#quantum gravity

For a while back there we might be able to avoid the black hole. They’d been lurking as shadows in our theories of gravity forever. Enough mass crammed into a small enough space would lead to a gravitational field at the surface from which not even light could escape from a surrounding surface that we call the event horizon. The event horizon generates paradoxes that worry physicists, and the singularity of infinite density within the black hole worries them even more. And so many brave physicists have fought for centuries to prove that these monsters don’t exist. They hoped nature would step in to save us from the theoretical horror of ultimate gravitational collapse. One of our final hopes is the Planck star—a ball of energy at the heart of the black hole like frozen shards of the Big Bang. Let’s hope they’re real, for physics’ sake.

Search the Entire Space Time Library Here: https://search.pbsspacetime.com/​

Hosted by Matt O'Dowd

Written by Richard Dyer & Matt O'Dowd

Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer

Directed by Andrew Kornhaber

Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour

Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber

Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez

Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing

Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.

This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.

Cosmic Genesis: How Black Holes Might Be Giving Birth to New Universes

The human quest for understanding the universe has led to numerous groundbreaking discoveries, each weaving a more intricate tapestry of our cosmic landscape. A recent theoretical framework, pioneered by Professor Nikodem Poplawski, proposes a revolutionary concept: every black hole creates a new, growing universe inside its event horizon. This idea, rooted in the Einstein-Cartan Theory, introduces torsion to the fabric of spacetime, avoiding gravitational singularities and transforming our understanding of black holes and the multiverse.

By incorporating torsion, the theory predicts that matter within a black hole, instead of collapsing into a singularity, reaches a “big bounce” and then expands into a new, closed universe. This challenges our current understanding of the cosmos, suggesting that our universe is a vast, cosmic nursery, giving birth to billions of “baby universes” through black holes. Each black hole, once thought to be a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, now becomes a gateway to a new, unobservable universe, raising fundamental questions about the nature of reality and our place within the multiverse.

The introduction of torsion also has far-reaching implications for the long-standing gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics. By violating the linearity of quantum mechanics, torsion favors the pilot-wave interpretation, where particles have definite positions, guided by a wave function. This non-linear aspect of torsion could provide a crucial link in the quantum gravity puzzle, enabling a more unified understanding of the universe, from the smallest subatomic particles to the vast expanse of cosmic structures.

While experimental verification of torsion poses significant challenges, it is not insurmountable. Future astronomical observations of the early universe, utilizing gravitational waves and neutrinos, may uncover the distinctive signature of torsion in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Additionally, cutting-edge particle physics experiments could reveal the extended sizes of elementary particles, predicted by the theory, or the effects of non-commutative momentum in high-energy collisions, providing a tantalizing prospect of empirical confirmation.

The profound implications of Poplawski’s theory, if confirmed, would revolutionize our understanding of black holes, transforming them from cosmic dead ends to gateways of creation. The multiverse, once a topic of speculative debate, would gain a theoretical foundation, with our universe being just one of many, interconnected through a web of black holes. This pursuit of knowledge, even if verification takes decades or centuries, embodies the spirit of scientific inquiry, driving us to push the boundaries of human understanding and illuminating the intricate, ever-unfolding tapestry of the cosmos.

Nikodem Poplawski: The Unknown Revolutionary Theory of Black Holes (This Is World, March 2025)

N. Poplawski: Big Bounce and inflation from spin and torsion (Gravity and Cosmology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, May 2020)

Women are notoriously under celebrated and over ignored in science, but there are more women in science now than ever before. It's not implausible.

I wonder what would happen. How would it be sidestepped? Or would she become the new Einstein Superstar Scientist? Have we really progressed to that point yet? Would it help?

Introduction Black holes—cosmic monsters where gravity crushes matter into oblivion—challenge our understanding of physics. At their edges (event horizons) and cores (singularities), Einstein’s general relativity (governing gravity) collides with quantum mechanics (ruling the subatomic). This conflict hints at a deeper theory: quantum gravity. Here’s how black holes probe the quantum…