Scientists have been trying for a long time to learn more about wormholes.
In science fiction, like in movies and TV shows like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek,” wormholes in the cosmos let spaceships travel through space and time with ease, allowing them to go to places that are hard to imagine. We wish it were that easy.
Scientists have been trying for a long time to learn more about wormholes, and it looks like they are finally making progress. Researchers said on Wednesday that they had made two tiny simulations of black holes in a quantum computer. Black holes are extremely dense celestial objects with a gravity so strong that not even light can escape.
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Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at Caltech and co-author of the study published in the journal Nature, called it a “baby wormhole.” She said that scientists are still a long way from being able to send people or other living things through one of these portals.
“From what I’ve tried, I can say that it’s very, very far away.” People come up to me and ask, “Can you put your dog in the wormhole?” “So, no,” Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. “…That’s quite a jump.”
“There is a difference between something being possible in theory and being possible in practise,” said Joseph Lykken, a physicist and co-author of the study who works at Fermilab, the United States’ particle physics and accelerator lab. “So don’t get your hopes up if you want to send your dog through the wormhole. But you need a place to start. And I just think it’s cool that we can get our hands on this at all.”
The researchers watched the behaviour of wormholes on the Sycamore quantum processor at Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O), which is part of Google.
People think of a wormhole, which is a break in space and time, as a link between two distant parts of the universe. Scientists call them Einstein–Rosen bridges after the two physicists, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who first talked about them.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is about gravity, one of the most important forces in the universe, makes sense with these kinds of wormholes. In the 1950s, physicist John Wheeler came up with the word “wormhole.”
Spiropulu said that the researchers found a quantum system that has key properties of a gravitational wormhole but is small enough to run on existing quantum hardware.
“It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck.” So, at this point, all we can say is that we have something that, based on its properties, looks like a wormhole.
The researchers said that the experiment did not create a break in space and time in physical space, but it did seem to create a wormhole that could be used to travel through based on how quantum information was sent using quantum codes on the quantum processor.
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“These are very powerful ideas that have been around for a long time,” Lykken said.
“But in the end, we’re doing experimental science, and it’s taken us a long time to figure out how to test these ideas in the lab.” And that’s what makes this so exciting. “Well, wormholes are cool,” is not enough. This is a way to actually study these very basic questions about our universe in a lab.
