NARRATOR: Our infinite
universe is brimming with strange, violent, and
potentially life-transporting phenomena. Imagine cosmic portals where
objects could disappear, be ejected, or escape to some
other place in space or time. They are tickets to
oblivion, for the most part. Either you get shredded
in the black hole, you get transported to
another part of the universe in a wormhole, or
you get obliterated by the gusher of a white hole. NARRATOR: Blast off to the
warped side of the universe, as scientists search for black
holes, white holes, and worm holes. Are these frivolous
fantasies, or a science fact? [music playing] The universe is a
cosmic cornucopia of endless possibilities. Imagine a shuttle service
to anywhere in the cosmos. It's not aboard a
futuristic spaceship. It's a galactic ride through a
wormhole, a theoretical tunnel providing shortcuts
through space and time. Wormholes are a little
bit like a subway system that you might use in the city,
where you're going into a hole, you go through a
tunnel, and then you come out of the other
end through another hole, and then you've traveled
through the city. Same thing would be
possible in a wormhole to travel between different
points in the universe. [music playing] NARRATOR: Physicist Clifford
Johnson has contemplated the possibility of wormholes. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: The difference
between a wormhole and a subway system is that you're using the
wormhole to travel a greater distance than you would
if you were traveling in ordinary space. NARRATOR: In theory, a
wormhole has a throat connected to an entrance and exit
called mouths located in different parts of space. MARK MORRIS: A wormhole is
appealing, because we're limited by the speed of light. We can't get to the Andromeda
Galaxy in less than something like 600,000 years, even
moving at the speed of light. GREGORY BENFORD:
I keep wondering if the really next big
discovery in astronomy could be a wormhole. Not just because they're
fun for people like me, but because they could take
us to someplace that we can't plausibly ever
get any other way. [music playing] NARRATOR: Gregory Benford
has pondered the science and fiction of outer space. As both a physicist and author
of over 30 sci-fi novels, Benford has witnessed
fantastical theories become a reality. A lot of us would like to
know if wormholes really exist, or whether they're just another
mathematical construct thought up by Einstein, the genius. NARRATOR: Albert Einstein's
general relativity laws allow for the existence of wormholes. In 1930, Einstein and his
colleague, Nathan Rosen, calculated the
mathematics of one of these intergalactic
pipelines. It became known as the
Einstein-Rosen bridge. The wormhole is a solution
of Einstein's equations for general relativity
telling us how gravity works. They're hypothetical,
and what they do is they connect different
parts of space and time. NARRATOR: The Einstein-Rosen
mathematical wormhole arose from studying black holes. A black hole is
a region in space of extremely strong gravity. The gravity is so strong that
there is no way for objects that get too near to break away
from its gravitational pull. Nothing can escape a close
encounter with a black hole, not even light. MARK MORRIS: This
inverted fountain serves as a visual
analogy to what's going on around the black hole. If the bottom is the area
inside the event horizon, and the water falling into it
is analogous to gas that might fall into a black hole, imagine
yourself being a fish swimming around this region. Once you get down inside
this central portion, you're past the
point of no return. NARRATOR: But Einstein never
intended his wormhole as a tool for space travel. His wormhole is theoretically
created at some moment of time. It opens up briefly,
then pinches off. Anything that tries
to pass through it will get crushed when
it squeezes apart. The typical wormhole that you
write down in your equations and study is unstable. It'll vanish in an
incredibly short time. So what you need is some
means of holding it open. NARRATOR: After Einstein's
wormhole was determined unstable in the
1960s, little research was done on the concept. Then, the sci-fi film "Contact"
was released in the late 1990s. Based on the book by renowned
astronomer Carl Sagan, it proposed that a wormhole
could be used for space travel. [music playing] The book "Contact" and
then subsequently, the movie, was a nice place in fiction
that was accessible to everyone where you could see
the idea of a wormhole. So it was a nice way of getting
people interested in that idea all over again. ALEX FILIPPENKO: This was kind
of a very far-fetched idea that wasn't even considered very
seriously by many physicists until Carl Sagan decided
to write this book and try to make it as
realistic as possible. And since that time,
theoretical physicists studying Einstein's general
theory of relativity have considered travel
through wormholes. NARRATOR: Scientists began to
investigate whether there might be a type of wormhole
different from Einstein's that is traversable. But traversable wormholes
needed something to prevent them from pinching off. MICHIO KAKU: You want to
stabilize the wormhole. You don't want the
wormhole to collapse. Keep the wormhole open. That requires something
new called negative matter or exotic matter. We've never seen
negative matter before. It would have
anti-gravitational properties. But one day, if we ever
find negative matter, perhaps that's the key to
stabilize the wormhole. NARRATOR: The idea of a
traversable wormhole captivated science fiction enthusiasts. It also reinvigorated the
serious study of wormholes within the science community. This transversable wormhole
created quite a sensation, because perhaps it is
physically possible to one day build a subway system
to another galaxy. The term wormhole came from
an analogy with an apple. You want to get from one part
of the apple to another part. If you're a worm, you
can eat your way down into the body of the apple
and make a little tunnel and come out the other
way, and it's shorter. But unlike a worm moving
here on this apple, for a wormhole in
our universe, we might not know what dangers
lie at the other end of the wormhole. NARRATOR: The other
end of a wormhole could be connected to a very
dangerous part of the universe with all sorts of
exotic phenomena. It might even be in
the core of a star. GREGORY BENFORD: If we
ever find a wormhole, and if it's close
enough for us to reach, almost certainly, we'll first
send automated probes through and direct them to come
back, maybe even put them on a cable in case something
nasty happens to them and they can't return. NARRATOR: Physicists
do not know of any way that a wormhole might arise
naturally in our universe. But can they be
made artificially? One possibility that
physicists speculated about that might allow
you to construct wormholes would be to blow them up
from what's considered to be the fabric of spacetime
that might actually contain tiny wormholes seething
in and out of existence due to the laws of
quantum mechanics. NARRATOR: Scientists
proposed that perhaps traversable wormholes could be
sculpted out of quantum foam, a subatomic bubble-like
structure that might exist everywhere in the universe
on length scales a billion, trillion times smaller than
the nucleus of an atom. That's how you would
do it in principle. It's completely unfeasible using
any technology that we know of, but it's at least something
you might consider. NARRATOR: If one could be
engineered or located in space, scientists contemplated other
possibilities for a wormhole. Could it transport
galactic vacationers to different points in time,
as well as different places in space? To actually create a time
machine or a wormhole machine that would take us
to a distant galaxy, you would have to
have the physics of an advanced civilization, a
civilization perhaps millions of years beyond ours. NARRATOR: Time machines have
mystified movie audiences for over 50 years. Gentlemen, I am talking
about traveling through time in a machine constructed
for that very purpose. NARRATOR: But could a wormhole
be used for such travel? The wormhole
may lead to things like being able to
go to another galaxy by walking 5 feet
through a wormhole, or even going to another time. NARRATOR: But wormholes
as time machines pose unsettling questions. In the distant future,
will Earthlings be able to travel to the past
and perhaps change history? Scientific ideas considered
far-fetched today could one day become as
acceptable as the fact that the Earth is round. The laws of physics may allow
for the existence of wormholes, tunnels providing shortcuts
through space, as well as time. So could these cosmic
subway systems theoretically be engineered into
time machines? Einstein's general
relativity laws reveal that time travel
into the future is possible. They show that time is perceived
differently depending on where one is in the universe
and how one moves. Objects moving at close to
the speed of light age slower than static objects. And objects near
a gravitating body age more slowly than
objects farther away. ALEX FILIPPENKO: Clocks
run at different rates in different
gravitational fields. The stronger the
gravitational field, the more slowly time
passes relative to someone out in space where there
is no gravitational field. On Earth here, on the
surface, our clocks run slightly more slowly than
clocks high up in the sky. So an example of this is that
the clocks in the GPS system of satellites run
a little bit more quickly than the clocks here
on Earth, because they're in a weaker gravitational field. And the scientists and engineers
developing the GPS system have to take into account the
different rate at which clocks run. If they hadn't done
that correctly, then your GPS system
wouldn't work. If you were taking a trip
from Los Angeles to New York, you'd end up somewhere
in Massachusetts. NARRATOR: Forward time
travel has been tested using highly precise atomic clocks. Scientists have placed one
clock on the ground and another in a rocket flying
high above the Earth. The two were compared using
radio signals between rocket and ground. The clock on the
rocket ticked faster. Here, on Earth, my clock
is running more slowly compared to someone
in a rocket ship somewhere further
away from Earth. So their clock is
moving more quickly. They're going to
the future faster. NARRATOR: Physicists have
studied whether wormholes could provide travel, not only to the
future, but also, to the past. If there was a wormhole
with one mouth near Earth, and the other in the
center of our galaxy, the rate of flow of time will
be different at the one mouth then at the other when compared
to the external universe. But when looking directly
through the wormhole, the rate of flow of time
appears to be the same. [music playing] This difference in their
relative ticking rates, as viewed externally versus
viewed through the wormhole, would convert the wormhole
into a time machine. What that means is that
by entering a wormhole, you could leave here
today and come out the other end of the wormhole
hundreds or thousands of years earlier. The wormhole
may lead to things like being able to
go to another galaxy, or even going to another time. It's possible you can use a
wormhole of a certain kind to actually transport
information backward in time or people backward in time. NARRATOR: But
backward time travel raises disturbing paradoxes. Could one actually voyage to
the past and change history? One of the problems with
traveling backwards in time is that it produces
various paradoxes. The most famous of this is
the grandfather paradox. This says that if I
have a time machine, I could go back in time, and I
could kill my grandfather, who would then never have had
my father, who would never have had me. I would never have been born. So that means he
would never have been able to go back into
the past in the first place. MICHIO KAKU: Or let's say
you go backwards in time and meet your teenage
mother before you're born, and then your teenage mother
falls in love with you. Then how can you be born if
your teenage mother spurned your father and fell in
love with you instead? The practical
problems are enormous. But one day, if somebody
knocks on your door and claims to be your great,
great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter,
someone from the future going backwards in time to meet
her illustrious ancestor, don't slam the door. Perhaps in the future,
our descendants will have the possibility
of time travel, and perhaps one day they may
come knocking on your door. NARRATOR: Backward time travel
has ignited a myriad of science fiction scenarios. If that machine can
do what you say it can, destroy it, George,
before it destroys you. NARRATOR: If the laws of
physics permit wormholes, then how can those laws deal
with the danger of changing history? One possibility is that the
laws of physics allow you to do backward time travel as long as
it leads to a self-consistent universe, that, in some sense,
that history is not changeable. You can't go backwards and
change things, which could stop you from having been
created in the first place, for example, in the
grandfather paradox. NARRATOR: For now, forward
or backward time travel through a wormhole
remains in question, and some scientists
think that any attempt to create a wormhole
time machine may destroy the wormhole. What actually happens when
you try and make that wormhole into a time machine is that as
soon as it starts connecting different times, you get a
pile up of radiation so intense that it destroys
the entire wormhole, thus stopping you from making
that wormhole into a time machine. This seems to be a sign that
maybe this is the way nature protects itself using
the laws of physics from ever producing paradoxes
and strange things that time machines seem to suggest. Wormhole travel
is really iffy, because you have to know
a lot about the wormhole so that it doesn't do unpleasant
things like, for example, turn you into a big ball of
gas all of a sudden. Because the gravitational
stresses that support the wormhole are
plausibly quite strong. MARK MORRIS: The idea of a
wormhole is not something that we can point to and
say, that's impossible. It would be absurd to say
we can't do that ever, because we're dealing with
powers, energies, and knowledge that are outside of
our current domain. [music playing] NARRATOR: Like a wormhole,
there is another phenomenon that has never been discovered, but
Einstein's general relativity laws allow for its existence. It's called a white hole. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: While a black
hole is an object into which things are falling
and disappearing, rather like a sinkhole, a white
hole is doing the opposite. Things are coming out. Things are coming out
rather like a fountain. A white hole is like the
unicorn, an exotic animal that's never been seen before. A white hole is very
similar to a black hole, except it runs backwards. Think of running the
videotape backwards. Instead of matter falling
into the event horizon, never to come out, matter
falls out of a black hole. So it's the opposite, a
kind of reverse black hole. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Black
holes, as we know, have now been understood to
be out there in our universe, and so you might wonder
whether the same thing's true about white holes as well. For example, quasars, when
they were first discovered were thought to be
maybe white holes. Why? Because they seemed
to be producing a huge amount of energy. We now know that
that's not the case. Quasars are actually
powered by black holes. There is a school of thought
that says that anything that can exist must exist somewhere,
and if one adopts that school of thought, then
at the moment, we have to admit that white holes
might be out there somewhere. NARRATOR: If nature
uses white holes, physicists speculate
that they could have been an important element
in the earliest stages of the universe,
maybe even in the formation of the universe itself. When trying to decode some of
the mysteries of the universe, the answers may truly
be black and white. The universe began with the
Big Bang, an expanding fireball of matter and energy
that started compressed as a tiny subatomic point
called a singularity. A singularity is a region where
gravity is immensely strong. The Big Bang singularity gave
rise to the entire universe, which includes space, time, and
all the matter that fills it. [music playing] A similar type of
singularity is a white hole, a theoretical object that
arises in Einstein's theory of gravity. It's essentially a black hole in
reverse, a point of singularity where matter is ejected. Consequently, some
scientists have wondered if the
universe could have been created from a white hole. MARK MORRIS: One idea to
describe the entire universe has been that it's one big
white hole in which there's an emergence from some
initial singularity. That creative thought
is one amongst many for how the universe
was seeded, and how it began, and how the Big Bang emerged. MICHIO KAKU: Think about it. A white hole emits matter. It doesn't gobble up matter. But isn't the Big
Bang the same thing? That small, little quantum
dot that expands and spews out matter? So perhaps the white hole could
be the story of our universe. [music playing] NARRATOR: NASA's Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe, known as WMAP, has measured
the radiation left over from the very early universe. Studies of this cosmic
microwave background have confirmed that the
universe began with a brief, but colossal growth birth
called inflation that preceded its regular phase of expansion. So some scientists speculate
whether a white hole could have been the instigator
of this growth birth. The evidence coming from our
space satellites, like the WMAP orbiting the Earth right now,
is consistent with the idea of a multiverse. A multiverse consists
of many universes, like soap bubbles
floating in a bubble bath. In a bubble bath, we have
bubbles popping into existence, collapsing back, giving
birth to baby soap bubbles. So in other words,
big bangs could be happening all the time. Perhaps each big bang
starts with a white hole that then expands rapidly,
giving us a baby universe. [music playing] NARRATOR: It's still unproven
whether multiple universes exist, and whether white
holes may have created them. But scientists have shown that
some types of white holes, although possible in
theory, are highly unstable. They would not
survive for very long, and they simply collapse
to form black holes. Possibly, white
holes played a role. Perhaps they formed
for a very short time, but then being unstable,
they collapsed. But even during that period
when they were first formed, they may have left
some important imprint on the future of the universe. We don't know whether that's
true, but it's a possibility. GREGORY BENFORD: White holes
are a nice act of imagination, but I don't think they
have any substance yet. They're entirely
theoretical objects. But then, black holes were
that way once upon a time. NARRATOR: White holes
might or might not have existed at the
beginning of the universe, but one thing's certain, black
holes are no longer science fiction. They're science fact. [music playing] Scientists agree these
whirling vortexes are born out of the death throes
of massive stars. When a sufficiently massive
star runs out of fuel, it is unable to support itself
against its own gravitational pull. It then collapses inward
to form a black hole. GREGORY BENFORD: Black holes are
troublemakers in the evolution of the universe. They can draw matter in, spew it
out, reform, reorganize regions of the universe, perhaps
part of a galaxy, take up residence at the
center, start running the show. They're big, muscular things
that lumber around and cannot be stopped. NARRATOR: Black holes
are difficult to detect because they're black. But they can be observed when
they interact with something in space, such as in-falling
gas, which heats up and glows in x-rays. Years ago, black holes were
considered to be impossible. We have something called the
giggle factor in physics. People used to giggle whenever
we talked about black holes. But now, we see
hundreds, thousands of glorious photographs
of black holes. [music playing] NARRATOR: There are at least
two types of black holes. One is called a stellar
mass black hole, which is approximately 3 to
30 times the mass of our Sun. It's speculated that 100 million
of these reside in our Milky Way galaxy, and similar
numbers in other galaxies. The other is a
supermassive black hole that is millions to billions
of times the mass of our Sun. [music playing] It's believed that this
humongous monster lives at the center of most
every large galaxy. Our own Milky Way
galaxy has one. Yet, whether they're stellar
mass size or supermassive, all black holes are
cosmic cannibals. MICHIO KAKU: A black
hole, in some sense, it's like a cosmic roach motel. Everything checks in,
but nothing checks out. A trip to a black hole would be
fantastic, almost psychedelic. It's like having a
near-death experience. As you get even closer
to the black hole, tidal forces begin to
stretch your body apart so that the top of your body
and the bottom of your body experienced different
gravitational forces, and you become spaghettified. Eventually, even the
atoms of your body become noodles and
become ripped apart. In the case of a
supermassive black hole, the process of spaghettification
is somewhat different. The person jumping in wouldn't
be spaghettified until passing through the event horizon,
and the reason for that is because the tidal forces
that would stretch him aren't strong enough until you
get closer to the singularity. So the person jumping in
would have a few moments of perception that they
were inside of a black hole, and they could
marvel at that idea before they plunged
toward the singularity, and then became spaghettified. NARRATOR: And if one black
hole isn't violent enough, try two black holes
dueling for dominance. In the vastness of space, black
holes occasionally pair off. It may appear as
though they're engaging in some sort of
cosmic courtship, but these unions are
anything but harmonious. When two black
holes get too close, they become trapped by
each other's gravity. The two orbit around each
other like whirling dervishes. These binary black
holes will eventually collide and coalesce. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: It's
believed that collisions between black holes
will be quite common. They would be in orbit around
each other, and then spiral inwards, and at some
point, they would coalesce, and that coalescence creates a
huge disturbance in spacetime. If you have two objects
that are bending space a lot around them, and
they merge together, then you'll get this ripple,
this wave going out carrying energy with it. [music playing] NARRATOR: Typically,
when black holes collide, they create wild vibrations
called gravitational waves, which spread across the
fabric of space and time. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: These ripples
would be just like the ripples you would have, say, on
the surface of a pond. If you threw a pebble into a
pond, it creates a disturbance, and then you see the ripples
carrying that disturbance away to far points of the pond. NARRATOR: In the past,
binary black hole collisions were impossible to identify. Now, scientists have developed
gravitational wave detectors to track these vibrations, and
hopefully, catch black hole collisions in the act. [music playing] LIGO is a ground-based
observatory that's currently searching for gravity waves
produced from collisions involving stellar-sized
black holes a few times the mass of our Sun. The system uses lasers to
measure the motions of mirrors that hang by wires
from overhead supports. When two black
holes merge together, they'll release these
gravitational waves, these ripples in
the shape of space. And as the ripples pass by
these giant contraptions, they alter ever so
slightly the distances between these detectors, and
the detectors can actually monitor and see that
change in distance, and that's the signature of a
gravitational wave coming by. NARRATOR: In the future, LISA,
a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission, will be able
to detect waves from collisions involving supermassive
black holes. These impacts occur after
two galaxies have merged, and their supermassive
black holes sink to the center of
the newly-formed galaxy and find each other. And if collisions involving
two supermassive black holes isn't chaotic enough, try three. In January, 2007, US
and European satellites actually observed black hole
triplets 10 billion light years away in the Virgo constellation. They're actually
three quasars, which are luminous objects
thought to be powered by supermassive
black hole's located in the centers of galaxies. This trio is in close
proximity to one another. They're only about 100,000
to 150,000 light years apart, which is about the
width of our Milky Way. In all probability, the
three will eventually engage in a hostile merger. If you take three large black
holes brought close together because two big spiral or
elliptical galaxies have slammed together, then
it's a real free-for-all. And two of them
could win the game and throw the third one out. MARK MORRIS: Gravitational
interactions between three bodies can lead to
the ejection of one of the supermassive black
holes from the system, and then you're just left with
a binary supermassive pair that will coalesce, ultimately. The supermassive black
hole that gets ejected is ejected typically
with enough speed that it can't carry
stars with it. So it becomes a
rogue black hole. It's off on its own. [music playing] NARRATOR: Modern
science continues to unravel the mystery
surrounding black holes, but for some, one
enduring question remains. The deepest question in
all of black hole physics is, what lies on the other
side of a black hole? What happens if you throw the
encyclopedia into a black hole? Is all that information lost? We don't know for sure. NARRATOR: According to
Einstein's general relativity laws, nothing can ever
come out of a black hole. But if a black hole
is extremely tiny, the laws of quantum
mechanics merge with the laws of general relativity. Quantum mechanics
governs the world of the very small,
such as electrons, neutrons, and other
subatomic particles. General relativity rules
the world of the very large, where ordinary gravity is
dominant, like planets, stars, and galaxies. The fact is, when you
put together quantum theory with black holes, you find
that they aren't completely inert objects that
only suck things in and nothing comes out. They actually radiate. NARRATOR: The black holes
that radiate are called mini black holes, which are much
smaller than their stellar mass or supermassive
black hole cousins. [music playing] Celebrated physicist
Stephen Hawking proposed that if mini
black holes exist, they must emit radiation,
which has been named Hawking radiation. It is believed this radiation
will cause a tiny black hole to evaporate and
potentially disappear. Hawking gave
mathematical evidence that when a tiny black hole
forms and then evaporates, some of the information that
went into the black hole never comes back out. This startling prediction caused
a firestorm among physicists, because the laws
of quantum theory insist that information can
never be completely destroyed. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: Essentially,
the world split into two camps, those who believed that
Hawking's calculation was really it, and the other
camp that said, well, Hawking's calculation
needs refining. String theory and
other theories seem to suggest that the information
is actually preserved. It just comes out very subtly. ALEX FILIPPENKO: The question of
what happens to the information that goes inside a black hole
is, I think, not fully settled. The chemical composition
of the objects that went into the black hole
and other aspects of them, their color, their temperature,
et cetera, et cetera, we don't really know what
happens to that information. [music playing] NARRATOR: It appears unlikely
that scientists could venture inside any black hole and
return back home in one piece to report their findings. But a worldwide
collaboration of scientists may be on the verge of the
next best thing, manufacturing tiny black holes
right here on Earth. [music playing] Today, scientists are
pushing back the boundaries of cosmic research. If naturally formed black
holes aren't scary enough, what about a black hole factory? In Switzerland, at the physics
laboratory called CERN, scientists have built the Large
Hadron Collider, the biggest, most complex science
experiment ever constructed. It's a particle
accelerator 17 miles long and the weight of
five jumbo jets. It's capable of crushing
subatomic particles together to replicate the energies
that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. This particle collider
was designed and built to study important questions in
fundamental particle physics. But it will cram so
much energy together that if physicists are
lucky about how nature works at those energies, it could
also produce tiny black holes. CLIFFORD JOHNSON: We
might be able to see microscopic black
holes being formed in these high-energy collisions,
and those black holes would then be amenable to study. They would rapidly evaporate. We'd be able to study
their decay products and understand physics
of quantum gravity in the laboratory,
which is something that we never dreamed we'd be
able to do in our lifetimes. NARRATOR: But the possibility of
manufacturing mini black holes has roused suspicion and fear. Could they escape
the Earth's gravity and eventually
devour our planet? Cosmic rays from outer space
hit the Earth all the time, perhaps with more energy
than these mini black holes. So these mini black
holes are harmless. They're not gonna
eat up the Earth. They're not a doomsday device. [music playing] NARRATOR: A similar
mini black hole scare happened in the United States. In Brookhaven, New York, a
smaller collider experiment is already underway. The Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider, better known as RHIC, is an underground pipeline where
gold atoms collide together at 99.9% the speed of light. When the experiment
began in the year 2000, news spread that these head-on
impacts created black holes. The laboratory, which
is very responsible, decided it needed to respond
to this and reassure people, so it convened a
group to look at this, and what that group found was
that these kinds of collisions had been happening
in outer space, and that had never caused
a problem theoretically. We produce conditions in
these collisions which would mathematically give some
similarity to the-- the theory that surrounds black holes. But in practice,
we're completely safe. There's no way that any black
hole that could be a concern could be produced here at-- at RHIC. DMITRI KHARZEEV:
RHIC certainly is not capable of producing a
black hole of any kind. There is not enough mass
which is being created here by many orders of magnitude. NARRATOR: Although RHIC cannot
create mini black holes, scientists can go through
the ashes of these particle collisions to learn about
the early moments a few microseconds after the Big Bang. So we can use this knowledge
to gain a better understanding of what happened
shortly after the event, including the possibility
of primordial black hole formation. [music playing] NARRATOR: The particle collision
experiments in Switzerland and in the US may not produce
life-threatening black holes, but they could give
several important clues about whether
information comes back out of the mini black hole, and
even how the universe began. They do provide a laboratory
to see how far we can push Einstein's theory until
all hell breaks loose and the equations
collapse, and that's why we think that mini black
holes could be a key to going beyond Einstein. [music playing] NARRATOR: Physicists
will continue to probe into the mysteries
still surrounding black holes. They will also
remain on high alert for any signs of the elusive
wormholes and white holes. The search for the next
frontier marches on. GREGORY BENFORD: White
holes, wormholes, black holes are tickets to
oblivion, for the most part. None of these are places that
you wanna take your summer vacation there. And these tickets will
cost a lot to even find. These objects are hard to
observe in the universe, and only one of them do
we really pretty much know is there, the black hole. The others may be
entirely hypothetical. They may be the
unicorns of astronomy. There are several cases
in history of science when an idea, or even a
solution to an equation, just seems like an artifact
of our imaginations, and actually turned
out to be a real thing. Black holes are such an example. Maybe white holes and wormholes
will have some role in nature which we'll one day discover. [music playing]
