Things You Thought You Knew – What Are Wormholes?

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StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk.

This is a Things You Thought You Knew edition, and that means it’s just going to be me and Chuck for this whole episode.

Can you handle it, Chuck?

No.

Oh, I’m already, I’m overwhelmed.

Because I already know that I don’t know, see?

There’s no thinking, there’s no thinking that I know.

Okay, so we’re going to, let’s first take on the topic that’s so simple.

Why do things break when they fall?

What do you think of that?

See, but this is what I’ve learned from Things You Thought You Knew.

There are times when, in the past, a full disclosure where you have said, so we’re going to talk about floating, things that float.

And in my head, I will say, not audibly, of course, but I will say, Neil has lost his damn mind.

He wants to sit here and waste people’s time talking about why something might float.

And I’m like, why, bro, whatever, okay, let’s get into it.

And then we start talking about it, and by the time it’s over, I’m like, oh my God.

Let’s do it.

Why things break when they fall.

Yeah, so maybe it’s obvious to some people, but just I thought I would tease out the physics of what’s going on.

Okay?

All right.

So you have a plate that is up on a shelf, right?

It’s a breakable plate.

All right.

And somebody shoves the plate, it falls, it hits the ground and breaks.

It’s a cat.

A cat did that.

A cat did that.

For sure.

It’s always a cat.

For sure.

One of my favorite memes, was it a meme where they said, we know the earth isn’t flat because otherwise cats would have pushed everything off of it by now.

I never saw that, but that’s hilarious.

That’s a really good evidence that earth is not flat.

So if the plate is just sitting there in front of you on the table and you want to break it, you have to introduce energy, all right?

Or a Greek wedding.

Or a Jewish wedding, they break.

No, a Jewish wedding, you step on the glass when you’re done.

With a Greek wedding, they break plates?

No, when they’re dancing.

Oh, bop, bang.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Yeah.

I guess I’ve never been to a Greek wedding and probably neither have you.

Neither have I.

Have not.

And right now, there are a bunch of Greek people watching this going, what the hell is Chuck talking about?

All right.

So the plate is in front of you.

You actually have to commit some kind of violence on the plate to do it.

So what you have to do is ask, how much energy is holding this plate together?

All right.

So you go down to the molecular level and see how strongly the molecules are bound to each other.

So in a crystal, for example, they’re pretty strongly bound together.

So if you try to break a crystal, it’s hard.

It takes more energy to break a crystal.

All right.

And so it’s a fragile sort of dinner plate.

All right.

Not a plastic plate, but just one that can break.

You actually have to put energy into it and the plate will not break unless the energy you put into it is greater than the binding energy of the molecules holding the plate together.

Okay.

Well, and that makes sense.

That’s simple.

Doesn’t that make sense?

It makes complete sense.

What doesn’t make sense right now is binding energy.

Okay.

So I thought those two words mean exactly what you think they mean in that sentence.

So the two molecules that are adjacent to each other, right?

Now, why doesn’t the plate just separate all by itself?

All by itself.

Yeah.

Something is holding the molecules together.

It could be any one of a number of kinds of forces doing it, but nonetheless, they’re attached to each other.

And if you introduce energy that’s greater than the energy that’s holding it together, you will break that bond.

Gotcha.

So, that’s how anything breaks, basically.

Right.

We happen to use dinner plates for this example.

So, if you’re just sitting there in front of you, if you pound on it, you’ll break it.

All right.

So, you had to put energy in it.

But wait a minute.

The plate that’s sitting on a shelf that the cat pushed off, you’re not pounding on it.

You didn’t pound on the plate.

Nothing touched that plate.

Did the cat break the plate?

The cat just showed the plate the edge of the shelf.

And even if the cat broke the plate, you know cats, they’d have been like, I didn’t break your plate.

I don’t even know who you’re looking at.

Why are you even looking over here?

First of all, why are you in my house right now?

That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Who the hell are you?

Why do you show up every day?

How did you get a key?

Is what I want to know.

How did you get a key to this house?

I saw a comic where there’s a cat sitting on the couch, and the caption said, if cats could talk, right?

And so the person who owns the cat comes home, right?

He says, oh, hi kitty, witty, witty.

And then the cat looks up at him, and then goes back to sleep.

Right.

If cats could talk.

That is genius.

I don’t know who wrote that.

That’s complete genius.

That is genius if cats could talk, which would be like, yeah, they wouldn’t.

They would just look at you and think, this mother.

Right, but they think everything you said that they would say.

That’s right.

Never say it to you.

It’s like, what are you doing in my house?

That’s right.

Who gave you the key?

Well, can I get back to breaking plates, please?

Anyway, anyway, so the cat didn’t do anything to the plate.

The cat didn’t physically break the plate.

Right.

Okay.

So, what broke the plate?

This is the question.

You know that if you take a hammer and hit it to a plate, it’ll break.

You know if you pound your fist on the plate, it’ll break.

You know all this.

Okay?

Why did the plate break when it fell off the shelf?

Because it hit the floor.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

So, the plate hit the floor with a certain amount of energy.

Correct.

And the higher the location it falls from, the more energy it’s going to have.

Does that make sense?

Of course.

And you know what kind of energy that is?

Energy of motion.

So, we have a word for that.

Kinetic.

Kinetic energy.

Exactly.

So, the kinetic energy of the plate that it had the instant before it hit the floor, you have to ask, how much energy is that compared to the binding energy of the plate?

Alright.

And so, does that exceed the binding energy of the plate?

And if it does, the plate will break.

Okay.

Where did the plate get its kinetic energy from?

Gravity.

Gravity.

Alright.

But, gravity didn’t put the plate on the shelf.

Who put the plate on the shelf?

Well, I mean, who lives with the cat?

That’s who put the plate on the shelf.

Yeah, because, you know.

So, the plate used to be at a low location.

Right.

And somebody walked up to the plate after it was cleaned.

It was like the lower shelf of the dishwasher.

They picked it up, used their energy to give that plate what’s called gravitational potential energy.

And the higher you put the plate on the shelf, the more gravitational potential energy it has.

And then the plate just sits there in possession of the plate.

A gravitational potential energy.

It just sits there.

And if you dare, if the cat pushes the plate off the shelf, the gravitational potential energy swaps and becomes kinetic energy.

Until it has no gravitational potential energy left, which is right when it hits the floor, and all that energy becomes kinetic.

And this dance between kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy is what goes on in every curve and every turn of a roller coaster.

Okay.

Other than the first pull up the top, where there’s like chains and motors, everything else is free fall.

You’re in free glide.

All right.

And so that’s why when you go up a hill, you slow down.

But why are you slowing down?

Because the gravitational potential energy is taking away your kinetic energy.

And once you get to the top, why do you speed up on the way down?

Because the kinetic energy is taking away, is being converted from the gravitational potential energy.

And your fastest point on an entire roller coaster is going to be where?

The fastest point?

Yes.

You mean where you reach your top speed?

Yes.

Where’s that going to be?

The bottom of the first drop.

The lowest point of the roller coaster is going to be your highest kinetic energy.

And your highest potential energy is obvious now.

It’s going to be whatever is the highest point on the roller coaster.

So the roller coasters fully exploit this gravity, kinetic energy, potential energy relationship.

And all I’m saying is you want to know who broke the plate?

You did because you gave it the energy to break in the first place by ascending it to that shelf.

See, it sounds to me like you’ve been talking to the cat.

Because that’s something the cat would say.

I ain’t nothing to do with this.

What are you talking about?

Whoever put it here, it’s their fault.

I was just introducing you to some gravitational kinetic energy.

Getting rid of some potential energy.

And by the way, the broom is over there.

Okay, so let’s keep going.

Now suppose the plate fell from an even higher height.

Okay.

All right?

It just doesn’t break into two.

What happens?

Oh, it shatters.

It shatters.

Unless there’s some other sort of structural aspect of it, like safety glass shatters rather than just breaks into large pieces.

You don’t always hold safety glass because the pieces are so small that one piece can’t go in and cut your jugular, right?

You’ll just be like surface damage to your skin.

With safety glass.

That’s why it breaks into very small pieces instantly.

So it’s depth by a thousand shards.

Instead of just one big one that cuts you in half.

That pierces your aorta.

All I’m saying is that if it’s higher, it gains more kinetic energy because you gave it more gravitational potential energy.

And by the time it hits the ground, it has much more energy to break the plate with.

So it doesn’t just break it in three places, it’ll break it in a hundred places.

There it is.

So that’s why things break when they fall.

All I’m saying.

There you go.

I have to say, once again, I’m impressed.

I gotta tell you right now, you know, I thought at the end of this talk that I was going to feel like the cat.

Like, what the hell?

And just to be clear, you could make something.

If you wanted to say, I want to make a plate that doesn’t break.

Right.

All right.

So you make sure the binding energy between the molecules of the plate is greater than the energy that would be given by the cat if it fell off a very high shelf in your home.

And this is basically unbreakable for most things that would happen in your home.

And so you could calculate what that energy is and find a material substance for which that’s the case.

Nice.

So that’s where you get break-resistant.

Break-resistant stemware for clumsy wine drinkers.

Yes.

So the material substance of it has higher resistance to…

It requires more energy to break it than what is normal and typical for a delicate wine stem.

I had a job where I had to demonstrate something that was billed as unbreakable at the time.

And when you’re supposed to demonstrate it within reason, okay, I took it and slammed it down and it exploded and I then said to the people, maybe it is break-resistant.

And that was your first and last day on that job.

Oh, without a doubt.

And Chuck, you know why some things just won’t break when they fall?

Because they’re flexible.

And the energy that would otherwise go back into the product to break its bonds, goes into the product to have the product bend.

Got you.

That takes energy to do that.

So plastic, something that’s plastic, when it falls, it will just bend.

And the energy goes into the bending of the structure.

So, and if you want to make something that will survive kids, things that fall and just bust apart into 20 pieces, but each piece can then be put back together the way it was before.

You see?

So the energy still destroys it, but doesn’t break any individual piece because that energy is just cast to the sunder.

That’s why all my dishes are made out of Lego.

Chuck, that was brilliant.

That’s just brilliant.

Alright, so there you go, Chuck.

There you have it.

As we end segment one of Things You Thought You Knew.

When we come back for segment two, we’re going to do a little more of this on a whole other subject.

Alright, we’ll be right back.

I’m Joel Cherico, and I make pottery.

You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com.

Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day.

And I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarTalk.

Things you thought you knew edition.

Chuck, ready for another one?

Oh yes.

Okay, this is the topic of white noise.

You know.

No, no, don’t go there.

Just stop.

I’m just saying, since January 6th, now that we brought it up.

I did not bring it up.

Now that we brought it up, I got us just, you know, since January 6th has happened.

While we’re on the subject.

White noise was long defined before the chaos at the Capitol.

All right.

So white noise is what is described as a combination of sound frequencies that ends up just sounding like a hiss.

It’s a hiss.

So what’s going on there?

It’s as opposed to black noise, which is shut them damn kids up.

That’s black noise.

Y’all know I’m down here trying to watch my stories?

What the hell is wrong with you?

That is black noise.

That is black noise.

Thank you, Chuck.

We’ll introduce that to the animals of physics.

Welcome to another episode of Black Noise.

No, you didn’t.

Yes, there you go.

More black noise.

Oh, no, you didn’t.

Right?

Just the background.

The background of black noise.

Just, or, that is what we not gonna do.

That is what we not gonna do.

That’s more black noise.

More black noise.

More black noise.

Chuck is gonna make a book.

You’re gonna make a…

Alright.

Okay.

So, here it is.

So, what it is, it’s a mixture of all frequencies of sound.

Oh, wow.

All at once.

All audible frequencies of sound.

Okay.

You could add in others, but it won’t make any difference because you can’t hear them.

So, white noise is low frequency, middle frequency, high frequency.

And there are different ways you can do it because high frequency sound at the same amplitude actually carries more energy.

So, you might sort of adjust it so that you have the same amount of energy, sound energy in each sort of frequency band.

Okay.

So, there are different ways to define it.

But the point I’m making is all frequencies of sound are sampled.

And what that sounds like to you is a hiss.

It’s so unfortunate now that we live in an age of digital streaming and cable television, because kids will never get to know what white noise sounds like on the television set.

When you’re between channels, when TVs were actually grabbing radio frequencies from the air with the antennas, if you were between channels, if the channel went off the air, you would see static on the screen, and that would be the sound of white noise.

Yes.

Oh, by the way, by the way, some fraction, a few percent of the hiss that is on that screen is the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Oh, that’s hot.

Yep.

Yep.

I thought you were going to say is as opposed to the world where Carol Anne was taken and poltergeist.

No, that was not what I was going to say.

So some of that hiss is the evidence, the remaining evidence of the Big Bang from 13.8 billion light years away.

And so it’s mixed in with the absence of radio signal because those signals are not any purposeful signal sent by any radio station.

They’re just whatever is in space, basically.

And so that sounds like white noise.

Okay, and so that’s what it would look like if you made a sort of image on a screen.

But that would be…

Oh, by the way, that would be electromagnetic noise.

So that’s not audio…

Yes, they turned a radio signal into an acoustic signal.

And that acoustic signal comes across as a hiss, as a white noise.

Just to be clear about that.

So now you have to ask, why is it called white?

Well, I don’t, because I’m old enough to be here in this country long enough to know…

Why?

I’m happy to tell you why it’s called white noise.

Please tell me why.

I really don’t know why it’s called white noise.

So here’s where it comes from.

Go ahead.

If Isaac Newton, one day, the sun is shining through his window and he closes his curtains or cuts a hole in the wall…

I forgot which…

Might have done both.

And just one narrow beam of sunlight comes through the wall.

Then he takes a prism, a 60-60-60 equilateral prism, okay?

And he puts the sunlight through the prism and on the other side of the prism comes the rainbow.

The colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, okay?

But he had a mystical fascination with the number seven and those six colors don’t sum to seven.

So he added one.

Which color did he add?

Indigo?

Indigo, of course.

So, we have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, all right?

And that spells everybody’s friend Roy G.

Biv.

We all love Roy G.

Biv.

Yes.

Almost as much as Belle Biv DeVille.

That was good.

Belle Biv DeVille only knew.

Had a cousin called Roy G.

Biv.

If only they knew.

So, anyhow, so it has all the colors there, okay?

Right.

So, the question is, did the prism create these colors?

Because the white light is no longer visible.

Right.

And this is what everyone presumed.

Of course it created the colors.

Because if they were there before it entered the prism, you would see them.

We see them.

Of course.

So, then he said, well, what will happen if I take another prism, put these colors back through?

Let’s see what then comes out the other side.

You know what came out the other side?

White light.

And so Newton was very clever, not just because he was smart, but clever in his experiments and what questions to ask and how to adjust the experiment to test for things where it could be one thing or another, but let’s readjust the test to distinguish what explanation might account for it.

In so doing, he showed that white light from the sun is composed of equal amounts of all the colors in the rainbow, in the spectrum.

And by the way, rainbows, people said, oh, the raindrops are making the colors, not the sun.

It’s in the sunlight.

This is freaky.

How could color be in white light?

What the hell is going on, okay?

Well, you got to get into the physiology of the retina and the brain and all that.

The point is…

Your eyes are racist.

That is how all the white, all the light is white.

All the colors come in to your racist eyes, and all they see is white.

I’m afraid I have to just say that is the physics to the.

Truth.

So, the point is, if you combine all those frequencies of white, the red, the orange, the yellow, the green, the blue, the violet, and combine them all, and you have equal amounts of them all, you get white.

So, this word, in that context, was then borrowed by the sound people.

If you put equal frequencies of sound, okay, it’s not a thing, it’s just this noise, we shall call it white noise.

Even though the sound, unless you’re synesthetic, where you have cross-wired senses, the sound is not a color, all right?

But we assign, we say it’s white, out of homage to Newton and the colors of the spectrum and the fact that you put all these colors, these different frequencies together, and you get the color white.

So that hiss is white noise for that reason.

Yeah, you know, and it’s funny because it is, I understand the borrowing of the term, that makes sense just because it’s the same picture of what you’re doing.

Plus you’re using frequencies.

Using frequencies, right.

Sound waves, light waves, the whole deal.

Exactly.

Sound makes sense, but the term doesn’t really fit for, like you say, unless you’re, you know, you have synesthesia, it doesn’t fit.

We need a better term for white noise is what I’m saying.

Okay, so the point is noise can be any combination of those frequencies.

But when it’s equal across the board, only then is it white noise.

No, why can’t it be equality noise?

DEI noise, diversity, equity, inclusion.

There you go, diversity, equity, and inclusion noise.

Because that’s what it’s doing, it’s including everybody.

And we can call it DEI.

DEI noise.

Right now, there are, let me tell you something.

Right now, there are some Fox News viewers that are watching us right now, and their heads are exploding.

Their heads are exploding right now.

Bill Maher just threw up.

Because he’s anti-woke.

Oh yes, he’s so anti-woke.

No, it makes perfect sense, honestly, to borrow that picture.

But it’s a very specific kind of noise.

It really is.

Otherwise, it’s not white noise.

For example, if you had more red in your spectrum than blue, and you mix them together, the object will have a red hue to it.

And if you have more blue in the mixture rather than red, it would have a blue hue to it.

Red stars and blue stars in the sky are exactly that.

They’re giving you all frequencies, but they lean towards that side of the spectrum that has those colors.

So I think it’s okay to borrow terms that make sense in other contexts.

I don’t have a problem with that.

Yeah, it paints the picture.

The problem is not too many people know the Newton story.

That’s my point.

It makes perfect sense.

Once you explain the Newton story, I’m like, oh my God, that’s awesome.

I get it now, white noise.

And if your acoustic noise is clankity clanking, or if you can find any signal within that noise, it’s not white noise.

It’s not white noise.

Right, exactly.

That’s very cool though.

Okay, that’s the one I just set the record straight there.

Yeah.

Once again, I’m impressed that you took something totally stupid, made it super interesting, and informative.

I’ll tell you something.

I don’t know how many times you can pull this trick.

Plus, I don’t want to hear later on that you come out with an album, Black Noise.

Oh my God, that should be my next album.

Black Noise.

That is good.

That’s good.

That’s a good name for an album.

That could work.

That could work.

Black Noise.

Black Noise.

You heard a white noise?

Here’s some black noise.

There you go.

Shut the hell up.

All right?

Don’t make me put my foot up your ass.

There you go.

That’s more black noise.

And by the way, what I should say is.

What?

What?

Black Noise and white noise make perfect sense together.

It’s just like, what the hell is going on?

What?

How many times I’m going to tell you?

Shhh.

Shut the hell up.

Black and white.

Black and white noise.

They belong together.

They belong together.

Oh, no.

Or there’s some party, the party that went too late next door where they’re jamming with folks.

All right.

I’m dying.

I’m sorry.

All right.

All right.

We’re done here.

Let’s take a quick break.

And when we come back, the third and final segment of Things You Thought You Knew.

Chuck, we’re back for the third and final segment of Things You Thought You Knew.

Alrighty.

Things to do with wormholes.

Uh-oh.

Watch out.

I just thought, you know.

Oh no, man, I don’t know if we should be doing this.

People are not imaginative enough.

That’s my point.

Why are we giving people…

Let me explain.

No, scientific sci-fi writers right now are watching this here.

Yes.

And going, bro, get a pen.

Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is about to hook us up with some killer ideas on what to do with wormholes.

My point is we should be paying for this.

This is valuable.

All right, so here it goes.

So let me remind people what a wormhole is.

Yes.

All right, so we have the sort of the fabric of the space-time continuum.

All right, so it’s not just that space is out there.

Space is intricately configured with time.

And how do you know this?

Because we did this exercise before.

I think we did space-time in another show.

We did an explainer on that.

Where I ask you, I say, Chuck, let’s have lunch tomorrow, okay?

Let’s have lunch tomorrow at 12 noon.

Okay, and then, of course, I will say, are you buying?

Okay, that’s not what I thought.

Of course, well, where do you want to have lunch?

Yeah, so the question is where, all right?

So I set up a time and you knew that was incomplete.

And we have to complete the engagement by establishing a location.

So I gave you a time, tomorrow at 12 noon, and you’re going to say where, all right?

And I might say you pick whatever, but we need a where, otherwise it doesn’t work.

I could be in a place at a different time or at the same time at a different place, but we have to be in the same place and the same time in order to meet.

And on the same token, I can say, oh, I’ll meet you at Gabriel’s for lunch.

Okay, and then you say, what time?

All right, so space time are forever conjoined for this fact, okay?

And other reasons, but that’s the terrestrial one that is closest to how we think about the world.

All right, this fabric can be distorted in such a way that you can change the distance, the space time distance between two locations.

All right, and one way to imagine that is imagine all of our universe is just on a flat sheet of paper and you’re on one edge of the paper and I wanna get to the other edge and I’ll take light years of time, whatever, however long that takes, okay?

I mean, it’s light years distance, so I take many years traveling at the speed of light, but if I take the space and warp it, curve it back on itself, now your location is very close to me.

If I could somehow punch through the fabric of space and time and reach your location.

That’s the warp drive right there.

Well, so the warp drive would accomplish that by other means, but it is nonetheless warping the fabric of space.

Making something that would otherwise be longer, a shorter distance and thereby transcending the speed of light.

To do so, you’re no longer limited by the speed of light.

The diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light years.

You can’t travel across it unless you figure it during the TV commercial, unless you figured out a way to warp space and time.

Okay, so in that warp, in principle on paper, you can have a hole that you pass through and just come out the other side.

And you’re in another place.

And if you did it right, you can show up at another time, but let’s just make your timeline continuous with yourself.

So you go right through and you come out the other side, bada bing, there you are.

That’s the most classical invocation of a wormhole.

Okay, and by the way, in spite of what Hollywood shows, that when you go through wormholes, it’s like you go through the water slide at the water park.

No, that’s not how, it’s just, you just step through and you’re there.

This is accurately captured in Dr.

Strange, all right, where he opens up a portal.

Do they call them wormholes in-

No, they don’t, they call them portals.

Yeah, just a portal, and that’s a wormhole.

But in Rick and Morty, they do exactly the same thing, and they’re wormholes, they know this, okay?

And the difference, of course, is that in Rick and Morty, they’re using real science to make their wormholes, whereas Dr.

Strange is using magic.

Yeah, yeah, and you gotta do your fingers in a way and go in a circle.

And there’s little sparklies on the edge of it, too.

And there’s definitely weird looking ideograms that they somehow have power.

Okay, so, things to do with wormholes, right?

Yes, you can move through space and time, just as has been portrayed in the film.

But let’s get a little more practical, okay?

So, the movie Monsters, Inc.

was all about wormholes.

Did you see Monsters, Inc.?

You have kids, you saw Monsters, Inc.

I did, several times I’ve seen that movie.

Okay, the doors.

Oh yeah, I see what you’re saying.

They’re manufacturing doors that the monsters take home and then they open the door.

That is the door of the closet of the kid they have to scare that night.

That’s right.

Okay, and there’s a big chase scene where they’re going in and out of doors in the factory and they show up in Paris and they show up in 20 different places with every door they pass through.

Those are wormholes.

So instead of a transporter, which molecularly decomposes…

I’m getting there.

You were exactly right.

Chuck, that’s my next thing.

So my point is, if you just walk through a door, you walk through a door, okay?

That’s the wormhole.

And while they never said it in Monsters, Inc.

which is a Disney Pixar animated feature, but very cleverly done and they’re funny, they didn’t say it, but those are wormholes.

Period, period, okay?

Without the histrionics of a Dr.

Strange and without the madness of Rick and Morty, they’re wormholes, okay?

Well, if you have wormholes and you can warp space in that way, then the transporter in Star Trek, which dematerializes you, beams your energy at the speed of light to a location and then you get rematerialized, would be completely unnecessary.

Exactly.

You just pop the hatch, walk through, and now you’re in the other spaceship.

Now you’re on the planetary surface.

Why did you have to take me apart?

Exactly.

You completely took me apart, bro.

Completely, okay?

Plus, there’s some episode I was told, maybe in the later series, because I’m less complete in the later series, that there’s some fraction of your molecules that are not transported accurately.

Copying errors.

Well, that’s why they have the buffer.

It’s called the transporter buffer system because of that.

It compensates for that, which is why sometimes, which is so lazy, but I love it.

It works.

It’s like somebody gets lost and they’re just like, well, what we’ll do is we’ll use the transporter buffer to take all of their molecular imprint and then we’ll just bring the person back.

So, they don’t really die in a pile of goo.

Right.

Exactly.

So, what’s interesting there is we’re in the age of information, which was not so in the 1960s.

So, they weren’t thinking about information in the same way we’re at all.

And so, all you really need to do is make an exact copy of all the information that is contained within you, all the neurosynaptic configurations and everything, and then beam the information to another ship and then recreate you there.

And then what that means is I can create you in any location and I can create multiple yous.

That’s right.

I mean, why not?

They do that with the replicator.

That’s right.

That’s what a replicator does.

That’s all it does.

So, in principle, if you have a replicator, you don’t need a transporter system.

We just have the information of who you are and transport that.

So, that’s one thing you would do with a wormhole.

So, we have monster scaring children.

That’s the first application.

Next.

Second.

I love it.

Because otherwise, how are they going to get in the kids’ room?

There’s no way they can get in.

Exactly.

Well, yeah.

And in my hood, they were not coming down the chimney, right?

So, that’s not happening.

So, another thing is, imagine if the back of your refrigerator were connected to your grocer.

Oh, wow.

He’d stock it the same way he stocks the shelves at the grocery store.

At the grocery store.

They take a peek.

Oh, you would be low on lettuce.

And the lettuce is turning bad.

They’ll take out the lettuce, put in a fresh one, and there is no transportation network involved.

Say goodbye, Grubhub.

So Grubhub is a practical wormhole, right?

By the way, you know what else a wormhole is?

It’s an elevator.

Think about it.

You walk into a room, the door closes, and then when the door reopens, you’re in a completely different time and place.

That’s actually kind of, you know, yes, that…

Think about that, before electricity and before elevators and before tall buildings, just grab someone off the street and take them into a modern elevator.

Oh my God.

And then the doors, you know, they’re on street level or something, and then they push a button and then they open it up and then they’re a hundred stories up and they’ll freak out.

How did that happen?

The room didn’t change?

I didn’t see anything.

There are no windows.

What happened?

So, for me, an elevator is a modern sort of next best thing to a wormhole that you can come up with.

Yeah.

Right?

You could be in one room and then take an elevator and then there’s a kitchen and another room and then it’s like a living room or whatever, you know?

And so just the world changes just in a matter of seconds.

So what do we have?

So we have the elevator is a poor man’s wormhole, we’ve got scaring children in their closet, we’ve got the transporter in Star Trek, we’ve got the back of your refrigerator and what that ends up doing is completely removing the transportation sector from the world.

I was going to say what you really do.

I’m home for the rest of my life.

I don’t have to do anything.

Well, you don’t have to go somewhere to obtain something.

Yeah, everything comes right through the hole.

Right through the hole.

Correct.

Correct.

And I got one other.

I think I’ve told this many times, but I even laugh every time I retell it, even though it happened to me and it’s my joke, right?

So is that good or bad, Chuck?

Are you allowed to laugh at your own?

Listen, I say whatever works for a person telling the joke.

So, here I was in the Charlotte airport and I had to go from a big plane to a little plane.

And the carry-on that I had did not have wheels, so I actually had to carry it.

And Chuck, it felt like I walked three miles.

It might have just been a mile, but to go from a big plane to a little plane in that airport, I must have walked the full width of the entire airport campus.

Right.

So, I finally get to my destination with the little bitty ass plane, and I said, I got to tweet this.

So, I tweeted, can’t wait for wormholes.

That way, all airport gates would be adjacent to each other.

Just step through and you’re there.

And then, because I thought that was a nice geeky thing, tweeting to my geek base, I got out geeked.

Okay, here it is.

One of the responses was, Dr.

Tyson, the day we have wormholes, you won’t need airports.

I said, oh.

That is true.

Yes.

Now, you just put every pilot out of work.

I know.

Well, this is a readjustment to the economy.

That’s happened many times before.

Nobody’s making horse-drawn carriages anymore or buggy whips or, you know, there’s whole industries that don’t have this.

They’re still making the buggy whips.

They’re just not for buggies anymore.

They’re just called whips.

Okay.

Fine.

Yeah.

So basically, the entire transportation sector would go out of business basically overnight.

And it’s a fascinating reality.

But plus, you wouldn’t need 12-lane highways to go anywhere.

You’re going to go to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving?

Wormhole in.

So each home would have like a general purpose wormhole.

Right.

You dial the coordinates and come through.

But your grocer, they’d only have access to your refrigerator.

Right.

Right.

And your in-laws would have access to your friend’s house.

Not coming here.

Man, I’m going to tell you something.

I don’t like the world with just wormholes.

That’s a little too close.

No, you can lock them.

We’ll figure out a way to lock them.

It’d be like your front door.

You can hear a knock.

You know.

No, but you can never get away from anybody.

Think about it.

No matter where you are.

You lock them out of your wormhole.

Yeah, but then they call you on your worm phone.

You’re like, I’m right here.

I’m right here.

Hey, man, what’s going on, man?

Where are you?

I just went to your house.

You’re not home.

No, I’m in Bermuda.

Okay, I’ll meet you there.

Exactly.

Oh, yeah, you’re Bermuda.

That’s great.

I’ll be there in a couple seconds.

You know?

I didn’t think of the downsides of this.

Yeah.

Somebody’s got to think it through a little further than I have, but just think, or maybe the wormholes are where the previous ports were.

You know, train stations, airports, spaceports, you have a wormhole port.

And so you can’t just go anywhere at any time.

You got to sort of sign up and…

Yeah, that’s a little better.

Yeah.

The other way is a little invasive.

You can’t even pretend like back in the day when like, you know, people would knock on your door and be like, oh, you know, okay, we’re not answering that.

In the day, you couldn’t tell them in advance that you were showing up.

Right.

So you had to be ready to greet someone at the door.

In fact, the very word caller was someone who knocked on your front door.

And that word was adopted into telephones.

And so now we think of caller as only with phones.

You know, the gentleman caller on the lady, you know.

I do believe you have a gentleman caller at the door.

My dear, you did not tell us.

You got your plantation accent right on cue there.

Okay.

So Chuck, that’s 101 things to do with a wormhole.

That’s lovely.

I love it.

Thought I’d tell you about that.

And so let’s call it quits there.

That’s been the third of three segments of Things You Thought You Knew.

We hope you enjoyed that.

And as always, I’m Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep looking up.