Philip Gibbs – Black Holes and White Holes

A white hole is a purely hypothetical time-reversed black hole. What does general relativity say about them? Would they repel you? Could you fall into a white hole—or only fall out? Could the universe be a white hole?

Philip Gibbs answers all these questions and more in my first interview for Edinburgh Explorations—a series put out by the School of Mathematics and the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.

I met Philip online on sci.physics in the early 1990s, and together with a bunch of other folks we created the Physics FAQ, which answers a lot of the most fascinating questions about physics. At first I didn’t believe everything he said about white holes, but eventually I realized he was right!

What do I mean by “right”? Be careful: white holes are just solutions of the equations of general relativity, not things we’ve actually seen. But you can work out what general relativity predicts about them: that’s the game here, and that determines what’s “right”. It doesn’t mean white holes actually exist and do these things.

For the physics FAQ, much of it created by Philip Gibbs, go here.

The cover picture, showing the maximally extended Schwarzschild solution containing both a black hole and white hole, was made by Isaak Neutelings.