Sean Carroll
speaker
26,727 appearances
49 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 6d ago
Sean Carroll’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
There's sort of a shortcut using the curvature of space-time in general relativity to get from one place to another faster than you might think.
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Now, the interesting thing is, for the wormhole idea, you're never traveling faster than the speed of light, right?
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What you're doing is you are making use of the flexibility of space time in general relativity
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To sort of trick yourself into thinking that the speed of light is different than it really was.
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The speed of light is always the speed of light.
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It's one light year per year, it can never change from that.
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But if space-time itself can curve in different ways, uh the number of miles per hour you gotta go might be different than you think to get from one place to another.
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So, in other words, if I know that
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Alpha Centauri is four light years away.
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I think naively it's got to take me at least four years to get there by a clock that is sitting back here on Earth.
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But a wormhole provides a shortcut.
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Okay?
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It's not going faster than the speed of light, but it's changing the distance to Alpha Centauri, because I can go through the wormhole and it's like magically appearing much faster than I might have thought.
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So it looks to the person on the outside like you're moving.
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Moving faster than the speed of light, that's just because they don't understand or they haven't thought about the actual path that you took.
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So Al QBR realized this is all great, but you don't need a wormhole to do it.
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You don't need to change the topology of space-time.
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All you need to do is change the curvature of space-time.
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So he wrote down and published a paper explaining that if you can imagine a spherical bubble.
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Where the metric, the tensor field that tells you how space-time is curved, takes on a very, very particular form.
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Showing 401–420 of 26,727 · page 21 of 1337
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