In a few billion years, the sun
is going to bloat enough to ingest the earth.
And if we haven't found another
planet to live on by then, that will be the end of us.
Is the way out really a wormhole?
Christopher Nolan's latest epic
depicts a dying planet and some desparate people.
But relying on some radical advances in physics,
Matthew McConaughey and company are able
to get beyond our solar system
in an effort to save us.
But anything that's outside of our solar system
is at least 18 billion kilometers away.
And our current technology wouldn't get us there
for many thousands of years.
This is where wormholes come in.
One of the solutions to Einstein's
equations of general relativity is the famous black hole.
Where we think a dead collapsed star
creates an area of gravity so massive
that it creates a singularity where
all light and matter are pulled
past the dreaded event horizon,
and crushed down into nothingness.
But another solution in general relativity
provides for white holes,
which are the reverse of black holes.
And theoretically, are the exit for all the matter
that falls into every black hole in the universe.
Possibly spitting out matter
into another region of space and time.
Then, in 1916, another physicist named Ludwig Flamm
proposed that you could connect a black hole
and a white hole through a wormhole.
About 20 years after this,
Einstein and a colleague named Rosen,
investigated this kind of wormhole
and found that it would collapse much too quickly.
But even later on, the scientist behind
the movie Interstellar, Kip Thorne,
found that if you provided
some kind of exotic matter or energy,
you might be able to keep the throat of a wormhole open.
And this opens a possibility for time travel.
We suspect that anything that actually
does fall into a black hole gets
ripped apart molecule by molecule.
But there is math that suggests that
if you fall into a black hole in just the right way,
you might be spit out on the other side of the universe.
Now let's think of space-time
or the fabric of our very universe,
like a sheet that can bend.
If you were to bend space-time over and curve it,
and connect two of those points with a wormhole,
If you were to enter here,
and exit the wormhole here,
you could travel through space and time
quicker than even a light otherwise would
if it had to go all the way around.
But in Interstellar, wormhole time travel
is simultaneously our greatest hope
and our greatest challenge.
That's how Interstellar gets around
the problems of relativity.
The reason why Matthew McConaughey's daughter
and the rest of the earth ages while he is away.
If you travel close to a black hole,
or near the speed of light, time slows down for you.
But the universe ages normally.
By using a wormhole, you can take
a shortcut through space and time without aging anyone.
This is the problem.
Space is unimaginably vast.
Without a wormhole, even if we could
get to one of the 1,800 planets
outside of our solar system that we discover via a wormhole,
by the time anybody got back to tell us about it,
we'd all be long gone.
If you move a wormhole just right,
you can time travel back to the past.
When something moves close to the speed of light,
time slows down for it.
So if you moved one end of a wormhole
close to the speed of light or c,
less time would pass for it than the other end.
But time through the wormhole is synchronized.
If you entered the younger end,
you'd exit the older end at the time
the younger end experienced that entry.
That's backwards time travel.
And that's how McConaughey could get home.
Of course, there are caveats.
We've never actually witnessed a wormhole.
It only works out from the math.
If wormholes do exist, they're likely
too small and collapse way too quickly
to go through them.
And though the physicist who advised Interstallar
thinks that there's some kind of exotic matter
that could keep a wormhole open,
currently, we think it'd take about
the same amount of energy that the sun outputs
in a hundred million years to create a wormhole
about the size of a tangerine.
If we can manipulate wormholes,
they might very well be our best bet
at escaping the solar system.
Although it might turn out to be impossible,
Interstellar remains a fantastic
vision of space travel that pulls
real theories from some of our greatest scientists.
And if we are going to get anywhere in this universe,
it's going to be with those theories.
Why?
Because Science, alright alright alright.