Black Holes, Worm Holes, and the Origin of Everything

26:45and see how well does it explain things that have not been explained in the past. Does it raise internal contradictions? Does it have features that are more powerful than a preexisting idea? And you keep going through the list of different virtues of a model or an idea. And if it has enough virtues and passes enough confrontations with observation, then you might call it a theory. It's funny because people say, oh, it's just your theory or like, oh, evolution, that's just a theory. But in physics, remember, there's no way to prove something in physics. I can't prove that the earth is a perfect sphere.

27:28In fact, it's not a perfect sphere. It has some distortions to it. But I can make the case that it's more spherical than it is flat. And in doing so, I have to provide evidence for that claim. And then someone else can come actually no it's not perfectly spherical it has these distortions and it's actually slightly shaped like a pear and it has these different um properties so only by doing that do we have you know a closer and closer zeroing in on the quote truth but we can't very different from mathematics or you know computer science or something you can make a proof in mathematics which is not refutable unless you know the laws of logic are wrong and then in which case you're trying to use the laws of logic to prove that the laws of logic are not consistent.

28:17It's interesting, though, because math, everything derives from some first principles, right? So mathematics relies on the basic concepts of set theory. And from set theory, we can build a set of axioms that explains all of math. But if we weren't using set theory, and I don't know why we wouldn't, the rules would be different, and we'd be proving different things. But set theory conveniently describes how we count basically and matches that perfectly. That's right. Yeah. So with the, with physics, like it seems like the first principles sometimes change. So we had, you know, Aristotle, but then we had Isaac Newton, then we had Einstein, then we had quantum mechanics.

28:57And it's sort of like the height of creativity. Physics is very creative in the sense that we have, there's proving things in physics and then we assume they're true. But then there's another group of physicists that come along and say, you know what, I'm going to change the rules for a little while because we don't really know what the real first principles are. Yeah, I wouldn't say that they're guided by a desire to change the rules. It's that either there's two different ways that scientific discoveries happen. One is that we discover something serendipitously. We look at Mercury and we say, well, that's weird.

29:30Mercury is moving in this weird way and it's not predicted or explainable using the theory of universal gravitation of Isaac Newton. So then somebody would say, I'm going to explain that effect or retrodict, not predict it, but retrodict it. I'm going to say that they're - I didn't know there was a word for that. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, or postdiction instead of prediction. In other words, you knew that this was a problem and even Newton knew it was a problem. And, you know, they, they were quite astute even in the 17 and 1800s. But, but they didn't know the resolution of it because you can't predict it.

30:05You cannot explain, rather, why Mercury behaves in this strange way using Newtonian gravity alone. You need a new conception of gravity, which is what Einstein came along and did. And then there's another thing that can happen, which is that you can have a theory and then have a conclusion that comes from it that is then a prediction. So it actually happened with Newtonian gravity. there was a motion of the planet Uranus. By the way, did you know that NASA has commissioned me to change the name of the planet Uranus because it's so embarrassing that astronomers are impossibly tormented by the fact that saying Uranus has brought shame and embarrassment upon us?

30:54It's true. It was a horrible name. So I've actually come up with a new name for it and I'm prepared to reveal that on the James Altucher show right now. Well, what is the new name? Erectum. Okay, but wait, you know why it fails? Why? Because all the planets except Earth are named after the Roman names of the Greek gods, right? So Mercury, Venus. Mercury is Hermes in Greek mythology. Venus is Aphrodite. Mars is Aries. Saturn, actually. is Saturn Cronus in Greek mythology? Jupiter is Zeus. Yeah. Neptune is Poseidon. Uranus is Hephaestus, I believe. Uh-huh. Pluto is Hades. Yeah. It's not a planet anymore, I guess.

31:42I don't know. Yeah, that's right. So when, sometime in the mid 1700s, people looked at the planet Uranus and its orbit, and they were looking at it, And they noticed like sometimes in the air it would be like a little too far to the left and sometimes it was a little too far to the right. And they have great historical data for it. And just using Newton's laws of motion, the universal gravitation, an astronomer named Le Verrier, his name is Le Verrier, a French astronomer, predicted that there would be another planet beyond the orbit of Uranus and it would be pulling and slightly tugging on or delaying the orbit via its gravitational impact on Uranus.

32:22And he actually told somebody where to look, and they discovered it exactly where he predicted it, purely based upon the laws of Isaac Newton. So how come they didn't apply that same idea to Mercury? Like, what happened with Mercury? Oh, my dear friend, you're anticipating what I'm about to say next. So the same guy said, hey, this is great. And if you think about it, even though we can see Neptune, and they did discover it, it was kind of the first prediction of dark matter, right? In other words, they were saying there was some unseen matter that had a gravitational pull on something that we could see, visible light, in the form of the planet Uranus.

32:59And using this prediction, they were able to recover the position of the dark matter, which then you could see actually gives off some light. And that's the planet Neptune. So that was the discovery of Neptune. And so the same guy was a smart guy. So he said, well, this worked really well. maybe there was uh there's another planet inside the orbit of mercury closer to the sun that's doing the same thing and the reason that we haven't seen it is because it's so close to the sun it's blinded and we're blinded to its presence and so it was called vulcan so the planet vulcan was was predicted by the same guy using the same technique technique and that's totally wrong there is no planet closer to the sun than mercury but so in that case dark matter hypothesis was wrong and what was really needed was kind of like a version of string theory or you know some new form of physics to augment the laws of Isaac Newton and that was the laws of general relativity that we were talking about earlier that was what Einstein came up with so you had to actually change the relationship of the laws of physics the underlying notion of space and time and their connectedness together in order to have a the correct explanation retrodiction for the orbit of Mercury.

34:09And that's in fact what happened. So what is then, what is specifically the reason Mercury is little off from Newtonian physics? So there's an effect of near very strong gravitational mass of objects like the sun that distorts space-time and causes slight indentations in a way that causes this advance of the orbit, you know, basically acts as an additional distortion, which then acts in distortion, meaning a curvature of space-time. All curvature of space-time is how we perceive the force of gravity. So there's an additional force of gravity due to the presence of the mass of the sun that's not encountered for as you get closer and closer to the sun's surface, you actually pick up an extra term, an extra amount of gravity or curvature of space-time that is not present in Newtonian gravity, specifically because gravity affects time as well as space.

35:14So you had to basically add the effect of gravity on time in order to explain the effect of gravity and mass on objects, like massive objects like the planet Mercury. If it didn't have an effect on time, then you wouldn't have this advanced, and therefore it was absent in Newton's laws. I'm still not quite sure I fully understand gravity's effects on time, but that's okay. But the question I have is, was Einstein aware that his theories could be applied to Mercury before he came? Like, did he use Mercury as something he was thinking about before he came up with the theory of relativity? Like, did he curve fit to make it work?

35:53No, no. He was definitely interested in this and this was the first and really the only thing that he could think of that could provide a test bed at this time in 1914 for the observed behavior of his theory. So his theory made a prediction, and that prediction would explain Mercury's behavior. And then later it was realized there were many, many other consequences of Einstein's general relativity, including the fact that when there's an eclipse of the sun, as there is in April 8th of this year, which will be visible from Texas all the way up to like Illinois and Buffalo, New York and everything.

36:34And that total solar eclipse provided an opportunity to view stars that were behind the sun and that were normally occluded by the brightness of the sun and rendered invisible. But during an eclipse, you can see stars and you can measure their positions. And there's an effect called gravitational lensing, where the gravity of the object, either a black hole or in this case, the sun, bends the position of where the starlight should be, just like it bends the trajectory of how the planet Mercury moves. And so Einstein predicted that as well. And he actually made a math mistake, but eventually he corrected it.

37:09And then in 1919, so over 100 years ago, it was confirmed that there was, in fact, this distortion of starlight by the mass of the sun. And this was the great discovery that eventually did win him the Nobel Prize, even though people didn't want to admit it. It was just too astounding of a discovery to neglect. And so he didn't win the Nobel Prize in 1905 when he came up with relativity itself, or even in 1915 when he came up with the general theory of relativity that describes gravity. He only won it after this 1919 discovery. In 1921, he won the 1921 Nobel Prize.

38:03Now, how come his theories don't explain dark matter? Like, why is there dark matter? Why couldn't it be the case that what he's really predicting is that there's some super massive black hole, unbelievably massive, that's further than our ability to see it. It went in the other direction when the Big Bang happened, whatever. And that could be the reason why we experience some weird gravitational tendencies. Well, there are people that conjecture that dark matter is the manifestation of ordinary matter in another dimension. We don't have any evidence of that. Like, it could be just as if you have, you know, two different – imagine you have two different infinite chess boards, right?

38:49And on the chess boards are living some creatures that only are two-dimensional. They live in this flatland, as it's called. And then there's another chess board, and that chess board is separated by, you know, it could be one millimeter away. If they can't access, they can't move into that third dimension, either set of creatures on either two-dimensional chess board. They don't have any access to it using light. But if gravity could propagate from one chessboard to the other chessboard, then you could detect the presence of this other universe, this other flatland, merely by looking at the effects on objects in your own chessboard.

39:29So the pieces, you know, these flat two-dimensional chess pieces would move around differently because they might be tugged upon by the gravity of another object in another universe that's actually a very short distance away. And these have been explored by people like Lisa Randall and other people. There's no evidence for this, but that is exactly what you're saying is one of the explanations of dark matter. So this is why I think physics is, again, a super creative discipline because... Oh, sure. You have these things that are quote unquote real that are happening, but we don't really know why.

40:05And we have to just be as creative as possible, even crazy. Like there's other dimensions and the multiverse and every theory is basically crazy about the universe. But in physics, you're allowed to be as crazy as possible. Sometimes it's even better to be, oh, there's 12 dimensions and strings and all these things. and that's rewarded because good creativity backed somehow by a mathematical model that you might even make up to support your theory is rewarded in physics. Yeah, no, there are, you know, but the issue is that it might just be kind of an example of science fiction, right? I mean, there's more things you can theorize than you can actually expect to exist in reality.

40:51Well, and I have a question about that. I'm sorry to keep interrupting, but I get curious. So like the concept of a wormhole, is that science fiction? Is it theoretical or is it actual? And if it's actual, is it likely to be actual or is it actually actual? No, I mean, there's absolutely no evidence for wormholes. There is abundant evidence for black holes. Wormholes are sort of an interesting, almost cultural phenomenon more than they are a practical physics instance of something that could truly be measured or important in science. So there's no necessity for wormholes, but there is sort of a necessity for black holes because you have these objects of the endpoints of which are gravitationally collapsed objects and there's no way to escape.

41:45Once you start gravitational collapse of a massive star, as you suggested early on, it's basically a runaway positive feedback loop. There's no way to avoid collapsing to a singularity where there's absolutely infinite curvature. Now, you can't see the singularity because it's obscured by this event horizon, or if you like, any signature of it would be contained within the event horizon. and you cannot penetrate the event horizon. There's no escape velocity that allows you to get a signal out from inside the event horizon to any distance away from it. So like radio waves, light waves, every type of energy or frequency, the gravity is too strong for it.

42:30So the event horizon is the fictitious surface within which the escape velocity of any object, a baseball, a photon, a neutron, a crouton, is the speed of light. And then it only gets larger and larger as you get closer and closer to the singularity itself. So at the singularity, the escape velocity is infinite. And so it's impossible to generate anything that goes faster than the speed of light made of matter or energy. But, you know, all the more so is impossible, you know, to a much greater degree to do something that's infinite velocity. That would be the escape velocity at the singularity itself.

43:12so uh i forget if this is an einstein thing but if you go this if if an object goes the speed of light isn't it doesn't it get like infinitely massive or what's the yeah properties so so inside a black hole doesn't it just like is it is it infinitely massive there even though it's a singularity? So mass is the property that we associate with difficulty in moving something. So it's sort of like inertia. Mass is how much force do you have to apply to something to get it to travel with some acceleration? So if you have a mass, if you want to move something and you want it to have an extremely high acceleration, say start from zero and accelerate to the speed of light, then that you're taking some finite force and you're dividing by a very large number.

44:10The acceleration in F equals ma would be extremely large. So the mass would then be equal to zero. So the only way to get something to move, you know, infinite speed or, you know, faster than the speed of light would be if it had less than zero mass. So all photons, all particles of light in the vacuum, they travel at the speed of light. And then any massive object to travel to get to a given velocity, the equation that tells you how much energy you have to provide looks like 1 divided by the square root of 1 minus the velocity over the speed of light squared. So let's say you want to go at half the speed of light.

44:52So the energy you're going to have to provide that object is going to be many, many times its so-called rest mass. So you're going to have to supply energy more than all the matter energy that it has itself. And that E equals MC squared equation is the equation that gives the power of a nuclear weapon. In other words, the square of the speed of light is a tremendous number. And so, yeah, so any finite amount of mass will require an infinite amount of energy to travel at the speed of light. And anything that's almost zero mass or is zero mass, like a photon, can travel only at the speed of light.

45:29There's no way to slow down a photon in the vacuum. Why is the speed of light a limit? Like, is it like an arbitrary limit that happened to be just like magically the number and nothing can go faster than this? Well, so what ended up happening was in the 1850s, in the middle of the 1800s, Maxwell, James Clerk Maxwell, is a Scottish physicist. He was looking at the laws of electricity and magnetism and came up with these four equations called the Maxwell equations. And these are fought for what are called differential equations. And they describe how big an electric field does a charge produce, how big a magnetic field does a current produce.

46:12and then it was found that you could take these four equations and combine them in a certain way and you got two equations for the propagation of waves so that you'd have a field an electromagnetic field either a magnetic field or an electric field and then it would oscillate sinusoidally with a given frequency in time and a given period or wavelength in space So, and it was found that when he calculated what that speed is of a wave, which is a pretty straightforward thing to do in physics, the speed that emerged was a speed that was very, very close to the speed of light, as it was known at that time.

46:55The speed of light, it was very difficult to measure, but it was known it was greater than about 200 ,000 kilometers per second and less than 400 ,000. It's exactly 300 ,000 kilometers per second. But back then, so it was very suspicious close. And so he realized that actually these waves would then be propagating with a speed of the speed of light, as it was known at that time. But the problem was they didn't know about any waves that could propagate without there being some kind of medium, like an ocean or air in a room for a sound wave. They didn't know of any waves that could propagate without some kind of substance to support them.

47:35And so he conjectured this substance called the ether, that there must be some, you know, basically this invisible fluid that fills all of the universe called the ether. And then for about 50 years, people tried to see if they could detect the ether and they couldn't find that they found they couldn't detect the ether. And in fact, there was no way to even predict, you know, a value that would be consistent with what these measurements seem to indicate. So eventually we got rid of the ether and then it was a big puzzle how you could have, you know, light traveling always at the speed of light without any substance supporting it.

48:15And that's where Einstein comes in in 1905, 50 years later or so, and comes up with the notion that light only travels at the speed of light. And light is an electromagnetic wave. And no matter what reference frame you're in, no matter how fast you're moving, if you turn on a flashlight, that flashlight will always travel at the speed of light as observed by any observer in any of the reference frames. Even if you're traveling at half the speed of light, if that was even possible, and you turn on a flashlight, you will still see the light traveling away from you at the speed of light. And so it became really, the only way to have that happen was to say that when something is in motion, either the time for that observer slows down or the length as observed by those observers gets smaller.

49:04So either time gets longer or distances get shorter or both. And these effects were then measured in the laboratory. So you could actually measure things at very high speeds and measure how long they live for if it was a particle. And if it was moving very close to the speed of light or, you know, some very fast velocity, it would actually live longer than it would and decay at a later time than its brother in a jar sitting at stationary at rest on the earth's surface and these are all measured so how did he figure out though that light didn't need anything to propagate through it didn't need an ether um so einstein uh well so that was observed experimentally that there was no detectable ether and so the explanation for it is, you know, really relies on the generation of how electromagnetic waves are generated.

49:59So if you have a magnet and you have a wire, if you move that magnet inside the wire, it will generate an alternating electric current. The current will oscillate back and forth inside the wire. And that oscillation shows you there's a connection between current is just the motion of electric charges. And a magnetic field is a collection of, you know, is a collective property of matter that, you know, generates this magnetic field. And so as long as you have a magnetic field and it's moving, there's something moving in it, it will generate a changing electric current. And once you have a changing electric current, that generates a magnetic field.

50:42So if you have a current in a wire, it will generate a magnetic field, a constant magnetic field. And if you alternate the current of the wire, it will generate an alternating current. And then if you do both of those at the same time, moving a magnet and having an oscillating current, you can actually generate a self-sustaining electromagnetic wave. So it's sort of hard to visualize. It's like the vacuum has the potential at all points in time and in space to have a light wave or an electromagnetic field. And then in certain places, we call an excess of probability to find an electric magnetic field a charge or a magnetic field.

51:22So it's really kind of a self-propagating thing. It's almost like a wave that generates itself. You don't need, there's nothing waving. There's no medium. Like the vacuum is changing in the sense that it has a higher or lower chance of having this value for an electric or magnetic field. And we have observed that, and that's what's called quantum field theory. We've observed a quantum version of it. We have a classical version. Maxwell's a classical field theory and quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman, that's a quantum field. And we have a very good description of all the forces of nature except for gravity, both classically and quantum mechanically.

52:02But gravity, we don't have a quantum mechanical description of. So we don't know actually if there's a quantum analog of a photon. People call it the graviton, but we actually have never observed it. And even though gravity has many of the properties of light and other electromagnetic waves. That's right. Yeah. So gravity, you know, there's a funny meme where you look at, you know, It's like a picture of this guy Coulomb who discovered the laws of the equivalent law of universal gravitation but for electric fields. And then he's like looking over the shoulder on an exam of Isaac Newton who wrote down the law of inverse square law.

52:45And so, yeah, exactly. Both laws are inverse square laws and both laws have properties of wave-like solutions. So there's gravitational waves. There's electromagnetic waves. they're static but there are big differences between gravity and electricity and magnetism too the biggest one being that you have only attractive force of gravity but you can have negative or positive you know attractive or repulsive electromagnetism there's no anti-gravity there's no negative gravitational charges for example so and this is the theory that maybe gravity might be coming from a nearby universe so we don't so it looks like things in our universe, but we don't quite understand it because it's ultimately some property of another universe.

53:32Right. Yeah, that's right. So we're not sure about that. I mean, part of what my research is and looking for the, you know, the earliest signals from the Big Bang's origin, so-called inflation, would be to potentially discover the, you know, physical evidence for the origin of gravity in the sense that, you know, if inflation took place, there will be a quantum version of gravity called a graviton or, uh, and those gravitons will be produced in a way that we could detect them, uh, using the polarization properties of the cosmic microwave background. That's, that's what I study as we talked about, um, several times.

54:13So, you know, kind of what we're doing is looking for primordial waves of gravity in the early universe. That would be basically the oldest fossil thing you could see at all. So not 400 million years, like this black hole in this galaxy, if that's what it turns out to be. And not 400 ,000 years, like the cosmic microwave background, but actually something that's, you know, four trillions of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, like we talked about at my TED Talk here in San Diego, which was unbelievably almost 10 years ago this year james 2014 that's when we're on the same stage that's when we met that's when we met in the green room i feel like i must be going there must be greater gravitational pull on me because i feel like time's going faster or less gravitational pull on me yeah Time's going faster right now.

55:15That was the physics conversation. Fascinating stuff as always. And now we talk about more life, personal stuff in another episode. And it got kind of reflective for me. So stay tuned for the next version of Brian Keating.

55:38Thank you.