Can we escape a black hole with a warp drive or wormhole?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: Hey, hoor hey, I thought of a new genre of movies. Oh nice, Does it involve banana punts? Sadly, no, I'm thinking of a mashup of science fiction in your classic bank heist genre. Oh you mean you want to steal some science fiction books? Or is it mostly about portraying physicists as cool thieves. I'm thinking about thieves that use science fiction to steal stuff, like opening a wormhole into a bank vault. Don't doesn't Marvel do that already? Marvel does everything. The wizards count as scientists more. Instead of being a science thieve, you could maybe use science fiction to protect your valuable stuff. Oh I like that. Maybe I could hide all my gold inside a black hole. Yeah. You might never see it, but it'll be safe. At least I'll know that it's growing in there. Yeah. I guess it's a crewing, isn't it. It's a creating interest. It's compounding for sure. Hi. I'm or handmade cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, And sadly, I have no skills that can contribute to a bank heist and not even driving. You can't drive. You could be the getaway driver on a spaceship. Maybe I'm a very very safe driver, so I'd be like stopping at all the crosswalks, you know, observing all the traffic rules. Yeah, yeah, you're fired, Daniel. From my high stand, I can't say I'm sorry about that. But wouldn't physicists be good at planning to heist? You know? Aren't you good at like, you know, thinking things through and being analytical and you know, being detailed oriented. Yeah, I can make a university budget for our bank heist that includes like head rate and stretches out over five years. That sounds great. Yeah, Or you could write the grand proposal for startup ones, you know, to the mafia. What experts are they going to get to review that? They're all in jail, you know, so they're easy to get to. You could apply to the National Stealing Foundation. But anyways, welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of I Heart Radio in which we attempt to steal all of the jewels of knowledge that the universe has hidden away here and there we take your mind to the inside of black holes. We dropped them through wormholes and do crazy new locations in the universe. We try to snatch all the juicy tidbits that explain how the universe actually works, have it got to be the way that it is, and what it's crazy future holds, and we explain all of them to you. Yeah, because it is a pretty amazing universe full of incredible and valuable discoveries out there just sitting there, just waiting for a crafty physicist to crack the safe and get to all the shiny knowledge. I like thinking of the secrets of the universe as valuable, like I could auction them off as n f T s or something. You would profit from the East, Daniel, You wouldn't just be like a robbin hood physicist where you steal from the universe and then you you distributed to people in need. Well, that's the really cool thing about knowledge is that if you share it with people, it doesn't get diluted. Right, have a pile of gold and you give half of it to somebody, you have as much gold. But if you know the secrets of the universe and you share it with somebody, then you have somebody to talk to about it. So it's like even more valuable, right, But then if you make it into n f T that's the opposite of that. That's why I wouldn't turn the secret to the universe into n f T s. That's why we share them freely on this podcast. Yeah, and that's why we don't make a lot of money, I guess, because this podcast is for free, because making money is not the goal here. The goal is to celebrate knowledge. That's right. This podcast is a steal in itself. You are stealing knowledge from our brains. You stole my punch line then. But it is a pretty incredible universe full of interesting places, and some places are sort of harder to get to than others. In fact, there are places in the universe that might be impossible to get to or at least to get knowledge out of. Yes, the jewels of knowledge and not just littered on the streets. They are sometimes hard to find, and you actually do need a physicist or two on your team Oceans thirteen or Oceans nineteen or whatever the sequel will be in order to extract those jewels from the universe. Sometimes you just have to perform a clever experiment. Sometimes it seems like the universe is doing its best to keep its jewels hidden from us. Yeah, and Daniel, how many people work in your collaboration at the Large Chundren Collider? Like a few thousand? You know, I'm not even sure what the number is to within a hundred. It's somewhere between five thousand and six thousand authors on every single paper I see. So your sequel would be Oceans five thousand, five hundred plus or minus five hundred. Your movie title needs an error? Are that's right? What's another hundred authors on a paper anyway? Really? Between friends? Yeah? Though sometimes it seems like, no matter how many henchmen you have in your gang m it seems that the nature sort of like you're saying, it has places in the universe that it just doesn't seem to want to let you get to. And it's especially tantalizing and frustrating when we know the secret is in there, when we have found this physics vault and we just don't know how to crack it. We know that the answers are waiting behind a wall, and if we could only get in there, we could learn something deep and true about the universe, like the Ultimate Heist. I am warming up to this movie idea. It's starting to seem interesting sci fi heist doctor Strange's ocean. Well, I think one of these places that are really hard to get to the universe, as you mentioned, are black holes. Black Holes are extremely difficult to get to or at least survive getting into, and maybe even impossible to get anything out of. And yet we know that hidden inside a black hole are critical details that will reveal to us the true nature of space and time. How does space come together? Is gravity a quantum force or the curvature of space time? What is the smallest unit of space? What is actually going on inside a black hole? All of those answers are available to anyone who falls into a black hole. Yeah, but just to be clear, Daniel, it's not like you go into a black hole and it's all there on a textbook or you know, a sign. It's like you want to get into a black hole just so you can do experiments there and then see what you know these how these rules of the universe change inside of one experiments. I'm expecting a ted talk when I get there by by the physicists that I threw in before me. That's what I have students and post docs for right. Right, I thought you were going in first, Daniel, I'm never going in first. You know that when the aliens arrive, we're sending other people first. I'm gonna be in like the fifth wave. Another reason why I'm not in a bank heist. That's right, you just want to sit at home and count the knowledge later. But you're right that the secrets of the universe are not just laid out for us in an already written paper or a ted talk. We would have to do some observations, but I don't think it would be that tricky. There are some really big questions that different ideas about what might be going on inside a black hole are extremely diverse from there's a tiny singularity of infinite density too. There is nothing inside a black hole because everything's smeared along its surface, and so a lot of things could be very quickly ruled out once you get inside. I wonder if it's possible for you to get into a black hole, get ready to do your experiments, and to figure out that you didn't bring the right equipment. Are you You just have no idea how to test for these things? Yeah, well, people can always throw stuff in after you go right. So if I ever go to a black hole, I would just want my students to just keep throwing equipment in after me in case I need more stuff, just in case, because he wouldn't be able to like tell them possibly what you need, right, you know, as computers get better, I want them to just keep throwing in more computers so I keep doing more analysis. Also, maybe some lunch, you know, a little s q to table would be nice. Maybe a bed might be good too. But yeah, it's interesting to think about what's inside of a black hole, and it's sort of frustrating to think that even if you do get in, and even if you bring the right equipment and do the right experiments and figure out how the universe actually works, you might not be able to come out and tell other people. It's incredibly frustrating. You know, there are some kinds of knowledge that we know are out there. We also know that eventually we'll get them, Like, for example, what's going on on the surface of exoplanets fairly nearby. We don't have the technology today, but eventually we'll have powerful telescopes to image those services, will send robotic probes. We'll figure it out. We might even get some samples returned in the far far future. But black holes are so much more frustrating because it seems like it might actually be impossible to get the information out of there, or maybe not according to the theory. Black holes are space time I don't wish you can't get out of but there are sort of loopholes in the theory that might let you come out. I love loopholes in physics theory. Instead of being like a physics bank heist, sometimes I want to be a physics lawyer, want to argue in front of the court of the universe, like actually your honor it says here. I think you mean actually your honor according to uh this paper from thirty years ago. And hey, we do discover these loopholes, and sometimes these loopholes are really important. Like we all know that you can't travel faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, it seems like it might be theoretically possible for things to move away from each other faster than the speed of light if the space between them expands. It's an awesome kind of loophole because it solves the problem. You don't actually want to travel through space faster than light. You just want to get somewhere faster than light could have. So that's a really wonderful kind of loophole in the kind that we might be able to use to crack open a black hole. Yeah, because space is but a pretty a pretty interesting thing. It's not just like an emptiness out there. It's it's sort of this thing that can squish and may bend and sometimes maybe even have shortcuts in it. It's a really difficult concept for people to grasp. I think a lot of people are still stuck with sort of Isaac Newton's idea of space is like the emptiness to backdrop the stage on which the universe happens, not actually a part of the universe, but now, as you say, we know it's a dynamical thing that responds to the stuff that's in it. Yeah, and in particular it sort of allows for two things that may let you come out of a black hole. And those two things are warp drives and wormholes, which I'm still waiting Daniel for you guys to make it a reality. Well, I sent that grant application to the Daniel Science Foundation into the National Thieves Foundation, and I'll let you know when I hear no it's a national stealing foundation. That's why wrong email address. But you're right that these are theoretically allowed in the universe. General relativity in our knowledge of physics says that it might be possible to shortcut to places in space to get from one to the other without going through all the space in between. That's a wormhole, or to squeeze space in front of you and expand it behind you to create a warp bubble and get places faster than light could have. That's a warp drive. They might be theoretically be allowed. Yeah, And we've talked about both of those things in our podcast. If you're interested in going deeper, you can search for those episodes, but we didn't sort of talk about maybe using them to get out of a black hole. And a lot of folks out there have been writing in asking me if it's possible to use warp drives and wormholes as a loophole into black holes. And so today on the podcast we'll be tackling can you escape a black hole with a warp drive or warmhole? Now, Daniel, are people asking you this because they're thinking of going to a black hole or are they stuck in a black hole? And if they're stuck in a black hole, how did they get the message to you? I got this weird email with no return address you. It's just like emptiness from like three trillion years ago. No, I think people are planning their vacations, and you know, they want to think about what happens with my family and I fall into that black hole, and you've got to be prepared. You know, some people are really safety conscious, like how many people can I bring back? And can I you know, maybe leave some of them behind and hopefully No, that's kinda that's kind of dark. I think listeners are really curious about this seeming impenetrability. Anytime you hear about something being totally impossible in physics, it makes you wonder if there's not just like another clever angle or some loophole to exploit. And of course we're all curious about what's inside black holes, and so if you found a way to siphon off that information, it would be pretty fascinating. Yeah, and so this is pretty mind bending and space bending stuff. You know, black holes bend space a lot, and warp drives and warmholes also bend space. So you know, I can I can see how people might think like, hey, what if I use one to solve the other? And so we were wondering how many people had thought about this possible combination of things black holes, warp drives, and wormholes, and how they can be used together or used against each other. So Daniel went out there into the wilds to the internet to ask people this question. And thanks very much to all of you who volunteered to answer crazy, unexpected questions about loopholes in general relativity without any chance to prepare or take a graduate level class in advance. And if that sounds fun to you, please don't be shy. Right to me two questions at Daniel and Jorge dot com and I'll set you up with some crazy questions. So think about it for a second. Do you think you can escape a black hole with a warp drive or warmhole? Here, it's what people had to say. I'm not really sure how a warp drive works, but if you are changing the shape of space or of space time, then it seems like you could get yourself into position where the gravity of the black hole doesn't hold you as tightly as it does in normal space. Well, for sure, Jean Lopeicar would try to use the warp drive, depending will how close we would be to the black hole. But if we are in the no escape area where the light doesn't go out, I don't see how we can get out of there. I think even if your maths and simulations tell you in some way to escape a black hole, the fact that you've been spaghettified is going to slow you down to some extent. I don't think you could use a wormhole, but I'm pretty sure you could use a warp drive. I think a warp drive would do it. But unfortunately I can't tell you why. I think at because of the prime directive. Well, since warp drives are fantasy at this point and wormholes are theoretical at best, I would say no, you cannot because we do not know much about these modes of travel. I am gonna say no because I don't think anything can escape a black hole. All right. Not a lot of optimism here. Some people are like, Nope, Nope, I don't think so. I like the person who said John looked the card when he us a warp drive. I think that could be a good life philosophy. You know what, would John looked the card? Do? Yeah? And it made me wonder. I've seen a lot of episodes of star Chek the Next Generation, but I don't remember one where they fall into a black hole and use a warp drive to escape. Even on that show where the science is like, how can we say very flexible, I don't remember them using this particular trick. Oh. Interesting, they didn't make it so, But of course there's probably a listener out there who's seen every episode ten times and can correct me. So if the Enterprise he uses a warp drive to escape a black hole, please send us a note. I think they used to in one of the movies. Didn't they use something to sling shot, like around some of the sun or something, and then to go faster than light and travel back in time. It wasn't that a plot of one of the movies. Yeah, they did go back to present day San Francisco to save the humpback whales and one of them, and they did that by going faster than the speed of light to go back in time. But I don't think a wormhole or warp drive was used. Yeah. I guess a warp drive is pretty normal for them, Like they just have one in their ship. Everybody has one. Yeah, which makes you wonder why do they need to sling shot around the Sun in order to go fast in the speed of light when they got the warp drive right there. But as we say, the science is flexible. I see, it's a black hole of real science. No, I love that show. You don't have to be all hard science fiction. Have a good time, but it does help right, that more fun. It's a different kind of universe, and I like all the universes, from the true physics universe as we actually live in to the crazy goofy universe of Star Trek. Yeah. Alright, well, let's get into this question, Daniel. Can we use a warm hole or warp drive to get out of a black hole? Maybe step us through this first? Why is it hard to get out of a black hole in the first place? Black Holes are hard to escape because they do more than just pull on you. Everything that has gravity is pulling on you, like the Sun is pulling on you, the Earth is pulling on you. Black Holes are a great example of how gravity is more than just a force. It's actually the changing of the shape and the organization of space itself. So the reason that we feel gravity is not because there's a Newtonian force between stuff. But because having mass in space changes the shape of space, and when the shape of space changes, you get this fictitious forces, a feeling that there's a force there changing the paths of particles. And that's what gravity is. It's a fictitious force which appears when space is curved, and black holes are the most incredibly intense curvature. They change the shape of space so much that space becomes one directional inside the black hole. Every future you have inside a black hole only moves you closer to the center. Yeah, it's like being sort of trapped in a bubble of space. Although Daniel, just to be clear, Um, I know that the gravity as as a space time bending thing is sort of the prevailing view, But like you were saying at the there are some questions about gravity that we still don't know, right, Like, there's still the possibility that gravity is a force and it has a forced particle. That's the description we get from general relativity, which so far has survived every experimental test we've thrown at it, even really really precise ones about the warping of space and frame dragging. Check out our episode on gravity Probe B. It's predicted the existence of black holes, which appeared. However, the place where we expect general relativity to break down is when it gets really really intense over really really short distances, when quantum gravity becomes relevant, when we need to understand how quantum particles interact gravitationally, for example, inside a black hole. So the best place to figure out why general relativity is probably wrong is inside a black hole. So you're right, this description of gravity as a bending of space time is very effective, but it is a classical theory and is likely incorrect. It's the new classical theory, I guess, because there's a previous classic. There's like a classic classic theory, which is a Newtonian view. Right, that's right. But by classical we don't mean the old delicious formula that you loved when you were a kid. We mean that it's not quantum mechanical. General relativity as we use it assumes that space is smooth and continuous, there's an infinite number of locations between every two points, that objects have perfect paths, that if they are here and then they are there, they must have followed a path in between. But we know the universe is different from that. We have strong evidence that quantum mechanics is the nature of space time. We just don't know how to unify those pictures. Yeah, it's it's sort of like the neoclassical view now, because we know that there might be big changes coming soon. Yeah, and specifically, general relativity predicts at the heart of a black hole is a singularity. But it's not really fair to call it a prediction. It's more like a failure. General relativity predicts something which is essentially impossible and infinitely dense point, so most theorists see this as the breakdown of general relativity. This is the point where general relativity no longer works and has to be replaced by a quantum theory. So it's not like we really expect there to be a singularity at the heart of these black holes because that's what Einstein predicted. We expect to find something else which helps us change general relativity, which shows us how to refine it and extend it so that it does apply to those crazy circumstances. But I guess even before you get to that singularity, a black hole is such that even if you get near it, you're sort of trapped inside of it. If you get beyond the event horizon of the black hole. You're saying that there's like nowhere for you to go because all of space time sort of curves around you, and anywhere you try to go, it just pulls you closer to the center. Yeah, and people think about the inside of a black hole as this barrier past the event horizon. Remember, the event horizon is not like a physical place. It's not like there's a gate there with some guard locks you in and says you can't leave. It's just an effective location. It's just if you venture past this point, then your light cone, your future, everything that you can affect in the universe is now trapped inside this radius around the black hole. So it's sort of like a point of no return. It's like if you're trying to drive fast around an icy turn. You know, when you've lost traction and you're just not going to make it and you're gonna slide out. That's the point of no return. The event horizon is sort of like that you got a little too close and now all of space is leading you eventually towards the center. Yeah. I think it also it's kind of like if you're trapped in a pit on the ground, and it's it's sort of like the point where the walls of the pit get go beyond vertical, Like once they're vertical or more than vertical or leaning towards you, there's almost no way you can climb out. And so, according to classical general relativity, everything that happens inside the event horizon eventually hits the singularity, and there's no way for information to pass out of the event horizon, including you or any signals you want to send, or any notes or ted talks you compose while you're inside the black hole, yeah, or any science fiction novels or TV shows that you come up within there. All right, So that's a black hole, and so theoretically it's all sort of impossible to get out of it, or so we thought. There are sort of loopholes to this theory that might let you get out, maybe a warm hole or a warp drive, and so let's get into whether or not we can use them to get out of a black hole. But first let's take a quick break. All right, Daniel, help, I'm stuck inside of a black hole? What can I do? And if you can hear me, you're probably in here with me, in which case. Uh, we're both doing exactly. That's never the phone call I want to get. The call is coming from inside the black hole. You're inside the black hole too. That's the combination sci fi horror movie genre. Yeah, well, there you go. That's the first scene in your movie. Somebody has to steal us out of the black hole. It's a rescue movie exactly, which is what John goes, Well, WHOA, now we can cast the Rock. I would rather put my faith in the Rock's hand and John Cena, I don't know. How about uh boy, who would win in an armed wrestling contest or a physics test? The Rock for sure? How about both? We could get them both in the movie. But one of them could play you, the other one could play me. I think you have an over density of muscle and you might create your own black hole, and then it would be counterproductive. They'll have to diet. Maybe you're stopped working out. But I'm curious about your suggest in there. If you had to choose, who would you prefer plays you in the movie, The Rock or John Cina or the Rock for sure? Yeah, you're gonna shave your head, So if you can play I think it'd be easier to get him a wig. But either way, I guess we would need one of their help to get out of the black hole, because black holes are almost maybe impossible to get out of, except that maybe there's the idea that we could use a loophole in the theory, one or two loopholes, either a warmhole or a warp drive. So maybe let's go through him one at a time. Daniel, Um, how does the warp drive even work? So warp drive is a really cool idea, and let me stress that it's theoretical. We have these equations that suggest it might be possible, but there's a whole lot of question marks and engineering hurdles to overcome before we actually build a warp drive and use it to shoot off and explore the universe. The basic idea is that if you can manipulate the curvature of space, you might be able to accomplish what you want, which is to get from here to somewhere really really far away without having to travel through all of that space. And the idea is that space is flexible, and so for example, if you can squeeze the space between here and your destination and at the same time expand the space behind you. You can effectively move a little bubble of space faster than the speed of light, because while there are rules about how fast you can go through space, there are no rules about how fast the curvature of space can change. Yeah, so this is kind of one flavor of war drives. You know, it's it's all sort of fantastical at this point in theoretical and there are many different ways to kind of pull off a war drive, right, I mean, we talked about this in one of the chapters in our book. Freaquently asked questions about the universe. Yeah, there are lots of crazy ideas out there. I think the one that's closest too plausible is called the al Qbair drive, named after a Mexican physicist who came up with this idea. He discovered that there's a solution to Einstein's equations for general relativity which can accomplish this. So if you could bend space in this way, then theoretically you could take a little bubble and warp it across the universe. The question at the end of his paper, though, is can you bend space in this way? You know, Einstein's equations are very tough to solve, and it's not always clear that you can accomplish this kind of curvature just because you want to WHOA Okay. First of all, if you're interested in learning about all the other crazy ideas for warp drives, please check out our book Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe and b there's an actual paper where someone proposes a warp drive. Is this like a sub genre of physics papers? This is a sub genre of physics papers, and it's one that's growing recently. People are working on all sorts of crazy stuff exploring the potential consequences for faster than light travel or closed timelike curves. In general relativity, a lot of people are exploring sort of the edges of the fabric of gr what it can predict and how it can be manipulated. This is a paper that came out more than ten years ago, so it's been around for a while. Oh man, that means that somebody has had ten is to be working on this. This is not the fringe, right, This is sort of like between the mainstream and the fringe. But these ideas are being taken seriously, and I mean this paper is correct. If you could bend space in this way. It would accomplish that, but you know, of course, there's no guarantee that you can bend space in this way. Einstein's equations say if you have an arrangement of matter and energy in a certain way, they tell you how space bends. This is sort of going the opposite direction. It says, Oh, I want space to bend this way, what arrangement of mass and energy do I need? And unfortunately, the answer and the paper is you need some weird stuff like negative energy matter like matter with negative mass, which we don't know if it exists in the universe. Well, okay, let's take a step back though first and maybe step through this idea so that you're saying that one way to do a warp drive is to somehow, like if I want to get from here to another star, one way to do that is to squish, like move forward, but squish the space in front of me so that it's smaller, shorter, so that if I take like one step, I'm actually going ten thousand steps or something like that. And in the meantime, to like make up for it, I have to expand the space behind me, because I'll step through this crunch space, and then I have to let it go back to normal behind me. Well, you don't want to actually step through the scrunch space because then you get torn apart by these tidal forces. But what you can do is have a little bubble, and that bubble can get closer to your destination. So imagine, for example, you step into our work bubble and then you squeeze the space between you and Alpha centauri and then you step out of the work bubble. It's sort of like stepping onto a moving walkway. So you step sideways into the bubble, you can press the space in front of you, and then you step sideways out of the bubble again. So you're saying the bubble moves. It's the bubble moves. Yes, So you don't actually go through crunch space. You don't go through crunch space. You don't want to. Like that space is extraordinarily curved and you would feel very strong forces. So in this version the warp bubble, you don't actually go through crunch. The bubble itself moves right. And space can do this kind of thing. Space can distort, it can bend, you can twist, you can get reconnected, all sorts of crazy stuff. I see like you sort of. I guess I'm controlled visualizing this bubble. So like, inside the bubble is regular space that is comfortable for me. But just outside of the bubble, you're saying space is crunch and then somehow the bubble moves, but I do to move, or the bubble moves, but I stay in place. That's right. You have an inertial frame inside the bubble, so you're not moving relative to the bubble, but the bubble is moving relative to the rest of space. And that's accomplished also because there's a part of space behind you that's expanding. So that's what this bubble does, is it compresses the space in front of you and expands the space behind you. I don't need to move, like, wouldn't the bubble move away from me or past me? You're inside the bubble and so you have no velocities, no forces on you relative to the bubble. The whole bubble moves, including you. WHOA, it's almost um. I guess you're trying to go on a train track and you're what you're like, you're scrunching all the tracks in front of you. Yes, it's a lot like sitting on a train. Right on a train, you don't move relative to the train. The train moves relative to the track. So that's what you're trying to accomplish here. I see, the bubble is a train, and space is a track, and I'm scrunching the track in front of the train, and then the train moves through the scrunch space. And one complication is, of course, how do you get space to scrunch in front of you and to expand behind you, because it has to scrunch ahead of you before you get there. And here's a key problem is that you inside the bubble can't do anything to the universe outside the bubble while you're inside. So if you need space to be scrunched in front of you, you need some sort of space scrunching device in front of you which either has to travel faster than the speed of light. If you know how to do that already, you don't need a war bubble, or you need to like lay a track and advance somebody's like go before you and build the space crunching track between you and alpha centaur, you know, or to accomplish this scrunching right, Oh, I get it, yeah, Because you're in the train moving like you can't reach out, like you can't have an arm sticking out of the train ahead at like seventy miles ahead of you and scrunch the tracks in front of you. Because if you get an arm out that far, you might as well just hop on the arm and go forward. Maybe the rock can do that, right, Yeah, with the help of John Cena, one of them could toss the other. There you go. Now it's a train highest Rescue movie. Throw John Cena from the train. Yeah. Okay, So you're saying, in this version of a warp drive, which is kind of like the front runner in terms of the theory in the community, you kind of have to like build a track ahead of time, sort of like a like a tunnel almost in space before you can war drive. It's not like you can just warp drive anywhere. You have to lay down this magical track. Yeah, it's sort of like a hyperloop. And let's clarify, Like the idea that's out there is if you can bend space in this way, you can move a warp bubble through space. The question is, then how do you bend space in this way? And one idea people have is make this basically like hyperloop train track that bends space and find matter with negative energy density to bend the space behind you. There might be other ways to accomplish this curvature. That's just one idea how to accomplish this particular curvature of space that would effectively give you a warp bubble. But I guess I would this work. So let's say we lay out this hyperloop or warp drive loop from period of office and TORI, and along the this tunnel there's some sort of like device or material that somehow like puts out negative mass energy. Is that what you're saying. Yeah, the whole warp bubble needs to be surrounded by weird negative energy density to separate the bubble from the rest of the universe so we can move faster than light. There's a strange connection between negative energy density and faster than light travel. But the theorists tell me that this is not something that's actually well understood even theoretically, and we have no idea how to make something with negative energy density anyway. Right, But but I guess what I'm saying is that it would need to be somehow selectively activated, right like this tunnel would need to be lined with this negative energy matter or generators, and then you need to sort of like activate them as your bubble goes along. I think that's true, because what you want is space to be curved right in front of your bubble and space to be expanded right behind your bubble. And so it sounds like a pretty complicated engineering problem. A little bit, A little bit. There's definitely some details to work out here, although you know, they have made some progress. And the first generation of the idea they thought it would take as much matter as is contained in the observable universe to accomplish this squeezing of space. Now they've got it down to like some fraction of the mass in Jupiter, So you know, that's progress. Yeah, that's a huge amount. That's a huge difference, huge savings. That's right. We've broadened down from seventy two good jillion dollars to only sixteen jillion dollars. That's right. Yeah, we've gone from the rock salary to um the actor's salary. But I think you're what you're saying is that the main problem is that it depends on this weird thing, which is something with negative energy, which we don't even know if it's possible, or we have no idea how to do. There's only one scenario in general relativity, as far as we understand it, where space can expand, and that's if you have a lot of potential energy inside some quantum field in space. And we talked about this as a potential source for inflation in the very early universe. When the universe did exactly that, it expanded and the in phloton field with a lot of potential energy might have accomplished that. And currently today the universe is expanding fairly gently thanks maybe to the cosmological constant, which might be a source of potential energy in space driving dark energy. So we do see that the universe is expanding, space can expand, although controlling dark energy is not even an engineering problem, it's just fantasy. WHOA all right, I have a question about that. And also let's getting too whether you can use maybe warm holes instead to get out of a black hole. But first let's take another quick break. All right, we're trying to get out of a black hole, Daniel, and we can't afford the Rock or John Cena to help us here, being on a train low budget black hole escape Heist movie. That's right, we only have enough money to fill up Jupiter. It makes me kind of wonder, like, you know, you're talking about dark energy and how it's expanding space and whether or not we can maybe harness them of this negative energy that might exist to maybe create a warp drive. Could could just use dark energy or this negative energy to just basically like punch a hole in a black hole? You know what I mean? Like, could we just you know, use somehow theoretically, is it possible to manipulate this and just kind of create an escape hatch potentially, And that's sort of what a warp drive might be doing. Now. In our universe, there is dark energy. Space is expanding, and so, for example, black holes that exist out there in our universe right now, they're existing in the context of space that is expanding underneath them. And people write to me sometimes they ask, like can dark energy pull apart a black hole? As far as we know, black holes do survive dark energy because they're out there in the universe and they've lasted for billions of years. And the effect of dark energy, remember, is to expand space. And so fundamentally, if you have a homogeneous if you're like expanding all of space. At the same time you're just stretching the black hole. You're just moving the event horizon further out. It's like expanding the black hole. Nothing that was inside the event horizon ever gets out of the event horizon. If you're smoothly expanding all of space. What we're talking about what the warp drive though, is like, could you expand just part of space? Could you like distort it, make like this weird bubble or divot, so the event horizon actually like changes, it's no longer a sphere, and you can like slip it behind you. You can get out from inside the black hole. Yeah, it's theoretically possible, right, like because the black hole is bending space itself, but then you're sort of bending it back in certain places. It's not even theoretically possible. I would say it's like maybe potentially theoretically possible. There's a lot of issues there, right, but maybe theoretically possible. It's still theoretical possible. It may be theoretically possible. Expanding the space behind you can sort of like move you further from the center of the black hole. Right if you specifically expand that space that's between you and the singularity and not the spaces between you and the event horizon. Then you're sort of moving closer to the event horizon. If you do that enough, you might be able to pop out of the event horizon. But according to some particle theories that I talked to, if you do that, then you don't really have a black hole. To them, a black hole is something with an event horizon that nothing can escape from. And so if you like construct a warped tunnel out of a black hole, they say, well, it wasn't really a black hole. They're purists. I see, they're black hole purists. They're like, well, if you can escape one, then it's not a black hole. Yeah, exactly. But the bigger problem is an engineering one, which is how do you build the track. If you're inside a black hole and you want to warp bubble out of the black hole, then you need this warp drive track, this hyperloop we talked about, this construction of this crazy matter to get you out, And if you're inside, then you can't go out to build this track, so you sort of can't build your way out of it. I see, if it's possible, then it's not impossible, So you could sort of do it if you built the warp drive track in advance, Like you see a black hole, you build this warp drive track into the black hole, then you can jump in and ride it back out. But the particle theory purist would say, well, when you built that warp drive track, you sort of like created a divot in the black hole already and you didn't really go into the event horizon. Yeah, it's like you punched a hole in it. Uh, and you went into the whole of the black hole, but you didn't actually touch the black hole exactly. So either you bend in advance and you're sort of sitting in the dip in the event horizon, or you go inside, but then you can no longer build your way out, and like, that's a loophole in the loophole of the loophole. There are a lot of holes in this theory, Daniel, And there are a lot of holes, And we haven't even talked about wormholes yet. Yeah, let's get into our last kind of hole for a black hole, because that would make it all whole, and that is a wormhole, which is maybe another possible way to get out of a black hole. And so Daniel, we've talked about warmholes before and how there may be at the center of black holes. I'm actually more optimistic about the wormhole approach than the warp driver approach. You're more optimistic, more optimistic, less optimistic. But let's let's let's find out. Well, there's lots of different varieties of wormholes. So the variety of wormholes that are inside a black hole, sometimes called an Einstein Rosen bridge, is a tricky concept. Some theorists say it's just a mathematical artifact of choosing a weird core in it system. It can't actually exist in nature. But the idea is to connect black hole interiors. So you have like two black holes and they have the same singularity and the same interior, the same event horizon, even though one is in one place in the universe and the other is in another place in the universe. That's not very useful. It just means that if you fell into a black hole, turns out you're inside two black holes. But you could change black holes in case you get bored of one, you know, kind of like during the pandemic, you just change rooms you work in for some variety. But you're just still home, man, You didn't go anywhere. That's the problem, al right. So that kind of warmhole wouldn't help you. There's another kind of wormhole. You have a black hole where the singularity is connected to a different kind of object called a white hole, which is like the opposite of a black hole. Black Holes something you fall into and can't escape. A white hole is something you can shoot out of, but you can't ever go into. So these are like one way tunnels in space. Theoretically, nobody's ever seen a white hole or a wormhole, but in principle, you could fall into that black hole and then get shot out the other side of the white hole, right like one of them. The black hole is this hole that's sucking stuff in, and the white holes is presumably other point in space that's just viewing out stuff constantly. Yeah, And so you could go into the black hole and you couldn't leave the black hole itself. You couldn't pass through the event horizon the other direction, but you are no longer inside the black hole, so that sort of counts, yeah, I guess, And and you would be you would shoot out of the white hole, I guess on the other side wherever that is. But that's not so useful again because you don't know where that is. That doesn't solve the problem of I've fallen into a black hole and I can't get up right. Well, it does solve it. You just end up somewhere else, have no idea where you are. Yeah, that's true. Oh I'm in the other side of the universe. Yeah, it looks like I'm still going to miss much. And I said, still can't tell anybody exactly. But a more exciting possibilities to you sort of a generic wormhole, a wormhole that doesn't require a black hole. A wormhole most generically, it's just a connection between two points in space. Let's say these two points are effectively next to each other. If you're in one spot, you can just sort of step to the next one. And these two points in space don't have to be like normally near each other. You can have this point in our solar system just be connected to that point in another solar system. We don't know how to build a wormhole like that, but theoretically they are possible. We think they can exist. So the idea is, maybe you're inside a black hole, you somehow make this kind of wormhole appear, so you can just sort of like step through it and appear on the other side of the wormhole. I see. So you're saying that not all wormholes happen at the at the center of black holes. Like, theoretically I could have a wormhole right next to me, right here and not die, but it would just be this weird arrangement where like I stick my hand in to the wormhole and it's connected to you know, another point in space where you'd see my hands sticking out. Its sound is like totally bonker science fiction. But it's a solution to Einstein's equations, and again we don't know how to make it happen. Keeping one open also requires negative energy density matter, which again may not exist. But if it did, then the wormhole itself is not inconsistent with the rules of general relativity. And recently there's been some progress in understanding black holes that suggests that this might really be possible. Interesting, So, okay, so maybe step me through the solution here. You're saying that I would maybe if I'm able to create a wormholes, I would create one that starts here next to me, and and the other side of the wormhole is like maybe just inside the event horizon of a black hole. Is that what you're saying, Like, so I stick my hand in, and my hand would be inside of a black hole, but I'm able to pull it out. Yeah. So you stick your hand in and you have your phone inside the black hole, you take a bunch of pictures, you pull it back out. You have pictures from the inside of a black hole. Right that, they're all black. Obviously, I think my phone has any kind of special you know, graviton detecting sensors that's coming out in the next Apple iPhone. I think, Oh, I see, Yeah, I think that Samsung one is already there's an app for that. Yeah, they keep sticking more and more cameras and the back of your phone. Now that sounds like crazy science fiction, and it probably is because we don't know how to build a wormhole. We don't know how to make that happen. To say, I want a wormhole from here to the center of that black hole. But in principle, there's nothing preventing us except that we don't know how to do it. However, recently we talked about whether maybe information can leak out of a black hole, whether maybe like there's a quantum entanglement between the Hawking radiation generated the event horizon and the stuff that fell into the black hole a long time ago. And theorists now think that that quantum entanglement might be accomplished by wormholes, that there might effectively be information wormholes that connect the inside and the outside of black holes, and so potentially, if you're inside a black hole, there are already these wormholes you need to get information out. Other theorists think that this is complete and utter nonsense. Wait, what you're saying that maybe wormholes are like, maybe black holes already have wormholes in them. That Hawking radiation, this faint, these faint emission of particles, that the edge of black holes might be leaking out information that fell into the black hole. Remember the black hole information paradox is, Information can't be deleted from the universe, but stuff falls into a black hole and then it evaporates where that information go. Recently, people think, oh, probably that information is encoded in the Hawking radiation that was admitted, which means they must be somehow quantum entangled, and they suspect that's done with wormholes. So we think that nature maybe already has wormholes from the inside to the outside of black holes, so that information can leak out before the black hole disappears. Other theorists think that this is complete and utter nonsense. So you might not be able to stick your hand inside a black hole, but you might be able to like transform it and into information, send it inside the black hole, and then send it back somehow, like some sort of weird wormhole based information teleportation. Right, But I guess what aren't these Hawking radiation? You know, isn't it sort of like random on the surface of a black hole. It's not like there's a hole in the black hole where stuff is radiating. It's like it sort of happens randomly all over the black hole. Well that's what Hawking thought. Hawking thought that the radiation was random, that it didn't reveal anything about what happened inside the black hole. It was only dependent on the black hole's mass and temperature. But these recent developments suggests that it might not be random, that it might actually be indicating information about what's inside the black hole. But it's all very exploratory and none of that is final. It's like maybe theoretically possible. I'd say two maybees maybe but even if it is possible, it's not something you could use to get out of the black hole, right, Like it maybe allows information to come out, but like sticking a whole Daniel through, it might not be possible. But what am I other than information? Right? If you could tear you apart, read all my quantum information, send that information outside the black hole, reassemble me, that would be me getting out of a black hole. Well, but you would still be in the black hole like that, that version of you is still stuck in there. We just get a fresh copy of you, know, because when you read the quantum information of something, it destroys it. That's the no cloning theorem that says that you can read and transmit quantum information, but doing so destroys the original. So it would be sort of like beaming out of a black hole. And so then there's a philosophical question about whether the originally was killed and the new you is actually you or not. But your information will have been teleported out of the black hole. Well that's wild. But that again, that's assuming you can somehow control this hawking radiation, and we don't even know if it happens. Like you can establish like a channel for it, right, Like it could just be happening all over the black hole. Yeah, and nobody even seeing Hawking radiation. So this is like beyond theoretical. This is speculation on speculation to the speculation squared. I see. But I guess even if you warm hole into a black hole, wouldn't you get destroyed at some point? Or would you say, you sort of warm hole to a point inside the black hole where you can still survive. Yeah, really big black holes, you can survive near the event horizon without getting pulled apart by the title forces. So that is potentially possible. Although whether you can assemble the delicate machinery you need to read your entire quantum state and teleported back out of the black hole. Yeah, that seems like a stretch. It just booked a hole in the whole of the whole of the loophole. Holy, holy moly, Holy Dwayne Johnson all right, well, um, it sounds like, um, maybe there is a way to get out of a black hole. You know, maybe it won't be through a war drive, although if we figure out negative energy and how to make it, maybe it might be possible, And it might be possible through a warm hole although it's um it's gonna be pretty hard and we have no idea how to do it. It's gonna be tricky, but might be that getting information or people or phones out of black holes moves from the category of totally impossible to really impractical. We don't see how this is going to happen, but maybe in a thousand years, which is a big step forward, very special thanks to bar Action Scheney, who consulted on this episode. Any inaccuracies in the physics are our responsibility, not his. Yeah, and then we'll take a big step back when all the physicists say, wow, but that's not a black hole. Then you can get something out of it. It stops being a black hole if you can get if you can get anything out of it, that's right. That's the most annoying answer possible. Actually, there's a loophole. Will actually your loophole means it's not a black hole. But then if there's a loophole, then it's not a loophole anymore. I'm going to escape that loophole. I don't even know what I just said. All right, Well, something to think about, and maybe there's hope for those of us who plan to go into a black hole in the future, or for those of us who just desperately want to know what is the fundamental nature of space and time? Very special thanks to Baracra Scheney, who consulted on this episode. Any inaccuracies in the physics are our responsibility, not his. How does this universe actually work at the lowest level? What really is the fabric unreality? The answer is waiting for us inside a black hole. Yeah, just make sure you have a good getaway car and the latest phone. Well, thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed that. See you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcast from my heart Radio visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Ye