Wormholes might sound like something that belongs in a Star Trek episode rather than a research paper, but scientists just simulated one on Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. The result suggests these devices could be used to test out fundamental physical theories.
The possibility of wormholes was first outlined in a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. In broad terms, they described a bridge in space-time that connects two black holes in different locations. Science fiction shows have frequently depicted these bridges as a way to rapidly travel from one location to another by flying a spaceship into one end and popping out the other.
In the real universe, however, wormholes are generally not traversable and will promptly collapse if anything attempts to pass through. But there are some theories that suggest exotic phenomena such as matter with negative energy could help prop open a wormhole long enough to allow something to pass through.
Seeing as we’ve never even encountered a real-world wormhole, these ideas are hard to test experimentally. But now, researchers have shown that they can use a quantum processor to simulate key aspects of this kind of traversable wormhole in the lab.
“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” study leader Maria Spiropulu, from Caltech, said in a press release. “This work constitutes a step toward a larger program of testing quantum gravity physics using a quantum computer.”
The experiment relied on a powerful idea from theoretical physics called the holographic principle, which attempts to link our two best theories of how the world works—quantum mechanics and general relativity—which are incompatible in their present form.
The idea gets its name from holograms—2D surfaces that can project a 3D image. In the same way, the holographic principle posits that all of the information required to describe the complex 3D reality we live in is actually encoded on a distant 2D surface.
While that might be hard to get your head around, a crucial consequence of the idea is that it sets up a mathematica
