Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Wormholes

hey a special thanks to our favorite new thing in the world blowforge for sponsoring this video [Music] hey neil it's that time again uh yes it is i'm always excited when it's that time so i got something for you it's it's comes up all the time in science fiction and i get asked about it and you know what it is it's wormholes oh god yes okay because people we're done with black holes time to move on exactly right and then of course there's all the people who think that perhaps the other side of a black hole is the wormhole and i've heard that kind of stuff talking yeah yeah so let me start off with just a quick story i told this story before but now it has a place to land perfectly all right so some years back in the early days of twitter i was at an airport and i think it was north carolina's charlotte's charlotte airport it's a huge airport and i had to go from a big plane to a little plane and i had my luggage i thought i'd be good and not have to check my luggage but then i realized now i have to carry the unchecked luggage between two very widely separated points in the airport so i'm there and i swear it was like miles all right so i get to the gate and i thought i'd be clever and so i tweeted can't wait until we have wormholes and that way all gates are adjacent to one another hmm okay you just sort of stepped through a door there's the other thing that's the other gate everything's connected by so i thought i was being clever and then someone cleverer than me replies in my twitter comment threat dr tyson the day we have wormholes you won't need airports that's true yeah whoa i just got totally served on that one it's a wormhole just so people can understand it it's a if you look at space and time we've learned ever since einstein in 1916 when he advanced the general theory of relativity which is the modern understanding of gravity we learned that gravity is the curvature of space time space time yeah and what you do is when you are falling towards something you are simply sliding along the fabric of your space-time towards whatever it was that you're saying is attracting you and so it's an interesting it's a different construct from just action at a distance you're there i'm here we have gravity we pull each other and that's it it's a whole other thing going on and if you think of space and time as fabric right then you can distort the fabric with the force of gravity captain i believe there's been a distortion in the space-time continuum exactly so if you if you ask yourself can i distort it in interesting ways that might benefit what i want to do in the universe so for example i can get you around among the planets using the rockets that we've got and i can get you there before you die all right so moving around the solar system takes days to the moon months to mars years to the to the outer planets and decade you know maybe one or two decades to pluto if you're looking to put that keep that on your list if you wanted to go to a non-planet if you want to go to nonprofit the chuck is rubbing it i didn't rub that one in chuck did i i thought i was being charitable and even included it in my thing and yes gotta start the fight if you want to go to the uh to the uh the lost member of the kuiper belt that shouldn't even be invited to the party yeah you know what are you gonna do right some people still have not gotten over that joke be sensitive to them so what happens is if you want to visit other stars then every way we know to get there exceeds the human life expectancy so you have to find a way to shorten that journey knowing that the speed of light is not just a good idea it's the law right all right there's a speed limit to how fast you can move in that fabric of space and time the nearest star is four light years away at the speed of light you watch someone go at the speed of light it'll take them four years to do that you say okay well let's just do that then but we're nowhere near the speed of light all right this is you know so so it's hopeless and that's the nearest star so you imagine let's is there a way maybe you can poke a hole through or open up a hole in the fabric of space and time in a way that it's curved such that you can take a shortcut from one location to another nice so imagine if you had a sheet that so compress everything to a sheet because otherwise it's hard to think of bending four dimensions like so our universe is now a sheet so i take that sheet normally i'd have to travel the full length of the sheet to get from a to b and i want to do that before the tv commercial okay and so what do you do you warp the space and then open up a hole from one side to the other where the two places are close in this higher dimension right and by doing so you basically take this portal through come out the other side unfold the paper the page and you've traveled all that distance in no time at all it basically and the no time part is well how how much did you warp the space in order to do that how and if you warp it a lot it can happen basically instantly like walking through a doorway or if it's warped a little less then it'll take you a little longer but in all cases your effective speed is way greater than the speed of light because you basically cheated and went across the other side now here i'm doing this with my hands and things and you told me you solved that problem you have warped space in your living room i did and so a couple years ago you did that explanation not on camera but we were just at the museum and you took a piece of paper and you drew two dots on the paper then you joined the two dots and you put a pencil through it and you were like that's your wormhole travel so i with my new favorite thing in the world it's called glowforge it's a 3d laser printer which allows you to cut all kinds of things which i actually made the fabric of space that's the black side right and then just for demonstration i made you know this other side which is red wait wait wait you gave space a black side i gave it that's right finally you making sure finally space has a black side okay and then for contrast i painted this other side red but here's the cool thing i took your demonstration okay so here's that sheet okay and then you bend this right and then just and now what i have is my wormhole man check that out and just like you said if i warp space closer then my time travel is diminished but if i warp it less i'm still traveling a shorter distance but as you can see it's a little longer i'm so into this neil i took video of it and everything oh really i mean i made video of this it is the coolest thing i have now i'm kind of a crafty person like i like painting and like sanding chairs and paint you know like i look at etsy i'm not gonna lie just to see what people are doing but like i'm not so crafty that i would ever make anything for somebody but i'm making everything for everybody you will never get a gift from me that didn't come from a glow forged [Music] i'm dead serious that is how cool this thing is okay every single every single striation every single cut that you see here was made by the 3d laser printer what you're saying what you're implying is since the damn thing can make wormholes out of the space-time continuum of the universe yes you can make any damn thing i am i'm telling you i am fascinated by this thing i am in love with this thing so anyway that's the wormhole that you just talked about okay that might be the only wormhole we get to have because why what i didn't tell you is that it's one thing to have a black hole that all space and time collapses on itself right to a singularity but what you now want is a hole through the fabric of space that remains open and the configuration of matter and energy to create a hole is unstable against collapse oh no so in other words you can have a stable black hole there that's sucking in it you know distorting the fabric of space and time but a wormhole requires actively holding it up so that while you're in there it doesn't collapse on you whereas you made one that's stable see we got to learn the secret engineering of that so basically people what you're looking at right here is the only stable wormhole in the universe you're welcome you're welcome that's all i'm saying [Music] so what did you do you clip on it's a spiral shape so you clipped it on together so it's it hooks in and then you get it's like a little accordion so yeah it's a spiral shape and then all i did was so the design as you can see here has a small hole in the middle the black hole and then i just put a little peg in there it actually cut a peg that i could put in there this thing did yeah it actually cut a peg that i could put in here this thing so the thing is a black hole most understandings of a black hole have you dying if you fall in if you can pry open a worm because you end up at the singularity right smooshed and spaghettified and stretched and and broken but a wormhole if it's opened and maintained it could do one of several things it could be a whole to another part of our own universe which is what you've just done because you you curved your universe and you're just going from one location to another or you can imagine wormholing out of our universe into another universe so in that case you'd have to print two of those and have two of their their sort of coily um whole structures intersect and that way people in one universe would go through that and show up in another universe now the cool part is if you break the wormhole and collapse it then you left your universe never to return again i'm on it i'll be right back wait wait are the bell collectors that close to your door how great believe it i i'm in so much debt i'm sure there's bill collectors in the next dimension as well they're like we've been we've been waiting for you chuck [Laughter] i'm free exactly what's it called extradition i guess from extradition yeah inter-dimensional extradition there you go cool cool yeah so so wormholes are fascinating and of course they show up in so many different movies all right uh in bill and ted's excellent adventure their their time traveling phone booth is basically a wormhole right oddly in the movie back to the future they're not they don't appear to be traveling they are it is a wormhole but you know it's a it's a it's a portal rather than an actual extended wormhole they just exit one time and enter into another right and one flaw but i'll give it to them because they did so much else right in uh back to the future is when they leave the parking lot and end up respecting the future one they uh leave the part at 88 miles an hour right and they show up in the cornfield in the farm fields that would become that that um that strip mall what they didn't factor in is that between those two times earth would have moved in its orbit you can't only travel back in time you have to also travel back in space if you want to land where you expect to land from where you left so if he would have time traveled back and landed and in the vacuum of space and they all would have died and the movie would have lasted 15 minutes well now yeah nobody's seeing that neil nobody's going to see that movie so the point is your wormhole if it's going to go anywhere you want it it's got to go somewhere otherwise it's not only in time but in space all right you want to make sure that it works out that way um so also is that movie in time bandits that was a um what's that from the 80s that one was the monty python crew so that one was wormholes in the movie contact jody foster basically goes through a wormhole and so you know it's kind of fun cinematically to display one of these to portray them as you're going through and it's basically like a tunnel and and you know in a way maybe the old tv show time tunnel was an earlier concept of a wormhole although at that time i don't think we had the term yet for it so by the way one of the earliest statements about the existence of wormholes was the idea that if a black hole absorbs everything that comes near it let's let's take a look at the math surrounding the black hole and you find out that there are two solutions to that equation that gives you the black hole one of them absorbs everything and one emits everything right okay so something that emits everything at all times is a time reversed black hole so you can ask hmm where does everything go that enters a black hole maybe it's what's coming out on the other side which we'll call a white hole how would you connect them you connect them with a wormhole all right so wormholes have very high utility if you're trying to think about fun and interesting and useful uh bendings of the fabrics of space and time and you've got a damn printer that'll make that every day and i was gonna say you could do all that or you could just get a glow forged you could you could do all that or you could just go get a glow forge and you could make your own black hole and your own wormhole can you make one big enough so that you could go through it and then you're gone so so if the next explainer video i say chuck gone fishing you know there you go yeah so uh i have to tell you i'm looking forward to uh figuring out first of all i think of everything now when i see stuff i'm like can i glowforge that that honestly is my new that's how they smell okay that's how that's how cool this thing is so i'm hoping that uh we will have the opportunity to talk about more stuff maybe that we can sponsor this let's get them to sponsor this oh that well yeah that without a doubt i mean let's do that they better don't tell anybody even yeah i i have to say though um glowfords you saved my christmas that's all i can say if if you know me you know what you're getting all right our first explainer video where chuck now has toys yes okay all right chuck we got to end it there all right all right uh that's been fun talking about uh wormholes and and like i said try to stay in this universe we we have more work for you okay okay yeah i might become bi-universal that's all i can say buy universal yeah man all right this has been star talk an explainer video i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist keep looking [Music] you

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 282,932

Rating: 4.9391284 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, chuck nice, glowforge, glowforge 3d laser printer, wormholes, wormhole, wormholes explained, gravity, curvature of spacetime, curvature of spacetime and gravity, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Contact, Back to the Future, Time Bandits

Id: 1fFrpBJDMJo

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Dizl89]

Hello, I am not formally educated in any field relating to these topics but I wish to ask two questions in terms of sharing food for thought. 1. How feasible is creating a whirlpool in space-time? Like in water we can create a nice controlled pathway from A to B(top to bottom[up and down or as I like to think of in terms of “In and Out” or vise versa]). Instead of water of course we have space-time and for the connecting “water-slide” doorway. 2. Can we quantum-connect two “beacons” to be placed at a designated spot yet? Because i assume the rest just figures itself out lol. Asking for a friend. Could there be a missing link for light and torsion waves? ... sound? ... google can’t answer these questions lol. Otherwise love the videos thanks