Scientists have managed to simulate a wormhole and ‘teleported’ some information through it, marking a serious step forward for the understanding of one of the more mysterious and confusing things theorised in the universe.
So, you might have to bear with us here a bit, because it’s all very complicated and new, but physicists claim that they’ve used a quantum computer to create the first ever 'wormhole' which was first suggested in 1935 by legendary scientists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.
The idea is that wormholes lead from one place in space-time to another by passing through an additional dimension.
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As reported in journal Nature, the wormhole was created by quantum bits of information known as ‘qubits’ that are stored in microscopic superconducting circuits within Google’s Sycamore quantum computer.
Through manipulation of those qubits the scientists managed to send information through the wormhole, apparently.
The team was led by California Institute of Technology scientist Maria Spiropolu, and they implemented their new ‘wormhole teleportation protocol’ on the incredibly powerful machine at Google’s Quantum AI facility in Santa Barbara, California.
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The ‘quantum gravity experiment on a chip’ is the first of its kind, and beats another team that they’d been competing with to do such an experiment.
That other team was working between IBM and Quantinuum’s quantum computers.
If you’re still not completely getting this, that’s fine – as we’ve mentioned, it’s extremely complicated.
Spiropolu said that she was ‘shaken’ when she saw that the qubits were passing through the wormhole.
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This new discovery supports a theory known as the holographic principle, which is a broad idea of how two pillars of modern fundamental physics – general relativity and quantum mechanics – are joined up.
The first part of that theory is Einstein’s famous description of how matter and energy warp space-time fabric to generate gravity, whereas the second is to do with the rules that concern atoms and subatomic particles.
The holographic principle suggests that there must be a ‘duality’ between those two ideas, suggesting that the space-time continuum of general relativity might actually be a quantum system of hidden particles.
It’s named so because the space-time and gravity is posited to emerge from quantum effects much like a hologram suddenly appears 3D from a 2D starting point.
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So, this new experiment supports the idea that wormholes can be created, at least through the quantum effects that we can see on quantum computers.
An actual wormhole, not the quantum computing kind, would be powered by gravity, rather than quantum effects on an incredibly powerful computer, according to New Scientist.
To give a - sort of - explanation, Alexander Zlokapa, who began this project for his university thesis, said: “We performed a kind of quantum teleportation equivalent to a traversable wormhole in the gravity picture.
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“To do this, we had to simplify the quantum system to the smallest example that preserves gravitational characteristics so we could implement it on the Sycamore quantum processor at Google.”
Spiropolu said: “The relationship between quantum entanglement, spacetime, and quantum gravity is one of the most important questions in fundamental physics and an active area of theoretical research.
“We are excited to take this small step toward testing these ideas on quantum hardware and will keep going.”
Got it?
Well, if you haven’t, don’t worry about it too much.
We’re still a long way from teleporting around the universe through traversable wormholes, but it’s still a really important scientific discovery nonetheless.
Let's just leave it with the scientists for now.
Tom Wood