Quantum wormholes, explained

Cosmologist Janna Levin challenges long-held ideas about the behavior of black holes, the storage of information, and the fundamental nature of space, time and gravity. He uses black holes to explore the physical possibility of wormholes: theoretical passages or tunnel-like structures that connect different points in spacetime.

Stephen Hawking has suggested that black holes emit energy, causing it to eventually evaporate – but this challenges the storage of information. The holographic principle suggests that information is encoded in a black hole, to deal with this information problem.

Levin likens black holes to jewelry, woven with quantum threads. His quantum theory has profound implications, potentially changing our understanding of gravity and the fundamental nature of spacetime – even if we question our quest for a theory of everything.

Janna Levin: Once you start accepting that space-time can bend or stretch, it can contract, time can twist, you can play any game you want. Another very simple thing to play with is the wormhole concept. If you can start using space, wouldn’t you want to trick us into creating a bridge between here and afar?

And then what you can ask is, “How is this possible? How can I find the material and the power to do this?” And Einstein’s equations will tell you these are the properties of matter and energy that you will need to make that bridge. The problem is that the forms of matter and energy needed to build them and keep them open, tend to collapse.

So I think the argument would be that wormholes are mathematically, perfectly possible. Physically, they may not be possible because there may never be the types of fat and energy needed to build them. Quantum wormholes are still debated. This is very difficult, man.

Well, let’s try something: Everything is actually a list of definitions of a short number of attributes. That electron means that mass, that spin, and that charge, and all that means. No electron is less difficult. No electron spins more slowly or has a different charge. That’s all they are on this list. And we call it “knowledge.”

There is information about how things are interconnected, and we believe that all information in the Universe should be preserved. It cannot be lost. If that electron runs away from the singularity and its quantum numbers are gone, that information goes out of the Universe, it disappears.

Now, the laws of physics are actually predicated on the idea that that would never happen because if it could, then the laws are meaningless. The discovery of black holes did not cause a big emotional problem about the loss of information because of the idea that it was always hidden behind the scene. And that one-way window meant that we would be completely unaware of electron loss and electron quantum number loss and floating out of existence.

We are protected from that completely, if people were willing to just kind of shrug their shoulders and call it a concept of protection so that we never run away from any problems in the reality of the world, on this side of the black hole. I always thought it was a little glib but that was the attitude people were willing to take, at least until Stephen Hawking. You start asking about the quantum properties around black holes.

In quantum mechanics, we believe that there is, in a vacuum, still quantum activity – and that’s what we think the vacuum is. The vacuum type churns and bubbles with this possibility. A vacuum does not allow anything to happen. There are rules that things always go in pairs; and they must come in pairs so as not to disturb the vacuum state.

Think of a colorful analogy: Imagine you have the color green, and that is a property. You can make a small drop of green paint in this green color if you have two yellow ones, so that together they make that green, and it has all the characteristics of a vacuum. What Hawking does is extraordinary is that he realizes that if I have two, a black hole has a volume like no other in the Universe, which can be one and leave the other completely.

It can hide one of those drops after the event. Its pair, which is left behind, let’s say the yellow droplet cannot return to the vacuum because it no longer has the proper properties. It needs its pair to disappear again, in our analogy to become green again. It cannot, by itself, be green.

And so that’s a small part of Hawking’s explanation, he realizes that this part can come out of a black hole. It does not come from within. It comes from nothing, the quantum energy of the vacuum. And it can survive. And if I’m very far away, I’ll get this yellow particle and I’ll see it coming from just outside the black hole. And I will conclude that a black hole emits energy.

And another neat thing that Hawking noticed is that due to the rotation of space and time, the green pair that was absorbed reduces the mass of the black hole. So the black hole gets smaller and smaller even though nothing came from inside the black hole and survived. Over time, Hawking calculates and concludes and declares that the black hole will evaporate and eventually pass away. And all this energy is stolen from the vacuum around the black hole, it will appear as if the black hole has heated up and burned.

Once you close the curtain on the event, it’s over. Unity may even end. But what happened to all that fell inside? What happened to all that basic quantum information that all of our laws are preserved, indestructible, where did it all go? Now I have a Universe that has revealed to me that knowledge is no more and has fallen.

And that became a big problem among those who believed that quantum mechanics is sacred and true, that you can’t destroy information, and those who believed that Einstein’s theory of curved time is sacred, that black holes are exactly as we understand them to be, and that there must be something wrong about quantum mechanics: and that led to the ‘paradox of information loss.’

Narrator: So where do we go from there? Are we talking about quantum entanglement? Are we talking about a firewall?

Levin: Well, we can talk about, maybe we can talk about holography.

Narrator: Awesome.

Levin: All right. The idea of ​​holography in conventional technology is that you encode two-dimensional information, so that on a certain one-dimensional surface, you shine light on it in a certain way and it gives a three-dimensional volume. The name was requested by Lenny Susskind; he proposed it as a way to explain the observation that black holes may actually be two-dimensional and that the idea of ​​a three-dimensional astrophysical entity inside, perhaps the universe, is just an illusion.

And the reason this was exciting and important, was, “Maybe the information about what fell into the black hole is always kept somehow on the surface and never falls into the black hole.” That is why it can be coded in the outgoing meter. And then when the event event is released and the black hole is gone, there is no more conflict because all that information has been released. It never fell into unity, it never fell into the Universe: it was always somehow kept at the surface.

Another strange thing to think about is the possibility that information is somehow kept out that it can lead to what are called ‘firewalls.’ When you come across this absence in the event, what we call “no drama,” there is no drama in the event, instead you meet a burning firewall and bits of you are erased from the event; really, you’re stuck there.

This is a very interesting idea, but as it was, it caused a lot of hysteria because there is nothing about the general relationship that suggests that there is any reason to expect anything amazing to happen in the event of the event. And so, this led to a lot of new energy and sparked a lot of discussion about how we can keep the information in the event without declaring this firewall. Well, we don’t need a firewall if there is a way for information outside of the event to be blocked by information that falls into it.

And that is similar to the idea of ​​two particles being two and being two in such a way that they are nothing when they are together, but when they are separated they are very different. And if two particles are connected, they are related to each other and can only be one way if the other is the other way. One can only spin if the other spins. And then by learning the information of the escaping particle, you can probably reconstruct the story of the particle that fell into it.

On the other hand, if the particles never collide, the radiation is absorbed by itself. Maybe there are tiny holes that connect the inside of a black hole, quantum wormholes and the outside of a black hole, so that, in a way, what fell into it was like what came out.

Well, lemme try this: I think a more metaphorical way to look at how wormholes can help us understand black holes is that when I look at a black hole and I see an event horizon and a solid shadow, and I believe that. if it is true, that I may be suffering from the illusion that a black hole is fundamental when it is not. Maybe it’s like embroidery: where a bunch of threads are sewn together and those woven threads are joined at a distance to look like a solid shadow.

But what it really is, is a bunch of threads that create the illusion of an eventful event. And in this illustration, those interconnected threads are tiny quantum wormholes. They negotiate information falling into a black hole and time and information coming out.

And they do this in this quantum way so that it is not that they go through the event path, but they create it: that the event horizon comes from the convergence of all these quantum wormholes. And that has very profound implications. It will solve the paradox of missing information that has plagued theoretical physics since Hawking first proposed it in 1974.

It would not only solve that problem, but it would be a smoking gun: a kind of sign that the theory of everything we are pursuing is probably not the right way. That gravity is somehow non-existent, that things like space-time, black holes themselves, really come out of the bubble of something that is 100 percent quantum mechanical.