Astrophysicist Paul Sutter writes:
In science fiction, space explorers routinely zip through wormholes in space-time that are connected by two black holes — celestial objects so dense that not even light can escape their clutches.
But are black holes really doorways into wormholes? And would these wormholes look anything like their counterparts in “Star Trek”?
The short answer is probably not, though the mathematics of the universe doesn’t quite rule it out.
By themselves, the only thing at the center of a black hole is a singularity — a point of infinite density.
In theory, however, a black hole may be paired with a mirror twin, called a white hole, to form a wormhole. Still, these theoretical wormholes would look nothing like the ones depicted in science fiction — traditional wormholes are predicted to be incredibly unstable, meaning they’d collapse the moment a single particle of matter entered them.
Some physicists predict that a wormhole could become more stable if it was formed from a spinning black hole, but our understanding of what happens in that scenario is murky at best.
Einstein-Rosen bridges
Scientists first discovered black holes not through observations in the universe, but through the mathematics of Einstein‘s theory of general relativity. Those equations showed that if you crunch down enough matter into a small enough volume, then gravity overwhelms every other force and shrinks the matter down into an infinitely tiny point, known as the singularity.
Black holes are one-way trips. Once someone crosses their boundaries, known as event horizons, they can’t ever escape. While black holes were once considered just a trick of Einstein’s equations, astronomical observations eventually revealed that black holes do exist in the universe.
But that same mathematics also allows for the exact reverse of a black hole: a white hole. A white hole still has a singularity at its center and an event horizon surrounding it. But instead of falling in and finding it impossible to escape, with a white hole a person could never reach the event horizon from the outside, because it’s constantly flinging its contents out into the universe faster than the speed of light.
Connecting the paired singularities of a black hole and a white hole together forms the simplest kind of wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Not very useful
Unfortunately, Einstein-Rosen bridges aren’t very useful for traversing the cosmos. For one, the entrance to the wormhole sits behind the event horizon. As a person can’t get in on the white hole side, they’d have to fall into a black hole to enter. But once someone crosses an event horizon, they can’t ever escape. That means that if you enter the wormhole you’re stuck inside for eternity.
The other problem with Einstein-Rosen bridges is their stability. “This bridge is a kind of wormhole, but it is transient: it pinches off before any object can use it to pass from one side to the other. So in this sense one does not really have a wormhole, since one cannot traverse it,” Samir Mathur, a physicist at The Ohio State University, told Live Science in an email.
This instability exists because creating a wormhole requires a very precise and careful arrangement of matter. Anything that disturbs this delicate balance — even a single packet of light, or photon — would trigger the instant collapse of the wormhole. The wormhole would tear itself apart like an overstretched rubber band faster than the speed of light, preventing anything from traveling down it.
In addition, physicists largely think white holes don’t exist in our universe. Unlike their siblings, white holes are fantastically unstable. According to the math, once even a single bit of matter falls towards them, they instantly explode. So even if white holes naturally formed, they wouldn’t last very long.
The combination of the uncertainty of the existence of white holes, the instability of Einstein-Rosen bridges, and the relative non-utility of them means that if wormholes exist, they probably aren’t Einstein-Rosen bridges.
A spinning singularity
There may be a way to build a wormhole from a more complicated kind of black hole: take their spinning into account. All black holes spin, but New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr was the first to solve the math for spinning black holes.
In the center of a rotating black hole, the extreme centrifugal forces spread the point-like singularity into a ring. It may be possible for this “ring singularity” to become an entrance to a wormhole, but once again the problem of stability crops up.
As you can imagine, this is not a very comfortable situation, and things are likely to go haywire very quickly. The situation is so unstable that it may even prevent the formation of the singularity altogether. In this case, many physicists believe that the concept of the “ring singularity” from a spinning black hole will be replaced by a more concrete idea once we gain a better understanding of these objects.
Full article at Live Science.
No
As to: “As a person can’t get in on the white hole side, they’d have to fall into a black hole to enter. But once someone crosses an event horizon, they can’t ever escape.”
As to falling into a black hole, there are also a few other problems for a person to consider besides the fact that they can’t ever escape.
One problem is “spaghettification” of the person’s body
And on top of that ‘minor’ problem, “the atoms which his (the astronaut’s) body is made become infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed”,
And as if all that was not bad enough, another problem is that the temperature around a black hole is “heated to a billion degrees or more”,
And whereas the entropy associated with the black holes of General Relativity is found to be “infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed”, on the other hand, the entropy associated with special relativity, (i.e. associated with the creation of light and therefore of the universe itself), is found to be extremely orderly, i.e. 1 in 10^10^123.
It is interesting that Roger Penrose, a staunch agnostic, would feel compelled to use the word “Creator”. I hold that Penrose, a staunch agnostic, simply would never use the word ‘Creator’ unless the extreme nature of the fine-tuning of the initial entropy of the universe, i.e. 1 in 10^10^123, compelled him to do so.
This extreme fine-tuning for the initial entropy of the universe creates some fairly embarrassing problems for atheistic naturalists when they try to explain, purely by chance, the origin of such fine-tuning for entropy,
As Dr. Bruce Gordon further commented, “In the most “reasonable” models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science.”
Moreover, beside the fact that we are dealing with two very different ‘qualities of entropy’ in Special Relativity and General Relativity, we also find that Special Relativity can be mathematically unified with quantum mechanics whereas General Relativity can not.
And although special relativity and quantum mechanics were, via the mathematical sleight of hand of ‘renormalization’, mathematically unified with one another in order to produce the very successful theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, no such mathematical sleight of hand exists for unifying General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
Professor Jeremy Bernstein states the situation as such, “there remains an irremediable difficulty. Every order reveals new types of infinities, and no finite number of renormalizations renders all the terms in the series finite.
The theory is not renormalizable.”
And as theoretical physicist Sera Cremonini stated, “You would need to add infinitely many counterterms in a never-ending process. Renormalization would fail.,,,”
And thus, since the entropy associated with special relativity is extremely orderly, i.e. 1 in 10^10^123, and yet the entropy associated with General Relativity is ‘”infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed”, then I hold those two very different entropies to be a fairly obvious reason, (besides the ‘infinite mathematical divide that exists between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics), for why QED (i.e Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity), can never be unified with General Relativity into a purely mathematical theory of everything.
And yet, although Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity give every indication of being forever beyond mathematical reconciliation with each, all hope is not lost in our search for a ‘theory of everything’.
If we rightly allow the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), if we rightly allow the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, then that provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”
In regards to gravity being dealt with on the Shroud of Turin, the following article states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’
And in the following video, Isabel Piczek states,,, ‘The muscles of the body are absolutely not crushed against the stone of the tomb. They are perfect. It means the body is hovering between the two sides of the shroud. What does that mean? It means there is absolutely no gravity.’
Kevin Moran, an optical engineer, describes the Shroud Image in this way, “The unique front-and-back only image can be best described as gravitationally collimated. The radiation that made the image acted perfectly parallel to gravity. There is no side image. The radiation is parallel to gravity,,,”
Moreover, besides gravity being dealt with on the Shroud of Turin, the Shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics, (QED), itself was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms.
Moreover, the following rather astonishing study on the Shroud, found that it would take 34 Trillion Watts of what is termed VUV (directional) radiation to form the image on the shroud.
So thus in conclusion, when, and if, we rightly allow the Agent Causality of God back into physics, (as the Christian founders of modern science originally held), then a very plausible, and fairly compelling, solution to the number one unsolved mystery in science today, of finding a reconciliation between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, readily pops out for us in that, as the Shroud of Turin gives witness to, both Gravity and Quantum Mechanics were dealt with in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
Of related note,
A black hole is a matter to energy converter. That’s it. It dissipates like a candle burning down. Gravity is not infinite at the center of a black hole. If it were anywhere near that, it should have exploded.
I believe that a working theory connecting all forms of electromagnetic energy exists. However, whoever has this information would keep it highly secret.
“Spaghettification”
Being on the edge of a black hole reminds me of a great scene from Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid. Butch and Sundance are being relentlessly pursued by some Pinkertons (Who are those guys?). They run into a dead end at the lip of a canyon that drops straight down to a river about 100 feet. They are getting ready to jump and Sundance has a panic attack and freezes. Butch asks, What’s wrong, Kid? The Kid says I can’t swim. Butch breaks out laughing and says So you can’t swim? Why you worried about swimming–it’s the fall that’s gonna kill you….
Bornagain77/2
They can’t but, if they’re wearing The Shroud, it can, although it gets a bit singed by UV radiation, wherever that comes from.
Seversky, “wherever that comes from”,,,
I love the way we are all opining about – or “holding” positions on – issues in quantum physics which quantum physicists themselves can’t agree on.
Neither BA77 nor I are quantum physicists. Sabine Hossenfelder is so I’m sure you can guess whose opinion I think should carry the greatest weight on questions in quantum physics. That is not to say she can’t be wrong or that there aren’t equally competent quantum physicists out there who disagree with her but she has a better chance of being right than commentators here and even just understanding the issues better.
I can live with the fact that other people know a lot more than I do about various issues. Others seem to have a problem with that.
Seversky/9
I think you could generalize that to 80% of what gets discussed on this blog. What was that quip by Richard Feynman to the effect that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics….
Seversky, “Neither BA77 nor I are quantum physicists. Sabine Hossenfelder is so I’m sure you can guess whose opinion I think should carry the greatest weight on questions in quantum physics.”
Sabine Hossenfelder, since she is only a theoretical physicist and not an experimental physicist. can’t hold a candle to Anton Zeilinger’ as far as experimental breakthroughs in quantum physics are concerned,
Thus will Seversky rightly give Zeilinger’s opinion more weight than Hossenfelder’s as he ought to do if he is to use his own metric consistently?
But hey Seversky, opinions are dime a dozen, and in science we are SUPPOSE to value experimental evidence over what ANYBODY”S opinion may be,,,,
And on the score of experimental evidence, Sabine Hossenfelder has shown herself willing to ignore experimental evidence when it conflicts with her apriori belief in Atheistic Naturalism. (exactly like you ignore any and all evidence that conflicts with your atheism Seversky)
,,,, Opinions detached from any experimental mooring are, as far as science is concerned, worthless
Of note,
I find any objections to documented comments here, such as those posted by Bornagain77, to be nonsensical. Any book or article that cites references made by qualified individuals advances knowledge. I post on another forum that studies a particular historical period. Posters are generally careful to cite their sources, which often include archived documents or images of actual documents from the period. So, instead of buying a book on a subject that some may never have heard of, on this forum, people can learn. Ideally, when done correctly, that is one important use of an internet forum like this one.
As Ba77 often does, there is a connection to verses from the Bible. Those references are important to me.
The conflict here is between those who see order in the universe and living things, and those who prefer to see blind, unguided luck bringing living things to their present state.
Relatd: I post on another forum that studies a particular historical period.
Which historical period?
No comment.
Relatd: No comment.
I was just curious. I do like history. Especially English history but i’m learning more European history all the time.