdrops, that you could, like, measure your velocity relative to space. That space was this, like, stage upon which everything happened. Special relativity already tells you that things like velocity are relative, and that there is no absolute frame of reference to the universe. So even special relativity is a big departure from Newton's view of how the universe worked. But it also assumed that like a giant universe that's not bendable.

That's like fixed kind of. In the same sense that Newton assumed that like the X axis runs perfectly straight out to infinity, special relativity also assumes that. Okay. So then did Einstein know that he had general relativity in his pocket when he came up with special relativity? or was it like a progression of theories? It was definitely a progression. He had not yet solved general relativity. This is not like a staged release

where he's like, I got a big idea, but I got to like drip it out to the public. This is not like a PR campaign. But he sort of knew that he, special relativity, I mean, if he called it special relativity, he knew that only applied to a special case. Yeah, but he hadn't solved the general case yet. It took him years and years to figure it out

because the mathematics was super hairy. And he relied on like clever ideas from other mathematical geniuses that he talked to to make his theory of general relativity work. And it's still famously almost impossible to deal with. Like the equations of general relativity are so complicated, we mostly can't even solve them for anything that looks like our universe. Like we've solved general relativity for scenarios like the universe is filled smoothly with mass or the universe has nothing in it but a black hole.

We can't exactly solve the equations of general relativity for any realistic scenarios because they're so hairy. So it took Einstein years to come up with his theory. But I guess maybe my question is like when he came up with special relativity, did he know that space could actually bend and that the universe was actually very different? Or did that come about when he discovered general relativity? No, he had that idea that he wanted to incorporate curvature into the fabric of space time as a way to explain gravity.

He just hadn't figured out how to make the mathematics of it all work. And that took years and sort of novel math. mathematics at the time, you know, differential geometry, the idea of like thinking about how things move along curve services. That was kind of new stuff 100 years ago. All right. Well, maybe break it down for us. Well, how would you explain what general relativity is?

General relativity is an explanation for why we think there's a force of gravity. It tells us that as things move through space, it's not as Newton described that they have mass and that mass gives them a force that attract each other. but instead that mass bends space and then they move according to the curvature of that space. So when you jump off a building and you fall towards the earth, it's not that the earth's gravity is pulling on you, accelerating you towards the center of the earth, but now you're moving according to the curvature of space.

The earth has bent space and you're moving along that curvature towards the center of the earth. So it's a different picture. And I guess you mean space time, right? Because you have to kind of mix time into it, right? Because, like, something, the bowling bottle doesn't fall towards Earth. Like, it needs time to do that, right? Time is definitely important factor. And special relativity already showed us that space and time are very closely connected.

And actually linked them together into a four-dimensional object. And in that sort of four-dimensional way of thinking, a lot of things that didn't make sense in 3D space and 1D time, now click together to make these really beautiful symmetries that you just don't have if you think about space and time separately. The same way that, like, linking electricity and memory, magnetism together into one object explains a lot of mysteries between them. Linking space and time together into one object really makes the mathematics crisp and clear and

beautiful. So yeah, special relativity is based on the idea that space and time are linked and general relativity just expands that. So yeah, absolutely space time is curved. And general relativity also predicts the distortion of time. As things pass through curvature, their time ticks more slowly. General relativity describes the curvature of space time. but the way you're describing it is sort of like it's all about gravity gravity comes out as a consequence of this story

really what we're trying to do is describe the nature of reality like what's out there why do things move the way we see them moving if you're in a spaceship and you're looking at the earth orbiting the sun you want to know why is it Newton tells you one story he says there's a force between these objects pulling on them Einstein tells you a different story he says there's no force there there's no acceleration that's the inertial motion of the earth through curved space time. Both stories are trying to explain what we see, but they are describing very different realities. I guess what I mean is like let's say you take gravity out of the equation. Like you're just talking about two electrons in space, repelling each other from their electrical charge.

Do you still need general relativity to describe that motion? No, in fact, we don't know how to do general relativity on electrons. That's one of the problems with it. Oh, well. Sounds like I just skipped ahead. Exactly. So no, you do not need general relativity to describe all the quantum interactions that exist like in flat space. Two electrons out there assume they're not perturbing space because their masses are so small.

Then no, we can do quantum mechanics and explain all those electron interactions without general relativity at all. General relativity tells us about space and time and gravity and that's it. I mean, that's a lot of stuff, but that's it. That's it. All right. So then what do you mean by how that this theory might be wrong? Like what would it mean for I sign to be wrong? Well, one way for theory to be wrong is for it to make an incorrect prediction, right?

If I say, look, I'm 50 years old and from zero to 50, I've grown about a meter and a half. So therefore, in my next 50 years, I'm also going to grow a meter and a half. That's a prediction. It's dumb, obviously. And it's going to be disproven if I live another 50 years and measure my height. So that's a theory that can be proven wrong, right? So if Einstein's theory makes a prediction and that isn't borne out by reality, we do experiments that show that his predictions are wrong, that's a scenario where we would say Einstein was wrong.

How else? There's a sort of philosophical sense in which Einstein could be wrong, which is all these theories of physics are telling us a story. They're an explanation and all of our explanations in the end are scientific stories about what's happening. Like, why is the Earth moving this way? It's moving this way because of the curvature of space. time. But those stories involve things we can't see. Like we can't directly observe the curvature

of space time. We can't directly see electric fields. These stories always involve invisible things that we can't detect directly. And so then we wonder like, well, what if those stories are wrong? Do they actually describe reality what's really happening? Or are they just sort of like the stories we're telling, even if they predict all the experiments correctly, could they still be sort of philosophically wrong. Is it sort of like, you know, how we thought Newton was right for a long time, and it worked to describe the motion of baseballs and billiard balls and, you know, the orbits of the planets, but it's not really right at the end of the day.

Exactly. We don't think that Newton's story is correct. Newton's explanation for billiard balls and planets is not what's actually happening, right? And so Newton can't be right. And so in that sense, we wonder like, well, if it's not really philosophically true, is it possible that sometime in the future, maybe not today, maybe well beyond our current capabilities

that Einstein's theory could be proven wrong in some deep future experiment. If it's fundamentally not describing the nature of the universe, it might be possible to find a way to prove that. Well, apparently there's a whole cottage industry

of people trying to prove Einstein wrong. There have been many experiments, a lot of different theories, just trying to bring the man down. And so let's dig into that and how exactly general relativity is wrong. But first, let's take a quick break. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it?

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Right, we're talking about how general relativity might be wrong, might be or is wrong? I'm pretty sure it is wrong. I mean, we don't know for sure, but if I had to place a bet, I put my money on Einstein is wrong. Are you taking bets? Is there a pool online that I can sign up for? Oh, you want to bet against me? Is that what's going on me? Well, apparently you're betting against Einstein. I am.

I see. I don't know. Who has the better hair? You are Einstein. Einstein is many things I aspire to, especially. This hair was all white. I know. I'm not there yet.

You could die it, I guess. Who dies their hair white? I don't know. I guess Dan Quill. Yeah, you could be the first person. Yeah, you could be the first person. Yeah, I think Dan Quayle died his temple's gray to get a little bit more gravitas. Oh, there you go.

But I prefer the youthful look. I see. I see. I'm no longer mistaken for a grad student in my department. You don't need gray hairs. In a while. You don't need gravitas to prove gravity's wrong. No, apparently you don't.

You don't even need gray hairs. You just need a great idea. That is a grave bar to pass. Well, it sounds like a lot of people are trying or happen to. trying to prove Einstein wrong, or at least they've been trying to make sure his theory is right, I guess. Maybe is that a better way to put it? Yeah, we have been trying to verify Einstein's theory, or at least to check it, or to see if it's wrong, because Einstein's theory of gravity doesn't just replace Newton's gravity. It changes. It makes different predictions from Newton's

theory, and that allows us to test it, to look for those very specific predictions, those consequences of gravity actually being a curvature of space time and not a force between two masses. So for the last hundred years or so, we've been doing those tests. Yeah, doing those tests and also making observations about the universe, right, as a way to test the theory. Yeah, exactly. One way to look for new stuff is just like build a new telescope, look deep into the universe, wait for surprises. Another very, very valuable way to discover new stuff is to make very high precision tests of your theory. You know, if your theory makes a very specific prediction about what's going to happen,

then go out and do an experiment that's really, really precise and check it because if there's a small discrepancy, that's a hint. Maybe there's something new going on. There's something wrong with your theory or some piece of it you haven't accounted for. We do that all the time in particle physics, for example, when we measure the mass of something super duper precisely and see if the theory predicts it, measure the interaction of some particle really, really precisely. and see if the theory predicts it correctly.

All right. Well, what are some of the ways in which we've tested Einstein theories? Well, one of the early successes was understanding the orbit of Mercury. You know, the planets orbit the sun, and in Newtonian physics, this is because there's a force there. And Newton and Kepler were able to even describe not just the circular motion of the planet, but the elliptical motion of the planets, right? The planets don't orbit in perfect circles. They orbit in ellipses.

But that's okay. In Newtonian mechanics, you can have an elliptical. orbit that's stable, right? The sun pulls on things and it goes faster when it's closer and slower when it's further away. The math all works out. But an ellipse has a direction to it, right? There's a bit of the ellipse that's longer and a bit of the ellipse that's shorter. And procession means that that ellipse is turning, like the direction that the ellipse is longer, the pointy bits of the football is turning. So we call that the procession of the ellipse. And Newton can also predict that procession. But what we discovered is that the procession of the orbit of Mercury was a little bit

different from what Newton predicted. And Einstein's theory predicted it correctly because it's a different story about how gravity works. But wait, why Mercury? Like, what's different about Mercury? Well, Mercury is closest to the sun. And one of the crucial differences between Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity is what happens when something is spinning. Like Newton says, if an object has mass, then you're going to feel its gravity. And it doesn't matter if it's spinning. Take a sphere of mass if it's spinning or not. Newton says it has the same gravity. It doesn't matter if it's spinning, if it's a perfect sphere, because you always have masses in the same place. But Einstein says it does matter because Einstein's theory responds not just to the presence of mass, but energy. And something

that spinning has a different energy than something that isn't spinning. And it actually twists space time a little bit in a way that twists things nearby. It gives them little twists. So the sun is giving a little torque to Mercury's procession, according to Einstein and not to Newton. And that little torque was enough to explain the deviation in the orbit of Mercury. But you wouldn't feel this here on Earth? It's a much smaller effect as you get further and further away. But we've actually measured this ourselves. We've put super precise satellites in orbit around the Earth to detect the effect of the Earth spinning on stuff in orbit around the earth.

We had an episode about Gravity Probe B, which involves these incredible gyroscopes, which are the smoothest objects known to man, these like incredible balls of quartz mined in Brazil and polished by grandmas in Germany until they're like incredibly spherical so that they're super precise. And they have detected the same thing around the orbit of the Earth. Whoa. That's another way in which we've proven that Einstein was right. Yeah, exactly.

All of these experiments and some of these, like they take dead. decades to develop, to make so precise, and they always come out, bang on Einstein's prediction. It's kind of infuriating. What do you mean infuriating? Well, we think Einstein is wrong, and so it's frustrating to not be able to prove it, right? As soon as we find an example where Einstein was wrong, that's a thread we can pull on. We can say, okay, here we go. Here's a lead.

The thing is, we think Einstein was probably wrong, but we don't know how to improve his theory. And until we find a place of where it fails, it's difficult to know how to proceed. So in the gravity of things and how spinning things affect gravity, because Einstein predicted that it would, right? Einstein predicted that it would. So something that spinning has more gravity to it? Like if the Earth was spinning faster, we'd all be heavier? It's not just more gravity, right? Newton's equation is one equation.

It's a single force equation. It tells you the magnitude of the force and the direction of it. But Einstein's equation is a tensor equation. It's like a big matrix of equations. It tells you gravity is much more complicated than just like a force and a direction. It can also apply a torque. There's all sorts of complicated things. So it's not just about more gravity, but it's about what that gravity is doing.

But is that true? If the Earth was spinning faster, I would be heavier. If the Earth was spinning faster, the Earth would be twisting you a little bit. It wouldn't necessarily make you heavier. It would be spinning you. Oh, but then you say like it affects the gravity, like it maybe increases the gravity of the Earth? Yeah, I think that's true because the overall energy is higher than you would get more curvature, but also that curvature is more complicated.

So it induces a little torque on objects nearby. There's sort of like a little eddy current in gravity, right? This is called frame dragging. Check out our episodes about that if you want more details. Yeah. What are some of the other ways in which people have tested Einstein? So a lot of these tests we just described are sort of weak field gravity. Gravity in places where space is curved but not like dramatically curved.

One of the really dramatic predictions of Einstein's theory is that space can curve incredibly powerfully. It can curve and create things like black holes. And for a long time, people thought, well, that's obviously wrong, right? That's ridiculous. But then we went out and we saw black holes in the universe. And so the fact that black holes exist, that there's an event horizon beyond which information, cannot escape is a direct prediction of general relativity, not of Newtonian physics, and something we've seen in the universe.

Well, we think we've seen, right? Didn't we talk about before how nobody has actually technically seen a black hole or confirmed its existence? Yeah, that's an important caveat, right? We've seen things that are very consistent with black holes. There are some alternative theories, dark stars, boson stars, fuzzy string balls, et cetera, The most mainstream interpretation of those is that they are black holes. They're totally consistent with black holes.

But you're right, we've never actually confirmed the existence of an event horizon in the universe. Right. Or what's inside of it, right? Yeah, or what's inside of it. But we have to sort of use black holes to prove that gravitational waves exist, which is part of Einstein's theory, right? Exactly. Another important distinction between Einsteinian and Newtonian gravity is that gravity takes time. that information is not instantly propagated in the universe. Newton says if you delete the sun from the universe,

its gravity disappears instantly. But, you know, Einstein's spent a lot of time thinking about how information is propagated. He developed the theory of special relativity. And so in general relativity, he accounts for this. He says that it takes time for gravitational information to propagate, and that propagates via gravitational waves. So you take a black hole, for example, or even a sun or a big rock, and you wiggle it. Then the curvature it's causing wiggles as you wiggle.

the rock. You can detect this if you have really big sources of gravitational waves like black holes eating each other as they spiral around each other. They make these gravitational waves and we've detected them. This is another crazy prediction that I personally thought would never be borne out. But again, due to like amazing technical and experimental bravado, they figured out how to see these things and we've confirmed them and the predictions are bang on Einstein's calculations. Yeah, that's some amazing engineering going on there, right? It really is impressive. They probably deserve their retirement, those engineers.

Well, they definitely deserve the Nobel Prizes that they won for it. I was thinking about where to go to grad school in the late 90s and thinking about, you know, particle physics at Berkeley or gravitational waves at Caltech. And I definitely chose particle physics at Berkeley because I thought they would never see those gravitational waves. I thought it was crazy. You could own part of a Nobel Prize right now had you chosen another path. Absolutely. You know, had the path not taken.

But instead now there are retired engineers who have part of a Nobel Prize, but you don't. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, there's another version of that story where I did join the project and I messed it all up and they never discovered gravitation. Oh, yeah. So maybe I was doing everybody a favor by staying out of it. That's right. You get to account for all possibilities. What I'm saying is I get a share that Nobel Prize by not messing it up, really. Well, then so do I, Daniel. Done. So does everybody else who's ever existed?

I mean, we're always saying everybody's a scientist, right? So shouldn't we all reap the benefits? Well, I think we all get the benefits, but not necessarily the credit. Or the not credit for not getting the way. I mean, there's so many discoveries out there that I didn't mess up. I don't know why I'm not getting credit for that. I know. There should be just a prize just for you.

They should thank me every year. And thank you, Daniel, for not being involved and not messing this one up. that's right the daniel whiteson ignored us uh price yeah exactly but anyway it's an incredible accomplishment Nobel rises very well deserved yeah and so that's one way in which we confirm general relativity right because you can only get gravitational waves with general relativity or is there another explanation for for them there's no other explanation for gravitational waves i mean other variations of general relativity that we might talk about you know ways to build on general relativity, but you can't get gravitational waves in Newtonian gravity.

You need the curvature of space time and general relativity to have that prediction. All right. So that's another box that general relativity checked. What are some of the other boxes that it has passed? Well, effects like gravitational lensing, because space is curved when light passes through it, it follows that curvature. And so light moving around really massive objects doesn't move in what looks like a straight line to us if we're far away. And we can see this in the sky. We can see light bending

around invisible dark matter and creating distortions in background galaxies. This effect occurs all over the place in the sky and it's been confirmed many, many times. So we definitely know that light is curved as it passes through bent space.

This is an interesting one because I feel like anyone can confirm and look out there into the universe to do this, right? Like you don't need to build a super special satellite or a super giant detector. Like, you can just look out into space and confirm that space is being bent out there. Yeah, I'm not sure you could do it with like a backyard telescope. You need sort of precise measurements.

But you haven't seen my backyard, Dan. Retired engineers have a lot of disposable income and maybe they have really fancy telescopes in their backyard. But, yeah, you can see these. Or like, you know, you could go to a local observatory maybe. Yeah. or a big one, and like you can step right up to the lens and take a look, right? Exactly.

Sometimes you can see galaxies duplicated, like the same galaxy in two places in the sky because photons from that galaxy bend around some object and appear to be coming from two different directions. You can see what's called an Einstein cross, effectively like an optical distortion of our vision because of this curvature. So yeah, you can just look through a telescope and you can see gravitational lensing. Now, this is significant because it basically shows that light is affected by gravity, which is significant because light doesn't have any mass, right? Yeah.

So it wouldn't nominally, according to Newton, feel a force of gravity. That's right. And yet, it's being pulled and pushed by the mass of other objects. Exactly, because it's moving through that curved space. And mass has been space and everything moves through that curved space. although doesn't it also maybe depend on what you mean by mass like if you mean any kind of energy is mass then could that also explain the curvature of light

without general relativity you know like let's say a photon doesn't have any mass in the traditional sense but it has energy to it does yeah yeah and now let's say that I call mass something different like mass now not just the mass we used to call mass but also energy like the energy a photon might have and then it feels the force from gravity

because of this energy mass couldn't I also maybe explain the curvature of light with Newtonian physics? Oh, I see. Could you make some sort of like Newtonian version of gravity where you generalize it

from just mass to energy and say, you know, the Jorge theory of gravity is that there's a force between objects with energy not just with mass? Yes, the Jorge theory of light and gravity.

Future Nobel Prize winning theory. Yeah, absolutely. You can do that. And people have actually tried to do this to build like a bridge between Newtonian and Einsteinian theories. One thing we do when we come up with a brand new theory is we try to understand like, is the old theory a special case of this new theory? How do they fit together as one at generalization of the other one? And so people have actually gone back and tried to like patch these things together and say, could you go from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics using that direction to avoid the interpretation of curvature? And there are some effects. that you can get right. For example, you can describe how light bends using this apparent force between energy rather than a force between mass. But you can't get all the details right of the curvature of space time. There's more information in there in the metric and the curvature of space time that can just be described by the force. It's sort of like a richer theory. I see. So I think I guess what I was trying to get to is that, you know, gravitational

lyncing is a test of gravity, but it's not like a slam dunk. case of gravity, right? Mm-hmm. Of general relativity. Exactly. You can add bells and whistles to Newton's theory to make gravitational lensing happen. Yeah, yeah. It's called the bells and whistles theory of the universe, the B&W.

All right, well, let's get into how else we know that general relativity is wrong. And let's talk about how it's wrong and where we think it might finally break. So let's dig into that. But first, let's take another quick break. 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 Sweeten.

Monica Patton. Elaine Welter-A. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivotts now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're talking about general relativity, the big theory that Einstein came up with that talks about gravity and how space can bend and how space time gets bent by things like mass and energy and how it might be wrong.

Although it seems pretty right from all the experiments we've done. So far, it's been endlessly vindicated, which is frustrating because I'm pretty sure it's wrong. So short. Even though every test we've done has confirmed Einstein's prediction, we think that there are scenarios where it must break down. Not tests we can do today, but tests we can imagine with thought experiments, places in the universe where we think Einstein's theory can't be right. Interesting.

So you're saying, like, it's right as far as we know and the phenomena we've seen, but there might be situations where it breaks down. We think that there are situations where it has to be wrong. even though we haven't yet been able to engineer any of those situations in the lab to prove it. But there's sort of thought experiments or future experiments we can predict or places in the universe where we think it's got to be wrong. Interesting. All right. Well, let's step through these scenarios. What are these places? Yeah, well, one was the scenario you brought up earlier. Like, what happens between two electrons? What is the gravitational force between two electrons? Because electrons are not just like tiny little versions of planets.

They're not just like small planets with tiny little masses in them where you can apply Newtonian physics or think about the curvature of space. They're fundamentally different from planets. They're probabilistic. We know that electrons are quantum objects. They don't have a definitive location. They have a probability for being here and a probability for being there. They can interfere with each other. And Einstein's theory doesn't account for that.

It doesn't allow for that. It says, look, things have locations and those locations, determine how space curves. So we don't know what to do when things don't have locations. Does space curve randomly? The space curve probabilistically? What's going on? But other theories can't deal with that?

Like could Newton handle a quantum object? No, Newton's theory also requires you to know where something is. Like if you're going to feel the force of gravity from an electron, you've got to know how far away it is and in what direction. If an electron like could be to your left and could be to your right, then what gravity are you feeling? Are you feeling gravity to the left? Are you feeling gravity to the right?

Are you feeling 50-50 gravity to the left and right? So it cancels the self out. Like Newton also doesn't know what to do in that situation. Wait, what? So then how do you do anything with quantum mechanics? Like how do you compute the path of an electron? Yeah, mostly we ignore gravity. Like when we compute the path of an electron or electrons interacting,

we assume that there's no gravity. We do those all in flat space. But then how do you, how do you, Like if another electron pushes it or pulls it, how do you make that calculation of where it's going to go? Well, we just assume that there is no gravity and we do the quantum mechanical version of things because all the other forces,

the pushing and the pulling of electromagnetism, that allows for this probabilistic stuff. We have a quantum theory of electromagnetic forces and a quantum theory of the strong force and the weak force. All the forces in the universe we can describe using quantum mechanics. And those quantum descriptions can totally accommodate these sort of probabilities and interference.

And it just lets you compute like the arc or trajectory of an electron? It lets you compute the probability of various outcomes. Absolutely. So quantum mechanics is totally cool with that. And when we do that, we have to ignore gravity. You might ask, well, how can you get the right answer if you're ignoring gravity? Well, gravity is super duper weak. It's so much weaker than any of these other forces.

So it's basically negligible. Like, we couldn't actually even measure the mass of an electron using gravity. We talked recently on the podcast about, like, the smallest thing we've ever measured the gravity for. It was like around a kilogram or a little bit smaller, you know, zillions and zillions of atoms. So we can't detect the gravity of these particles. We just ignore it in our calculations for particle physics because we also don't know how to do those calculations. But I wonder if you mean like only at the microscopic level. Like, for example, can I treat an electron as a little?

point particle, like a little tiny baseball, and throw it at the Earth. Wouldn't even, like, Newtonian physics tell me at least the most likely path that electron is going to take. Yeah, absolutely. You can do those calculations. And we actually do those calculations when we think about, like, the atmosphere. How much atmosphere are we losing? Well, it depends on the velocity and the gravity of the atoms in the upper atmosphere.

We lose more hydrogen and helium than the heavier elements because they have more gravity. the Earth is pulling on them harder. But there we're doing a classical calculation. We're ignoring the quantum nature of those objects. Whenever the quantum nature is relevant, gravity becomes irrelevant. And that's one of the frustrating things about testing Einstein's theory is that it's mostly irrelevant in places where we think it's going to fail. Like we think that Einstein's theory breaks down for quantum particles,

but it's also irrelevant for quantum particles because quantum particles have almost no mass. Well, I think what you're saying is that it does work for quantum particles, just not at a certain level, right? Like, you can use general relativity and Newtonian physics on an electron to predict whether it's going to leave the Earth or not or what path is going to take around the Earth, but when you get down to the microscopic level, you don't know what to do. Yeah. When the quantum nature of those particles is important, general relativity breaks down. We don't know what to do with it there. And that's exactly where we also can't detect.

the effects of general relativity. If you ignore the quantum nature of the electron or the atom, then yes, you can use general relativity or even Newtonian physics to predict the path of the particle. But when the quantum nature is important, that's when it breaks down and that's when we can't detect the effects of general relativity. All right. Well, what are some of the other extreme situations where you think Einstein theory might be wrong?

The other famous concern and the one that listeners raised is singularities. What's inside a black hole? General relativity tells us that the things that fall past the event horizon slide towards the center of the black hole where curvature gets stronger and stronger. And it gets so strong that essentially it's a runaway effect and becomes infinitely dense. You have this point in space where you have mass, but in zero volume. And so we call that a singularity because the density is essentially infinite or undefined. So that's the prediction of general relativity, but most people think that that's not really a prediction. that's a sign that the theory is broken.

It's predicting something we think is unphysical and it has to be replaced by another theory that we've gone beyond the boundary of where the theory is valid, just like me predicting that I'll grow another meter and a half in the next half of my life. What do you mean? Like you're saying that the idea of a singularity

is the prediction of general relativity. Exactly. Which is at the center of a black hole. Yeah, exactly. That's what general relativity tells us is at the center of a black hole. But we don't believe it. We don't think it's actually there.

We think it's a sign that general relativity is wrong, that we've pushed it beyond the bounds where you can no longer really use the theory. But why not? Why couldn't you have some point, something in the center of a black hole? Well, one reason is quantum mechanics, right? If something becomes that small, then its quantum properties are important because quantum mechanics rules when things are super duper small. Everything in the universe that's super tiny follows the rules of quantum mechanics.

And quantum mechanics says you can't have something so massive, so much. much energy in such a tiny little space is like an inherent fuzziness to the universe that a singularity violates. And so if we could look inside a black hole and see what's there? Is it a singularity? Is it something else a weird quantum fuzzy blob? Is it something completely different? Then we would know how to update and correct general relativity. But of course, we can't. But isn't it sort of the same as like an electron? Like an electron, you can treat as a point particle, which is also an impossibility. And yet do you still assume that in quantum mechanics? In sort of old school quantum mechanics, we do treat the electron as a point particle,

and that's valid in some scenarios, right, where it doesn't really matter. But you're right, if you zoom in on the electron, it can't actually be a point particle. And if you do quantum field theory, then you replace this idea of a point particle with like a little blob of energy density in the quantum field of the electron. And so we have like different pictures for sort of different scales of work in particle physics. But you're right, from some points of view, the point particle description works. just fine. And so if like from the outside of a black hole, having a singularity on the inside is okay. But once you zoom in on it, once you get in and observe the quantum details of it,

we're wondering, like, is it really a singularity or is it something else? And that would be a deviation from Einstein's prediction. If it's not a singularity, then that would be a clue, something we could pull on to help unravel or update Einstein's theory. Well, I feel like in this case, you're not, it wouldn't prove that Einstein was wrong. is just that at that level you have to use a different set of rules. Yeah, that's a good point. It's not showing that Einstein was wrong.

It's showing that his theory is valid only under certain circumstances. And that's cool. It's like saying, you know, is fluid mechanics wrong? Well, it works great for fluids. You can't apply it to like crowds or to steam or crystals.

Doesn't mean it's wrong. It means that it's relevant to a certain set of conditions. And so that's sort of the question we were asking philosophically. like if Einstein's theory of gravity is deeply true, if it's the actual story of what the universe is doing, then it should always be right. But if it's just an approximation, if it's something that works under some certain conditions like fluid mechanics, then, you know, it's just

a story we're telling ourselves that helps us do calculations. It might not be like the actual story of the universe if there are bounds on where it's relevant. Or I wonder if another possibilities that it is right all the way down to the center of the universe. You just have to add quantum mechanics on top, meaning that they're each right in their own way. Yeah, but they disagree about what happens at the heart of a black hole, right? So they can't both be right. I don't know. Maybe they don't disagree. But they do. We do disagree. You know, there might be some version of quantum gravity and extension of Einstein's idea, a modification of Einstein's ideas that describes more accurately what's going on inside a black hole. But if there's

no singularity there, then Einstein's prediction is wrong. Well, as a particle physicist and a quantum mechanic person, I would say maybe you're a little biased. Yeah, sure, I believe it. All right, what are some of the other situations where you think Einstein might be wrong? Well, another famous singularity is the Big Bang. You know, if you take the universe as we see it, it's sort of cold and dilute, but we see that it's expanding, then you rewind the clock back to the early. universe. You see the universe getting hotter and hotter and denser and denser and denser.

And you could rewind that back like all the way back to an infinite density, a singularity, a moment when the universe is filled with infinitely dense matter. And I got to clarify, a lot of people think of the big bang as like a single point of matter, which then exploded out into space. But instead, we imagine the big bang is something that happened everywhere, like the whole universe filled with this incredibly dense matter. So Einstein's theory lets you unwind all all the way back to this moment of infinite density. But nobody believes that. People think that, well, you get back to some hot dense state up to like the plank

temperature, some really hot moment. And beyond that, some quantum effects are going to be relevant. You can't just use general relativity to extrapolate all the way back to infinite density. Unless quantum mechanics breaks down at that point. Like, you're assuming quantum mechanics is still valid at that point, right? Yeah. But quantum mechanics is another theory that's been tested. in great detail and very exquisitely, and we think describes the fundamental nature of the

universe. So what happens when these two theories come into conflict is the big question. And so like inside the heart of a black hole or in the very, very early universe, these are the moments when quantum mechanics and general relativity are both relevant. They both have something to say about what happens and they say different things. And so most people believe, and maybe I'm biased because I'm a part of a physicist, that the universe is quantum mechanical and that general relativity will break down at those moments and will not accurately predict the universe. I see. By most people, you mean you and your friends.

Yes, me and the rest of the physicists in the universe. Most people believe that general relativity is wrong. But we haven't proven it. We have not proven it, right? It's a belief. It's a theory. It's a speculation. It feels a little like faith, Daniel.

Well, you know, science is subjective. in the sense of like what we try to believe, what we try to prove, what we explore, we have hunches, we have creativity. It's not like science is a process that tells you what to try and what experiments to do, et cetera, et cetera, right? You have to have ideas and intuition and hunches and creativity, but then you have to listen to the experiments, you know, and so that's what we're waiting for. But I guess you would concede that right now there's nothing that maybe would say that one

or the other is right or wrong. You just feel that one is more right than the other. Yeah, we have no evidence that Einstein was wrong. We just suspect very, very strongly that he's got to be wrong eventually. But no, we do not have any evidence that Einstein was wrong. In fact, it almost seems like you have evidence to the contrary. Yeah, we have lots of evidence that he's right. Frustrating, the huge amounts of evidence that he was right.

But under these scenarios that we can't engineer ourselves, We can't look inside a black hole. We can't rewind time to the beginning of the universe. We have a hard time coming up with ways of testing quantum mechanics and gravity that we did a whole episode about quantum gravity experiments in a tabletop that might be able to break that barrier. Nobody's yet been able to engineer a scenario to prove Einstein wrong. It kind of feels like a conspiracy theory, Daniel.

Is that where the Q in Q&N comes from? Does it mean quantum? Wait, is Einstein the conspiracy theorist? Or are you saying all particle physics is a conspiracy theory? I'm saying maybe quantum mechanics is the conspiracy theory. That's where the Q&Q&N comes from. Oh, I see. Quantum anon, yes.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, it even sounds like a particle, like electron, Q&O. Oh, man. I just broke the conspiracy. It's all tied to a secret cabal of physicists. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, you could make the same arguments in the other direction, right? You could say, like, look, quantum mechanics has been proven right through a huge number of experiments.

But it conflicts with general relativity, the heart of black holes in the early universe. So maybe it's wrong. You could take that entirely other perspective. We have two great theories that disagree and one of them's got to be wrong. Right. I'm just saying that the internet conspiracy starts with a cue. And so that to me is a big hint. And it sounds like a particle too.

All right. Well, what does it all mean, Daniel? Does it mean that we have these two titanic, gigantic theories about the universe? you're saying that they conflict in a lot of situations. And there's plenty of scientific evidence for each of them to be both right, but they can't both be right in the center of the universe. Yeah, we have so many scenarios where we've tested each of them individually with great precision. And all the scenarios where both of them should be relevant are scenarios we can't engineer

or we can't study or are hidden from us. So it's endlessly frustrating. But there's a lot of creative people out there coming up with ideas for how we, We might be able to test them, new ways to bring these two theories together. It's been 100 years we haven't figured this out, but we're still working on it. Is it possible they're both right? They can't really both be right because they make different predictions about the same scenarios, but they could both be wrong. In fact, most likely scenario is that they're both wrong and there's some other deeper theory,

which tells us a completely different story about the nature of the universe. One of my favorite things about these theories is that they do tell us. story. There's an explanation for why things happen. But as these theories are replaced by other theories, you get a different story. Like, oh, it's not actually fields out there or curvature of space time. It's something else going on that explains the whole universe. So yeah, I want to be around. We figure that all out and we hear the next story of the true nature of the universe. Pretty cool. It might be that the universe is made out of Q&ONs. And then, hey, it'll turn out the internet was right. I think it's Bigfoot particles.

Einstein was wrong, Newton was wrong, the internet was right all along. It's all tiny bigfoot's at the microscopic scale, yes. That's right, yeah. Pulling and pushing. Wait, Sasquatch has a cue in it, doesn't it? Oh, it does, yeah. Oh, my, well, I also has an S and a couple of A's. Details, details.

Maybe Sasquatch is a retired engineer, and she'll break the whole case open. You just have to read past the 15 minutes, Daniel, of that email of Sasquatch sent you. All right, well, we. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening and remember that 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.

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