Black holes get all the attention. They get all the love. They're on the cover of books and magazines.

Countless articles, Nobel Prizes in their honor. They star in movie after movie. They are the subject

of fierce debate. The Holy Grail of Quantum Gravity, the focus of an overly large percentage

of episodes of this very podcast. What about their twins, the white holes? Where are they?

Both in the universe and in discussions about the universe,

in math, in theory, in reality, the white holes, which are just as improbable as black holes,

don't appear to exist. So nobody cares about them, and they are forced to live in theoretical

shadows, hidden from the daylight of inspection and study.

To be fair, though, Blackholes do have an epic rags to Rich's story. I mean, nobody was even

looking for them to exist. And in 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity,

and months later, another scientist, and months later, another scientist,

just months later, another scientist by the name of Carl Schwarschild, who was at the time

fighting in the trenches of World War I, got a copy of Einstein's paper, read it, understood it, and found something magical.

He found a solution to Einstein's equations, which is a big deal because general relativity,

Einstein's theory, is just a machine. It tells you how to solve problems, but it doesn't tell you what those problems are.

You have to plug in various scenarios like planets orbiting a star, and general relativity tells you what will happen.

There's just one problem. General relativity is enormously complicated. It is a set of 10 equations that are all linked together and are all individually extremely difficult to solve. And then they are all linked together. So you have to solve all 10 equations at once. Contrast that with, like, Newton's Law of Gravitation,

which is just one simple equation that applies all over.

That's it.

General relativity is a nightmare.

And to get his own results, Einstein had to play a lot of tricks in simplifying assumptions and games,

and he thought that no exact solutions could be found, that you couldn't ever write down the

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