What if Einstein was Wrong?
Or at least, not entirely right.
I was watching this Veritasium video, the kind that starts with Einstein and ends with black holes, white holes, and questions that make your brain fold in on itself. It explained how following Einstein’s math exactly, no shortcuts, no tweaks leads to bizarre outcomes. Wormholes. Parallel universes. Realities that sound more like science fiction than science.
It reminded me of real life, when we follow routines or advice that look perfect on paper but don’t hold up in reality. A five-step plan to achieving something. A morning routine that promises productivity. Or in my case, a neatly laid-out roadmap that told me where my career should go, but ignored the chaos in between.
Einstein’s equations were like that. Beautiful, convincing, almost powerful. But maybe, just maybe, the universe didn’t get the memo.
When I came across Einstein’s Schwarzschild solution, a mathematical solution to his field equations in general relativity. On paper, it works.
It beautifully describes the gravitational field outside a spherical mass. But when we take it to its extremes, the math doesn’t just describe stars and planets. It predicts black holes… and then white holes… and then wormholes… and entire disconnected universes. All from following the math exactly as written. It’s not that Einstein made a mistake. It’s that the formula, when trusted too blindly, leads to results that break away from reality.
What It Means:
ds^2 is the spacetime interval between events.
r is the “radius” from the center (e.g. the center of a star or black hole).
t is the time coordinate.
G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the object, c is the speed of light.
θ,ϕ are angles, like latitude/longitude on a sphere.
This formula tells us how distances and times warp around a spherical mass.
This equation is “correct”, the math checks out. But if we follow it far enough, we enter the realm of black holes. And further extensions lead to white holes, wormholes, and even duplicate universes. All just from extending this “perfect” formula.
What fascinated me wasn’t just that Einstein’s equations predicted black holes, we’ve observed those. It’s that when we keep following the math, it doesn’t stop there. It keeps going, as if the logic has momentum of its own. White holes. Wormholes. Duplicate universes. These aren’t sci-fi theories, they’re real, mathematically valid outcomes of the Schwarzschild solution.
And yet… we’ve never seen any of them.
No white holes ejecting matter into space. No wormholes folding time and space. The equation is elegant, but reality doesn’t follow through on all its promises.
And I couldn’t help but relate to that in a completely non-scientific, everyday way. I’ve had moments where everything looked perfect on paper. Especially in work, as a TPM, I’ve spent hours building timelines, syncing dependencies, mapping out how everything should flow. It all looks clean in the plan. But then I get into execution and it starts falling apart. Priorities change mid-sprint. Teams interpret things differently. That one dependency I was banking on? Delayed indefinitely.
It’s not that the plan was wrong. The plan made sense. It’s just that reality had its own idea of how things were going to go.
That’s what Einstein got both right and wrong. The math? Crazy. But the assumption that reality would neatly obey its every consequence? That’s where things start to crack.
The more I think about it, the more I realize: being wrong doesn’t mean we failed. It means we tried to understand something deeply and the world showed us a side we didn’t expect. Einstein didn’t get it wrong because the math was broken. He got it wrong because he believed the universe would behave as beautifully as the equations suggested.
What if Einstein was wrong: not in calculation, but in expectation?