Speaker 1: Welcome to the Core side Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome back to another exploration. I am genuinely
Speaker 2: thrilled you are here today because we are tackling a
Speaker 2: subject that sits right at the intersection of our wildest
Speaker 2: science fiction dreams and well the hardest, coldest realities of physics.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 2: We're looking at a stack of research today that I'll
Speaker 2: be honest, it feels a bit like a roller coaster.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect description.
Speaker 2: It takes you up to this highest peak of excitement
Speaker 2: and then it just drops you into a free fall
Speaker 2: of disappointment. But then, and this is the weird part,
Speaker 2: it loops you around into something completely unexpected and frankly
Speaker 2: much more profound.
Speaker 3: It really is a journey of good news, bad news,
Speaker 3: and then weird news. We're dealing with the topic that
Speaker 3: everyone thinks they understand because of you know, Hollywood. Oh absolutely,
Speaker 3: but the actual physics behind it has just undergone a
Speaker 3: massive shakeup. We're looking at a paper published just recently
Speaker 3: in January twenty twenty six by Enrique gustain Yaga and
Speaker 3: his colleagues, and it forces us to rethink the structure
Speaker 3: of the universe itself.
Speaker 2: We are talking about wormholes, wormholes, the cosmic shortcut, the
Speaker 2: Einstein Rosenbridge. You know the image You fold a piece
Speaker 2: of paper in half, plunch pencil through it, and suddenly
Speaker 2: you can jump from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy in
Speaker 2: time for lunch. Right, It's the backbone of interstellar contact
Speaker 2: star treks. I mean, basically, if you need to move
Speaker 2: a plot faster than the speed of light, you use
Speaker 2: a wormhole exactly.
Speaker 3: It's the ultimate narrative device. It solves the biggest problem
Speaker 3: in space travel, which is that space is just, you know,
Speaker 3: annoyingly impossibly big. Yes, we want a subway system for
Speaker 3: the stars. We do.
Speaker 2: But and here comes the record scratch moment. There. This
Speaker 2: new research suggests that this subway system is permanently closed.
Speaker 3: Or maybe that it was never a subway system to
Speaker 3: begin with. Right, that's the hard truth we have to
Speaker 3: lead with. According to this new analysis, in the general
Speaker 3: classical and quantum gravity, the traversible wormhole the kind Matthew
Speaker 3: McConaughey fly as a spaceship through it. It likely does not exist.
Speaker 3: It can't exist.
Speaker 2: I have to say, when I first read the headline,
Speaker 2: I felt a genuine pang of loss.
Speaker 3: I get that.
Speaker 2: There's something so hopeful about the idea of a wormhole.
Speaker 2: It makes the universe feel accessible. Losing that, yeah, it
Speaker 2: feels like we're being trapped in our own backyard.
Speaker 3: I completely get that. It is a disappointment if you
Speaker 3: look at the universe as a place to conquer or
Speaker 3: travel through. But I want to pivot your perspective of
Speaker 3: it because what Gustin Yaga is proposing is that while
Speaker 3: we lose the shortcut, we gain an answer to a
Speaker 3: much more bigger question, which is the origin of everything.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 3: This research suggests that these structures aren't tunnels for spaceships.
Speaker 3: They are mirrors for time, and these mirrors might be
Speaker 3: the reason we're here at all. They might prove that
Speaker 3: our Big Bang wasn't the beginning but a bounce.
Speaker 2: Okay, mirrors for time and bouncing universes. That is a
Speaker 2: lot to unpack. So our mission today is to figure
Speaker 2: out how we got from sci fi tunnel to this
Speaker 2: new theory. We need to understand why the old wormhole
Speaker 2: idea failed, what this mirror actually is, and why it
Speaker 2: implies we might be living inside a black hole right now.
Speaker 3: And we're going to see how this attempts to solve
Speaker 3: the biggest headache in physics, the absolute war between gravity
Speaker 3: and quantum mechanics.
Speaker 2: So let's rewind. Let's go back to the source. Most
Speaker 2: people here Einstein Rosenbridge, and they assume Einstein sat down
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty five trying to figure out how to
Speaker 2: travel faster.
Speaker 3: Than light, which is completely wrong. We have to contextualize
Speaker 3: where Einstein was in nineteen thirty five. He wasn't thinking
Speaker 3: about spaceship. He was thinking about particles. Specifically, he was frustrated,
Speaker 3: frustrated with what with singularities in his theory of general relativity.
Speaker 3: If you crunch matter down enough, you get a point
Speaker 3: of infinite density singularity.
Speaker 2: And that's where the math breaks.
Speaker 3: The math breaks, it turns into nonsense. Einstein hated that
Speaker 3: he felt that nature shouldn't have divide by zero errors.
Speaker 2: So a black hole is essentially a divide by zero
Speaker 2: error in.
Speaker 3: The universe in the math of relativity. Yes, at the
Speaker 3: very center. At the same time, you had this emerging
Speaker 3: field of quantum mechanics dealing with electrons and protons, treating
Speaker 3: them as point particle infinite density dots, and Einstein and
Speaker 3: his colleague Nathan Rosen wanted to get rid of these points.
Speaker 3: They wanted a geometry that was smooth everywhere, no sharp edges,
Speaker 3: no infinities.
Speaker 2: So they weren't building a tunnel. They were trying to
Speaker 2: build a better electron exactly.
Speaker 3: That is the part history often forgets. They propose a
Speaker 3: model where a particle isn't a solid dot, but a
Speaker 3: tiny bridge connecting two sheets of space time.
Speaker 2: Two sheets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, imagine two parallel pieces of paper. The particle in
Speaker 3: their model was a little tube connecting a point on
Speaker 3: the top sheet to a point on the bottom sheet.
Speaker 3: To them, the Einstein rosenbrids was a model for an
Speaker 3: elementary particle.
Speaker 2: So it was a way to have mass in charge
Speaker 2: without having a singularity at the center.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it smeared out the pointiness of the particle into
Speaker 3: a smooth geometric structure that is wild.
Speaker 2: So the original wormhole was microscopic.
Speaker 3: It was intended to be. Yes, It was a mathematical hack,
Speaker 3: a really clever one, to save physics from infinities. The
Speaker 3: idea that you could scale it up and drive a
Speaker 3: car through it. That didn't come until decades later.
Speaker 2: So how did we get from math hack for an
Speaker 2: electron to let's fly a ship through it?
Speaker 3: That shift happens much later in the late nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: physicists like Kip Thorn.
Speaker 2: The guy who consulted on Interstellar the very.
Speaker 3: Same he and others started asking the what if questions.
Speaker 3: They took the Einstein Rosen math and said, okay, forget particles,
Speaker 3: so what if this structure was macroscopic? What if it
Speaker 3: was huge? Could we send a signal through it? Could
Speaker 3: we send a person?
Speaker 2: And that is when the sci fi dream was.
Speaker 3: Born, right, But almost immediately the math starts screaming no.
Speaker 3: And this brings us to what we can call the
Speaker 3: pinching problem. This is the part that kills the sci
Speaker 3: fi dream. So we really need to understand it.
Speaker 2: Okay, lay it on me. Why can't I fly my
Speaker 2: spaceship through the bridge?
Speaker 3: Because the bridge is dynamic. It's not a static hallway.
Speaker 3: It's not like the Lincoln Tunnel.
Speaker 2: It's not just a hole in space.
Speaker 3: No, it's a structure made of space, time and space
Speaker 3: time is governed by gravity, and gravity, you know, is
Speaker 3: an attractive force. It wants to pull things together.
Speaker 2: So it wants to close.
Speaker 3: It wants to collapse, and inside this bridge, the gravitational
Speaker 3: forces are immense. The math shows that it collapses basically instantaneously.
Speaker 2: Define instantaneously, like I open the door and it shuts
Speaker 2: in one second.
Speaker 3: Faster, much much faster. It shuts faster than the speed
Speaker 3: of light.
Speaker 2: Wait, hold on, I thought nothing move faster than light.
Speaker 2: You can't just say faster than light and get away
Speaker 2: with it. That's like rule number one.
Speaker 3: Good catch, And you're right. Nothing travels through space faster
Speaker 3: than light. But space itself space can do whatever it wants.
Speaker 2: Ah the loophole.
Speaker 3: The loophole, Space can expand or contract at any speed.
Speaker 3: It's the fabric, not the things on the fabric. So
Speaker 3: imagine you open this wormhole. You're standing at the entrance.
Speaker 3: You see the light from the other side, let's say
Speaker 3: the Andromeda galaxy.
Speaker 2: Okay, I see the pretty spiral galaxy on the other side.
Speaker 3: You take one step forward. But the tunnel, the space
Speaker 3: time of the bridge itself is collapsing so fast that
Speaker 3: the ceiling and floor meet in the middle and pinch off. Okay,
Speaker 3: and this happens before the light that was at the
Speaker 3: threshold can even reach the middle of the tunnel, so.
Speaker 2: You can't even get halfway through before it's gone.
Speaker 3: You can't even get started. You literally get crushed into
Speaker 3: a singularity before you can cross. The bridge disconnects itself
Speaker 3: from the universe before it can be traversed.
Speaker 2: So it's a trap. It's not a bridge. It's a
Speaker 2: cosmic mouse trap.
Speaker 3: In its natural state. Yes, it's designed to fail unless
Speaker 3: unless you prop it open.
Speaker 2: And this is where the sci fi writers say activate
Speaker 2: the shields or use the dark matter or some other technobabble.
Speaker 3: They usually say exotic matter. And this is a real
Speaker 3: term in physics, but it is often misused. To keep
Speaker 3: that throat open against the clushing weight of gravity, you
Speaker 3: need something that pushes back. You need anti gravity.
Speaker 2: Anti gravity. I mean that sounds pretty exotic to me.
Speaker 3: Effectively, Yeah, you need matter that has negative energy density.
Speaker 2: I am going to stop you there. Negative energy. That
Speaker 2: sounds like a mood, not a physics TERMO. How energy
Speaker 2: is its heat, it's light, it's motion. How can you
Speaker 2: have less than zero energy?
Speaker 3: It is a brain bender? I mean it's one of
Speaker 3: the weirder concepts out there. Think of empty space as
Speaker 3: having a baseline energy, the vacuum energy. We usually just
Speaker 3: call that level zero, okay, the floor right. Positive energy
Speaker 3: is anything above that floor, a planet, a star, a battery.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 3: Negative energy would be a region where the energy is
Speaker 3: lower than the vacuum state. It's a dip in the floor.
Speaker 2: Is that even possible or is this just a number
Speaker 2: on a spreadsheet that makes an equation work.
Speaker 3: Well, we have seen hints of it. We've created tiny,
Speaker 3: tiny amounts of it in labs using something called the
Speaker 3: Casimir effect. Basically, you squeeze two metal plates so close
Speaker 3: together that you squeeze out some of the vacuum fluctuations
Speaker 3: between them.
Speaker 2: So you create a little patch of less than.
Speaker 3: Nothing, a little patch of less than nothing that creates
Speaker 3: a tiny attractive force. But to hold a wormhole open,
Speaker 3: the human sized one, you would need Jupiter sized amounts
Speaker 3: of this stuff.
Speaker 2: And we don't have a Jupiter sized bucket of negative
Speaker 2: energy lying around.
Speaker 3: We haven't found a single ounce of it in nature
Speaker 3: on that scale. It is purely conjectural. It's a theoretical requirement,
Speaker 3: but there's no evidence that exists in the quantities needed.
Speaker 2: So the final verdict is no scaffolding.
Speaker 3: No scaffolding without the negative energy, the bridge snap shut instantly.
Speaker 3: The subway is closed permanently.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the door is slam shut, the subway is
Speaker 2: out of order. And usually this is where we would
Speaker 2: pack up and go home. Stories over. But Gastanga and
Speaker 2: his team looked at this broken bridge and said, wait,
Speaker 2: we're looking at this all wrong.
Speaker 3: This is the pivot. This is the brilliant part. They said,
Speaker 3: if general relativity forbids travel, maybe the bridge isn't for travel.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's serving a different function in the universe. It's
Speaker 3: not a bug, it's a feature.
Speaker 2: And this brings us to the mirror concept.
Speaker 3: Yes, they stopped looking at the bridge as a connection
Speaker 3: between place A and place B. They started looking at
Speaker 3: it as a connection between universe A and well.
Speaker 2: A reflection, the reflection in time.
Speaker 3: Correct. And to get this we have to talk about symmetry.
Speaker 3: Physics at its absolute core is just obsessed with symmetry assessed.
Speaker 3: How what do you mean, Well, look at the fundamental laws,
Speaker 3: Newton's laws, Einstein's relativity, even Schrodinger's equation. In quantum mechanics,
Speaker 3: if you look at the raw equations, none of them
Speaker 3: have a preferred direction for time.
Speaker 2: What do you mean? Time definitely has a direction. I
Speaker 2: am older than I was ten minutes ago. My coffee
Speaker 2: got cold, it didn't spontaneously get hot again.
Speaker 3: That is your macroscopic experience talking. And you're right. In
Speaker 3: our big, messy world, time has an arrow. We call
Speaker 3: that entropy.
Speaker 2: Right. The universe gets more disordered.
Speaker 3: Over time, Exactly, things get messier. You break an egg,
Speaker 3: it scrambles, it never unscrambles itself and goes back into
Speaker 3: the shell. That's the arrow of time we experience, right.
Speaker 3: But zoom in, weigh in. Look at a single atom
Speaker 3: mumping into another atom, a single billiard ball collision. If
Speaker 3: I recorded that on video and played it backward, would
Speaker 3: do you know?
Speaker 2: I know, I guess not. It would just look like
Speaker 2: another bound, so that the physics would.
Speaker 3: Look the same exactly At the microscopic level. The fundamental
Speaker 3: laws of physics are time symmetric. They work equally well
Speaker 3: forward and backward. There is no arrow of time in
Speaker 3: the fundamental equations themselves. The arrow only emerges when you
Speaker 3: have billions and billions of particles interacting.
Speaker 2: Okay, I accept that for atoms, but how does that
Speaker 2: apply to the wormhole, this giant structure.
Speaker 3: Gusta Yuga's team argues that the Einstein Rosenbridge is the
Speaker 3: place where this fundamental symmetry becomes physically relevant on a
Speaker 3: large scale. It's a structure that connects two regions where
Speaker 3: time flows in opposite directions.
Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, time flows backward. I hear those words,
Speaker 2: but my brain rejects them. What does that actually mean?
Speaker 2: Are people walking backward? Is the rain falling up into
Speaker 2: the clouds.
Speaker 3: It's not about movies playing in reverse. That's a common misconception.
Speaker 3: It's more fundamental. Think of it as a balance sheet
Speaker 3: for the universe. To make the math work, to keep
Speaker 3: the energies balanced, and the quantum symmetry is intact, you
Speaker 3: need a counterbalance.
Speaker 2: A yin and the yang, a yin and a yang.
Speaker 3: The wormhole isn't a tunnel to a new location. It
Speaker 3: is the hinge point. It's the joint. On one side
Speaker 3: of the hymn, you have our universe where entropy increases
Speaker 3: and what we call time moves forward. Okay, our side
Speaker 3: on the other side of the hinge. Mathematically, there has
Speaker 3: to be a complementary state, a state where from our perspective,
Speaker 3: entropy is decreasing, where time flows in the reverse direction
Speaker 3: relative to us.
Speaker 2: Is a mirror universe in a temporal sense.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is the necessary other half of the equation.
Speaker 3: It's not a place you can visit. It's the other
Speaker 3: side of the coin that makes the coin exist.
Speaker 2: And we don't see it because we're stuck on our
Speaker 2: side of the coin.
Speaker 3: Exactly. We only see the forward half because we live
Speaker 3: in a big, high entrpy world. But near a black hole,
Speaker 3: near that extreme gravity, where the bridge exists, the structure
Speaker 3: becomes relevant. The bridge is what stitches the two arrows
Speaker 3: of time together into one complete system.
Speaker 2: So the wormhole is the scene.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is the scene between the forward time reality
Speaker 3: and the backward time reality. Without both, the physics is incomplete.
Speaker 2: That is deeply abstract. But I want to ground this
Speaker 2: because the research says this actually solves a massive practical
Speaker 2: problem in physics, the black hole information paradox.
Speaker 3: Oh, this is the big one. This is the forty
Speaker 3: year long war in theoretical physics. This is the issue
Speaker 3: that kept Stephen Hawking up at night.
Speaker 2: Set the scene for us. Why is this a paradox.
Speaker 2: What's the problem.
Speaker 3: Okay, So in the nineteen seventies, Stephen Hawking did this
Speaker 3: incredible calculation. He combined quantum mechanics in general relativity near
Speaker 3: a black hole's edge, and he realized that black holes
Speaker 3: aren't perfectly black. They radiate Hawking radiation Hawking radiation. They
Speaker 3: glow with a faint heat, and because they're radiating energy,
Speaker 3: they're losing mass. Over trillions upon trillions of years, they
Speaker 3: lose all their mass, and eventually they evaporate. They disappear
Speaker 3: completely in a final poof of radiation.
Speaker 2: Okay, so the trash can of the universe eventually empties itself.
Speaker 2: Why is that a problem?
Speaker 3: Because of what was inside the trash can. Let's say
Speaker 3: I write a diary, all my deepest secrets, the complete
Speaker 3: information about my life, and I throw it into a.
Speaker 2: Black hole, very secure disposal.
Speaker 3: The most secure. But according to a fundamental rule of
Speaker 3: quantum mechanics, information is never lost. The universe is unitary.
Speaker 3: Unitary it means that if you had a super supercomputer
Speaker 3: and you could track every single photon and particle in
Speaker 3: the universe, you should, in principle, be able to rewind
Speaker 3: the clock and reconstruct my diary from the ashes, like putting.
Speaker 2: A shredded document back together. If you have all the
Speaker 2: pieces exactly.
Speaker 3: The information is scrambled, but it's not gone. But Hawking's
Speaker 3: math showed that when the black hole evaporates, the radiation
Speaker 3: that comes out is random. It's thermal gibberish. It contains
Speaker 3: no information about my diary. The information is gone, erased,
Speaker 3: deleted from the universe.
Speaker 2: And quantum mechanics says, you can't do that.
Speaker 3: Quantum mechanics screams illegal move yeah, but relativity says, sorry,
Speaker 3: the black hole is gone. This is the paradox, one
Speaker 3: of them, one of our two best theories of reality
Speaker 3: has to be wrong.
Speaker 2: And physicists have been trying to fix this for decades
Speaker 2: with all sorts.
Speaker 3: Of complicated, bizarre ideas. But here's how the time mirror
Speaker 3: fixes this. It's just so elegant. It redefines the event horizon.
Speaker 3: We usually think of the event horizon as the point
Speaker 3: of no return, a cliff edge. You fall off, you
Speaker 3: get crushed, your information is lost in the hole forever, right,
Speaker 3: But if the bridge at the center is a time mirror,
Speaker 3: the event horizon isn't a cliff It is the entryway
Speaker 3: to the bridge. The information your diary crosses the horizon,
Speaker 3: but instead of being destroyed in a singularity, it passes
Speaker 3: through to the mirror side, where time runs backward.
Speaker 2: Wait, so the information doesn't vanish, It just exits stage
Speaker 2: left into the past.
Speaker 3: It continues to exist and evolve, but in the reverse
Speaker 3: timeframe it flows into the other side of the symmetry.
Speaker 3: This means the information is conserved. It's still in the
Speaker 3: total universe, the bi universe system, you could say.
Speaker 2: So quantum mechanics is happy.
Speaker 3: Quant mechanics is happy, but it has left our observable
Speaker 3: region of forward flowing time. So general relativity is also happy.
Speaker 3: The paradox just dissolves.
Speaker 2: That is incredibly elegant. Feels like a magic trick. Is
Speaker 2: the rabbit in the hat nos in the other hat?
Speaker 2: You just need to know there was a second hat.
Speaker 3: That is often how physics advances. You realize you were
Speaker 3: only looking at half the system. The solution was there
Speaker 3: all along, hidden in the symmetry of the equations.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we fixed black holes. That's a Nobel prize
Speaker 2: right there. But the source material goes way bigger. It
Speaker 2: takes this mirror idea and applies it to the whole enchilada,
Speaker 2: the Big Bang.
Speaker 3: This is where we move from interesting physics to existential crisis.
Speaker 2: I'm a ready bring on the crisis.
Speaker 3: If the universe loves symmetry, and if black holes act
Speaker 3: as these time bridges, then what does that say about
Speaker 3: the moment everything began? The ultimate singularity?
Speaker 2: The standard story is fourteen billion years ago, there was
Speaker 2: a point of infinite density the Big Bang. Time starts
Speaker 2: at zero. Everything explodes out of that singularity.
Speaker 3: Right another singularity, another divide by zero error that physicists
Speaker 3: have never been comfortable with. But this theory suggests what
Speaker 3: if the Bang wasn't the beginning? What if it was
Speaker 3: a bounce. Imagine a universe before ours apparent universe. Maybe
Speaker 3: it expands for a while, but eventually gravity wins. That
Speaker 3: universe stops expanding and starts collapsing. It crunches down all
Speaker 3: the matter, all the stars, everything squeezes into a tiny
Speaker 3: hot day.
Speaker 2: The big crunch, And normally that is where we think
Speaker 2: it all ends, a final singularity.
Speaker 3: And if this bridge mechanism is real, it doesn't end.
Speaker 3: It doesn't hid an infinity. It hits that maximum density
Speaker 3: crosses the symmetry point that the mirror and reverses, that
Speaker 3: collapse turns into an expansion. Time reflects, the implosion becomes
Speaker 3: an explosion.
Speaker 2: And that explosion is our Big Bang.
Speaker 3: Precisely, we are the exhale of a previous universe's inhale.
Speaker 2: That is a beautiful image. It makes the universe feel
Speaker 2: like a lung breathing and breathing out potentially forever.
Speaker 3: It removes the need for a creation moment out of nothing,
Speaker 3: which has always been a philosophical sticking point. It implies
Speaker 3: an eternal chain of universes, each one giving birth to
Speaker 3: the next.
Speaker 2: But there's just a specific detail in the report that
Speaker 2: made my hair stand up. It says, and I'm quoting,
Speaker 2: our universe might be the interior of a black hole
Speaker 2: formed in another parent cosmos.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is the nesting doll theory of the cosmos.
Speaker 2: Explain that how can we be inside a black hole?
Speaker 2: I look up the night sky and I the stars.
Speaker 2: I don't see a ceiling.
Speaker 3: Think about the geometry from both sides. From the outside.
Speaker 3: In the parent universe, a giant star collapses, It forms
Speaker 3: a black hole. It creates an event horizon. Matter falls in.
Speaker 3: But what does that matter see from the inside. As
Speaker 3: it crosses the bridge, the math says, it experiences a
Speaker 3: moment of infinite density that immediately blossoms into a rapidly
Speaker 3: expanding space that.
Speaker 2: Sounds exactly like our expanding universe viewed from the inside.
Speaker 3: It is mathematically identical. The interior of a black hole
Speaker 3: in one universe can be the big bang of a
Speaker 3: new universe, the event horizon of that parent black hole.
Speaker 3: From our perspective, that's the boundary of our observable universe,
Speaker 3: the cosmic horizon beyond which we can't see.
Speaker 2: So we are living in a bubble, a bubble blown
Speaker 2: by a collapsing star in a bigger reality that we
Speaker 2: can never access.
Speaker 3: That is the staggering implication.
Speaker 2: Yes, which begs the question if we came from a
Speaker 2: parent universe, did anything survive the trip? Is there any
Speaker 2: luggage from the old world?
Speaker 3: That is the billion dollars question. If the bounce is messy,
Speaker 3: if it's not a perfect, clean reset, then some things
Speaker 3: might get through. Some structures might be robust enough.
Speaker 2: To survive, like what, for instance.
Speaker 3: Well Source Material speculates about primordial black holes. These wouldn't
Speaker 3: be black holes formed from stars in our universe. These
Speaker 3: would be small, super dense black holes formed in the
Speaker 3: parent universe that managed to survive the transition.
Speaker 2: They rode the bounce.
Speaker 3: They rode the bounce, And here is where it connects
Speaker 3: to another one of the biggest mysteries in all of science.
Speaker 2: Dark matter.
Speaker 3: Dark matter. We have this stuff. We know it's there
Speaker 3: because of its gravity. It makes up eighty five percent
Speaker 3: of the matter in the universe. We can't see it,
Speaker 3: we don't know what it is.
Speaker 2: We have been hunting for a new kind of dark
Speaker 2: matter particle for forty years and we've found zilch, nothing exactly.
Speaker 3: The experiments keep coming up empty. So some physicists are
Speaker 3: starting to ask, what if we're looking for the wrong thing.
Speaker 3: What if dark matter isn't a new particle at all?
Speaker 3: What if it's just a swarm of these ancient prime
Speaker 3: mordial black holes.
Speaker 2: Well, so the dark matter holding our galaxy together right now,
Speaker 2: it might be the ghosts of the previous universe.
Speaker 3: It fits the profile perfectly. They would be invisible because
Speaker 3: they're black holes. They would have gravity, a lot of it,
Speaker 3: and they would be everywhere scattered by the Big Bang.
Speaker 3: It is a stunning thought that the gravity keeping you
Speaker 3: in your chair might be generated in part by relics
Speaker 3: from before the Big Bang even happened.
Speaker 2: That is I don't even have a word for that,
Speaker 2: but I have to play the skeptic here. This sounds amazing,
Speaker 2: It sounds poetic, mirrors, balances, ghosts from another universe. But
Speaker 2: is it just math on a whiteboard? Is there any
Speaker 2: actual proof? Can we test this?
Speaker 3: I am so glad you asked that, because a theory
Speaker 3: without evidence is just fantasy. And this paper, this is
Speaker 3: the kicker. It claims to have a smoking.
Speaker 2: Gun, and it's in the cosmic microwave background.
Speaker 3: The cosmic microwave background, the CMB. This is the afterglow
Speaker 3: of the Big Bang. It's the oldest light in the universe,
Speaker 3: a baby picture of the cosmos when it was just
Speaker 3: three hundred and eighty thousand years old.
Speaker 2: And usually we are told it is incredibly uniform. It
Speaker 2: is the same temperature everywhere, with tiny, tiny fluctuations.
Speaker 3: Roughly yes, to the naked eye, a map of the
Speaker 3: CMB looks like TV static, random noise. But for about
Speaker 3: twenty years now, cosmologists have been staring at this static
Speaker 3: and noticing something weird, something that shouldn't be there and
Speaker 3: anomally a very specific one. We call it the parity asymmetry.
Speaker 2: Break that down. What is parody asymmetry?
Speaker 3: Okay, imagine you're looking at that map of TV static
Speaker 3: the CMB. You expect it to be totally random, But
Speaker 3: if you look closely at the patterns of hot and
Speaker 3: cold spots, you realize the patterns on the left side
Speaker 3: of the sky are slightly different than the patterns on
Speaker 3: the right.
Speaker 2: It's lopsided.
Speaker 3: It's lopsided. It's as if the universe has a preferred direction.
Speaker 3: One of its mirror images is slightly different from the other.
Speaker 2: And the standard Big Bang theory says that shouldn't happen.
Speaker 3: The standard model of cosmology is built on the idea
Speaker 3: that the universe is isotropic, the same in all directions.
Speaker 3: It says, this slopsidedness has to be a fluke, a
Speaker 3: statistical one in a million accident, like flipping a coin
Speaker 3: a thousand times and getting six hundred heads. It's possible,
Speaker 3: but it's really really suspicious, and.
Speaker 2: It's just a fluke. Is never a satisfying answer in
Speaker 2: science exactly.
Speaker 3: Physicists hate relying on luck. But here is the massive
Speaker 3: victory for the mirror theory. If you plug in the
Speaker 3: math of the time mirror, if you include the influence
Speaker 3: of that backward time universe on our own during the
Speaker 3: Big Bang, the lopsidedness isn't a fluke, It is a prediction.
Speaker 2: Wait, really, the theory actually predicts the static should be lopsided.
Speaker 3: Yes, the interaction between our universe and the mirror state
Speaker 3: during the bounce naturally creates exactly this kind of asymmetry.
Speaker 3: It breaks the perfect mirror symmetry in a very specific, predictable.
Speaker 2: Way, so that weird blemish on the baby picture of
Speaker 2: the universe. That isn't a mistake in the photo. That's
Speaker 2: a fingerprint.
Speaker 3: It is the fingerprint of the reflection. It is evidence
Speaker 3: that the other half of the system, the mirror universe,
Speaker 3: exists and had an influence on us. It takes a
Speaker 3: bug in the old theory and turns it into a
Speaker 3: core feature of the new one.
Speaker 2: That gives me goosebumps because it anchors all this wild
Speaker 2: speculation living in black holes time flowing backward. It anchors
Speaker 2: it to something we can actually point to, tell us
Speaker 2: go bad and measure.
Speaker 3: That is what makes this paper so exciting. It is
Speaker 3: not just philosophy. It's testable physics, and the first test
Speaker 3: seems to be a pass.
Speaker 2: So let's wrap this up. We started this investigation feeling
Speaker 2: kind of bad about the death of the wormhole. We
Speaker 2: lost our warp drive. We are stuck taking the slow
Speaker 2: boat to Alpha Centauri.
Speaker 3: We are, and I don't want to minimize that. For
Speaker 3: space travel enthusiasts, it is a blow, no question.
Speaker 2: But look at what we gained in exchange. It's an
Speaker 2: incredible trade.
Speaker 3: We traded a transportation tunnel for a mirror into the
Speaker 3: fundamental nature of time. We traded a simple shortcut for
Speaker 3: an eternal cycle of birth and rebirth.
Speaker 2: We gained a view of a universe that doesn't just
Speaker 2: start an end, but bounces. A universe where time is
Speaker 2: a two way street at the deepest level, even if
Speaker 2: we can only down one side of the road.
Speaker 3: And it connects everything. It suggests the laws governing a
Speaker 3: single particle are the same ones that govern the entire cosmos.
Speaker 3: It suggests that Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics aren't enemies.
Speaker 3: They are two sides of that mirror.
Speaker 2: I have one final thought I want to throw at you,
Speaker 2: a provocative thought to send our listeners.
Speaker 3: Home with Let's hear it.
Speaker 2: If we are possibly living inside the interior of a
Speaker 2: black hole from a parent universe, and our universe is full.
Speaker 3: Of black holes, I see where you're going with this.
Speaker 2: Does that mean every black hole in our sky contains
Speaker 2: a baby universe inside it?
Speaker 3: That is the logical conclusion of the theory is are.
Speaker 2: We living in a nesting doll of realities? Is universes
Speaker 2: all the way down?
Speaker 3: It is entirely possible. Every time a massive star collapses
Speaker 3: in our galaxy, it might be the big bang for
Speaker 3: a new reality that will never know we exist, and we,
Speaker 3: in turn might just be the offspring of a single
Speaker 3: collapsing object in a universe we can never see.
Speaker 2: That makes the night sky look a lot different. Those
Speaker 2: are just dark spots up there. There might be seeds.
Speaker 3: They might be seeds. I like that a cosmic garden.
Speaker 2: Well, on that mind bending note, we are going to
Speaker 2: close this investigation. Thank you for going on this journey
Speaker 2: with us through the wormhole, into the mirror and out
Speaker 2: the other side.
Speaker 3: It was a pleasure, a real trip.
Speaker 2: Go outside tonight, look up, think about the bounce. We
Speaker 2: will catch you next time.