Fumfer Physics 1: Edward Witten’s White Hole
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Vocal.Media
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09
Scott Douglas Jacobsen recounts asking Ed Witten, often regarded as Einstein’s intellectual heir and the only physicist to win the Fields Medal, about the plausibility of white holes. Witten, during a keynote on black hole thermodynamics, compared white holes to balancing a pencil on its tip—possible in theory but statistically impossible. Jacobsen pressed further, asking how large a universe and how much time would be needed for one to form. Rick Rosner contextualized this in terms of entropy, event horizons, and informational cosmology, suggesting black holes might not seal off information completely but instead collapse into high-entropy matter or budding universes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We can start with Ed Witten’s question. That was a dream. Literally a dream come true. I wanted to ask him one question.
Rick Rosner: Say what you asked him. First, explain who Witten is.
Jacobsen: Ed Witten is considered by many the heir to Einstein, whether or not they agree with superstring theory. His achievements in physics and mathematics are extraordinary. When there were five competing versions of string theory, he showed in one presentation that they were different aspects of the same overarching theory. He is the only physicist ever to win the Fields Medal, which is awarded in mathematics. People see him as a native speaker of both math and physics.
Rosner: So what did you ask him?
Jacobsen: There was a conference we organized through our institute. Witten spoke there as a keynote, followed by Leonard Susskind, another distinguished academic.
Witten was giving a presentation on black holes and black hole thermodynamics. At the end, he nodded to a hypothetical object—a white hole. In mathematics, it is valid, and in general relativity, it could have a physical correlate. A white hole is basically the time-reversed form of a black hole.
We have discussed white holes before, in various definitions. In practice, a white hole would look like a Big Bang explosion. Witten illustrated this with a pencil. He tried to balance it on its tip, could not, and snapped a photo before it fell over and dissipated energy. He said a white hole is like that in the universe: possible in principle, but as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip.
Someone asked whether a white hole is really possible or just a mathematical trick. Witten compared it to the pencil—statistically impossible, but still permitted by the laws of physics.
I followed up: If that is true, how big a universe would it be, and how much time would it take for a white hole to emerge? His simple definition was: a black hole is where everything goes in and nothing can come out; a white hole is where nothing can go in and everything can come out.
Rosner: So, the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the surface area of its event horizon. That is the defining feature: the event horizon is the spherical boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. It is the point of no return.
When two black holes merge, their combined surface area is larger than the sum of the individual areas, according to a theorem Stephen Hawking worked on. That is why surface area is central in black hole physics.
The reason is gravitational collapse. The closer you get to an object, the stronger the gravitational pull. On Earth, surface acceleration is about 10 meters per second squared. That is tiny compared to what is needed for a black hole. A black hole crams so much mass into such a tiny space that gravity becomes strong enough to trap light. The event horizon is the boundary where escaping would require travelling faster than light—impossible.
Under informational cosmology, we postulate that the speed of light is the ultimate limit.
Gravitational acceleration, no matter how collapsed the object, is not just created by the mass itself. It exists in relation to the rest of the universe. That is like Mach’s principle, which postulates that inertia is due to the motion of objects against the background of the universe. You would not have inertia without the rest of the universe to define motion against.
So, in informational cosmology, you would not have event horizons. Objects would still have entropy, but a black hole without an event horizon—since the speed of light is the ultimate limit—would always allow light to escape. It would be highly redshifted, stripped of nearly all its energy as it crawled out of the gravitational well, but information could still be transmitted in and out of the collapsed object.
The collapsing object would have most of its information squeezed out and become a ball of degenerate matter—a soup of undefined glop stripped of order. If you compressed Earth to nothing, all the structured order we see would be obliterated. That is what happens in a black hole: loss of information, loss of order, leaving behind a high-entropy object.
Unless, in collapsing, that glop somehow differentiates itself in a Big Bang–like way, generating a budding universe. Not truly a separate universe, since there are no event horizons, but a pocket within this one that builds its own information structures, looking like a Big Bang from the inside.
So, even without event horizons, you can still discuss entropy. The flow of information creates these objects.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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