A New Theory Reveals How Space-Time Could Create Tiny Black Holes

0:00This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East, thus with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East, thus Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. And now a quick vital break from our sponsor, Vital Proteins, the official collagen partner of the US Open and presenting sponsor of the Mixed Doubles Championship. If there's a sport where aesthetics meets athletics more than in tennis, I don't know what it is. So it just makes sense for vital proteins to be involved considering how much collagen peptide support healthy skin, hair, nails, bones, and joints. And that applies whether it's players facing a third set tie break in the semis or fans cheering them on. Thanks again to our sponsor, Vital Proteins. Learn more about collagen peptides by going to vitalproteins.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I love a brighter smile. What I don't love is that little wince when I take a sip of something cold or even breathe in cold air. You know that feeling? It takes your breath away that s-ouch! Eek! That's why I like senzidine clinical white.

1:01It's triple-action formula whitens, holishes, and helps protect against sensitivity. Plus, it protects against new stains for up to six months. So I can keep enjoying my iced coffee and everything else I love without the sensitivity. Wider teeth without the wince. Try senzidine clinical white today. Welcome to the Corkside Quantum Physics Podcast. An exploration of the fundamental structure of reality where quantum laws govern matter, energy, and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw, and understanding begins at the smallest scales. I want you to picture a black hole, but I want you to scale that image all the way down. Right, way down. Yeah, down past the size of a collapsing star, past the size of a mountain, even past a grain of sand, picture a microscopic black hole.

2:03A singularity you could practically fit on the head of a pen. Exactly. Now, imagine that this microscopic black hole wasn't formed from, you know, the chaotic matter of the early universe. Instead, it was birthed from this bizarre repeating structure, a crystal. Which just sounds wild. Right. But not a crystal made of physical matter, we're talking about a crystal formed entirely out of the fabric of space and time itself. It really does sound like a mathematical abstraction just pushed to its absolute breaking point. He really does. But we're actually looking at one of the most significant realities in modern theoretical physics right now. Yeah. We're talking about a scenario where the very geometry of the universe undergoes this phase transition. Okay, so a phase transition of space itself? Yeah, exactly. It momentarily organizes itself into a perfect crystalline pattern and then triggered by just a microscopic change in energy, it undergoes a critical collapse into a tiny black hole. And researchers have finally figured out exactly how this geometric collapse actually functions mathematically.

3:05So today, we are going to unpack this massive breakthrough. We're exploring how space time can temporarily lock into this discrete pattern, how incredibly unstable that state is, and how physicists finally crack the math to prove it. And the implications here are just huge. Researchers from TUAIN, that's the Vienna University of Technology and Goathe University, Frankfurt, haven't just theorized this. They've finally captured it with real analytical mathematics. Which was basically impossible before, right? Completely. And to do it, they had to employ this incredibly unconventional mind-bending trick, involving, well, infinitely many dimensions. Okay, wait, infinitely many dimensions. We are definitely going to get into that math trick. But before we expand the universe, I feel like we need to understand how a space time crystal can even exist in the first place. That's a good place to start. Because normally, when we think of black holes, we think of violent cosmic events. Dead, massive stars collapsing under their own weight. Right, the stellar mass black hole. Yeah. But physics doesn't actually dictate

4:05a strict lower limit on size, does it? No, it doesn't. We have this concept of primordial black holes. Which are the ones from right after the Big Bang? Exactly. Shortly after the Big Bang, you had matter and energy packed into these intensely chaotic environments. The density fluctuations were so extreme that microscopic black holes could have just formed spontaneously. Okay, let's unpack this a bit for you listening, just to make sure we're all in the same page with the physics here. Going back to Einstein's theory of relativity, the core idea is that mass and energy curves space time. Right, the classic bowling ball in a trampoline analogy. Exactly. A massive star creates a deep well in the trampoline. And it actually deflects light rays. But smaller mass is produced curvature too, just to a much lesser extent. Yeah, every bit of mass or energy bends the fabric a little bit. So, Christian Ecker, one of the researchers at Frankfurt, is looking at this curvature. But under certain critical conditions, this curvature doesn't just bend randomly

5:07like a bunch of dented trampolines. Right, usually the metric tensor, which is just the math that describes this curvature, it fluctuates completely randomly in high energy environments, just chaos, gravitational waves going everywhere. But under these specific conditions, it organizes. Yes, it ranges itself into this finely balanced repeating pattern across space and time. That is the space time crystal. Okay, I have to push back on the word crystal here. Oh, really? Yeah, because I know when you say crystal, a lot of people picture like a shiny quartz rock floating in a void. Ah, see what you mean. Yeah, it's not a solid rock. Right. So instead of a rock, imagine space time is like the surface of a drum. Usually if you hit it with a bunch of random noise, it ripples chaotically. It's a mess. Just random noise. But under these exact critical conditions, the ripples suddenly lock in. They form the perfect, repeating geometric grid on the drum head. It's not a physical object. It is a pattern in the fabric itself.

6:09That is actually a perfect analogy. You're talking about standing waves. A crystal, strictly speaking, is just any system that breaks continuous symmetry and becomes periodic. So the drum surface isn't flat anymore. It has this highly ordered repeating structure of peaks and valleys. A geometric grid made of gravity. Exactly. But here's the catch. This structure is incredibly, almost impossibly delicate. Right. Which brings us to this idea of being on a razor's edge. Professor Daniel Grummler from TU Ween calls this space time crystal a, I think his words were a very peculiar and fascinating object. Yeah, because it is an intermediate state. It is sitting exactly on a razor's edge between two completely different physical realities. And to help visualize how precarious this is, Grummler uses this great real world analogy of water. Oh, the super cold liquid example. Yeah. Imagine liquid water sitting exactly at zero degree Celsius. It's right at the freezing point, but it's still liquid. Right. It's highly sensitive. So sensitive that a tiny, seemingly insignificant change, like a speck of dust falling into it,

7:10or a tiny temperature drop triggers this dramatic shift. Suddenly all the chaotic water molecules spontaneously arrange into a regular pattern. They foam an ice crystal. Exactly. So what does this all mean for our space time crystal? If it's balancing on that same razor's edge, what happens when it gets nudged? Well, it experiences what we call critical collapse. And it can evolve in two completely different directions. Two paths. Right. If you just leave it alone or slightly decrease the energy, the pattern just sort of dissipates. It dissolves back into ordinary, boring, flat space time, just freely moving particles. But what if you push it the other way? If you add even a tiny microscopic amount of energy to this balance system, it takes a dramatic turn that inconspicuous grids suddenly folds in on itself and collapses into a microscopic black hole. Okay, wait. I have to stop you there. Because we usually think of gravity and mass creating black holes, piling on more and more weight until it breaks the trampoline.

8:11Why does adding a tiny bit of energy trigger a black hole? That is a great question. It comes down to the fact that in these extreme environments, energy and mass are essentially two sides of the same coin when it comes to gravity. Because of the whole E equals MC squared thing. Exactly. Energy influences the geometry of space time just like mass does. And Einstein's equations are highly nonlinear, meaning gravity interacts with itself. Gravity creates more gravity. Yes. The gravitational field itself contains energy and that energy creates more curvature. So when the space time crystal is in this delicate state, injecting even a tiny bit of energy causes the local curvature to deepen. And it traps itself. Yes, it deepens so fast that the energy can't radiate away. It compounds the geometry collapses and boom, an event horizon forms. That is just terrifyingly elegant. It really is. But if physicists understand this critical collapse so well, why is this making headlines right now? Because of the math. We've actually known about this phenomenon for over 30 years.

9:13Wait, 30 years? Yeah. Computer simulations first predicted this spontaneous black hole formation back in 1993. Okay, so if a computer simulated it in 1993, what was the road block? Why did it take three decades to figure it out? Because simulating something numerically is very different from solving it analytically. Like using paper and pencil. Exactly. A computer can take a billion data points, grid up space time, and calculate changes step by step to show you what happens. Right. But physicists want the actual mathematical equations. They want the algebraic formula that governs the whole system. And Einstein's field equations are so complex, so non-linear, that deriving that exact formula by hand was essentially impossible. They hit a massive wall. And here's where it gets really interesting. Because the researchers in Vienna and Frankfurt didn't just push harder against that wall. They used a wild workaround to solve the unsolvable math problem. It really is wild. They changed the number of dimensions in their calculations. Yes.

10:13Christian Ecker and the team essentially said, four dimensions are too hard. Let's use infinity. Which, okay, our universe has four dimensions, right? Three of space, one of time, up, down, left, right, forward, back, and time. That's our observable reality, yes. But mathematically, you aren't restricted by that. Nothing stops you from writing general relativity equations for five dimensions, or 42 dimensions, or even infinitely many dimensions. But that sounds incredibly counterintuitive. That's like trying to solve a Rubik's cube, finding it way too hard, and deciding to add a million extra sides to it to make it, quote, unquote, easier. I love that analogy. It sounds ridiculous, but there is a beautiful mathematical paradox here. Surprisingly, when the number of dimensions approaches infinity, certain complex calculations actually become much easier to manage. How does adding infinity make it simpler? Wouldn't it add an infinite amount of variables? You would think so, but think about how gravity works. In our three D space, gravity fades as you get further away from an object.

11:15It reaches out across the universe. Right, the inverse square law. Exactly. But in a universe with infinite dimensions, gravity falls off so rapidly that it effectively drops to absolute zero right outside the object. Wait, really? It just stops. It just stops. Yep. Gravity becomes completely localized. It doesn't reach out into the surrounding space at all. So you don't have to calculate all those messy gravitational waves interacting with the rest of the universe. Nicely. The infinitely steep gradient completely isolates the geometry. The messy non-linear partial differential equations just flatten out into much simpler equations. Okay, so the researchers solve the physics problem in this hypothetical infinite-dimension setting. Which is brilliant. It gave them the clean base solution they'd been looking for. But we don't live in infinite dimensions. So how do they get that answer back down into the four-dimensional space time that you and I actually live in? They use something called an expansion parameter. They basically treat the infinite-dimension solution as a starting point,

12:16and then mathematically, they calculate small corrections step-by-step to lower the dimensions back down. It's like they're slowly turning the mathematical volume back up on all those complicated non-linear interactions. That's a great way to put it. They reconstruct the complexity, layer-by-layer, until they map the solution perfectly back onto our four-dimensional reality. And the equations hold. They extracted the exact mathematical description of the space-time crystal collapsing. That is just phenomenal engineering. You temporarily break the physical parameters of the universe just to isolate the equation and then slowly rebuild reality around it. And it completely changes the game. Florian Ecker, one of the key researchers, pointed out that this technique is remarkably stable. It can be systematically improved. So it's not just a one-off trick? No, not at all. It gives physicists a brand new way to study extreme black hole phenomena analytically. They don't have to rely entirely on computer simulations anymore. They can actually read the underlying math of these critical states.

13:17You know, there's almost a broader life philosophy hidden in that infinite dimensions trick. Oh, how so? Well, sometimes when you are completely stuck on an impossible problem, like a 30-year mathematical roadblock, the solution isn't just to push harder against the wall. Right. It's to entirely change the framework. You have to change the dimensions of how you are looking at the problem. By making it infinitely more abstract, they actually found the simplicity they needed to solve it. I really like that takeaway. You have to step outside the confines of the environment that created the problem in the first place. Exactly. And it leaves us with this incredible mind-expanding concept. We now know analytically that space-time can essentially freeze into a crystal phase and then collapse into a black hole. It has phases, just like matter. Exactly. Just like H2O can be ice or liquid or vapor, it really makes you wonder, what other bizarre undiscovered phases might the very fabric of our universe be capable of taking on under the right conditions?

14:17Right. If space itself can crystallize, what else is hiding in the math? It's a pretty staggering thought. We're really just cratching the surface of what the geometry of reality can do. We really are. Thank you for joining us today for this exploration into the outer edges of physics. It's a lot to wrap your head around, but honestly, looking at the universe in infinite dimensions might just be the best way to understand our own. Catch you next time.