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Physicists Create ‘Baby Wormhole’ Using Quantum Computer

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Physicists announced on Wednesday that they had successfully simulated a pair of black holes and created a “theoretical” wormhole on a quantum computer. The researchers were able to transmit a message through the wormhole without affecting space or time, potentially paving the way for future studies of teleportation.

According to a study published in the journal “Nature,” scientists at the California Institute of Technology used the computer to virtually simulate what amounts to a tunnel connecting distant regions of the universe.

The achievement is a small step in understanding the relationship between gravity and quantum mechanics.

Dr. Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, the leader of a consortium called Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics, and co-author of the report, described that the “holographic” tunnel has the elements of a “baby wormhole.” 

“This is important because what we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole. And we hope that we can make adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step.”

Of course, scientists did not create a real-life wormhole, but physicists celebrated their work as a spectacular technical triumph. Dr. Spiropulu and her colleagues created the wormhole through an “emergent” two-dimensional space with “quantum fields on the edge of space-time determining what happens within.” 

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The computer-generated cosmic tunnel was built by scientists on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor. Essentially, their system was small enough to be implemented on current hardware while retaining the key properties of a gravitational wormhole.

Experts like Dr. Spiropulu stressed that scientists are still a long way away from being able to teleport any living being through a time-travel portal.

“Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it’s very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, ‘Can you put your dog in the wormhole?’ So, no.”

The study’s co-author, Dr. Joseph Lykken, said, “These ideas have been around for a long time, and they’re very powerful ideas.”

“But in the end, we’re in experimental science, and we’ve been struggling now for a very long time to find a way to explore these ideas in the laboratory. And that’s what’s really exciting about this.”

Dr. Daniel Jafferis, a physics professor at Harvard, said that the “key question, which is perhaps hard to answer, is: Do we say from the simulation it’s a real black hole?”

“I kind of like the term ’emergent black hole.’ We are just using the quantum computer to find out what it would look and feel like if you were in this gravitational situation.”

M.I.T. physicist Dr. Daniel Harlow, who was not involved in the experiment, told the New York Times that the study’s foundation was an extremely simplistic and unrealistic model of quantum gravity.

“So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know. On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this, and until now we couldn’t, then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would certainly be off the table.” 

According to Dr. Harlow, developing computers capable of handling these simulations might take 10 or 15 years.

Dr. Leonard Susskind, a Stanford University physicist who was also not involved in the study, agreed with Dr. Harlow.

“They’re learning that they could do this experiment. The really interesting thing here is the possibility of analyzing purely quantum phenomena using general relativity, and who knows where that’s going to go.”

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The concept of a wormhole was first born from physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1935. Einstein and a fellow physicist, Nathan Rosen, showed how shortcuts connecting black holes through space and time could theoretically exist. These bridges were later termed “wormholes” by physicist John Wheeler in 1957. 

The recent wormhole experiment used the mathematics of general relativity to investigate quantum teleportation in the hopes of illuminating some previously unknown facet of physics or gravity.

In quantum teleportation, researchers can use a set of quantum manipulations to convey a message between two entangled particles, whether separated by inches or miles, without the researchers knowing what the information is. The technique is seen as fundamental to the development of an unhackable “quantum internet” of the future.

In a Nature article accompanying the paper, Dr. Susskind and Dr. Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, said the results could help demystify aspects of quantum mechanics.  

“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled.”

According to Dr. Lykken, the most straightforward explanation is that the message went through a “really short” wormhole. 

In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length of a wormhole in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, which is also known as the Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that the wormhole in the study was no more than three Planck lengths long.

“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making. But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”

Space

Scientists Explore Presence Of ‘Galactic Tunnels’ Linking One Side Of The Universe To The Other

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Wormholes have been a firm favourite in the land of science fiction for decades, but now, scientists are exploring the real possibility that wormholes do in fact exist. Their attention is directed specifically toward the Milky Way galaxy, which could hold the secrets to discovering one such portal.

Anyone who is a fan of sci-fi will appreciate the fascination with wormholes. In the 2014 movie Interstellar, a team of explorers travel through a wormhole in space in an attempt to ensure humanity’s survival. And for over 6 years in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the Federation space station Deep Space Nine guarded the opening of a stable wormhole to the far side of the galaxy. All exciting stuff, but not steeped in reality. 

The first discussions surrounding real wormholes emerged as part of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and in its simplest terms, provides a shortcut between two far away points in space. Einstein’s theory supports the presence of wormholes as it allows for spacetime to curve, providing opportunities for time and space to bend and thus, manipulate the distance between the two points. 

Wormholes have been at the heart of hypotheses by theoretical physicists since the 1930s, where they were initially called white holes. White holes are the exact opposite of black holes in that they emit energy but do not allow anything to enter. The name was eventually changed to ‘Einstein-Rosen bridges’, but as this wasn’t a particularly catchy name, they became better known as wormholes. 

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Sadly, proving such a theory has so far been beyond the means of scientists here on earth, and no such examples have been found in space. However, now researchers at New York’s University of Buffalo have indicated that the answer may lie within our own Milky Way. 

Fresh attention has centered on Sagittarius A*, a huge black hole that is over four million times bigger than the sun.  Given its immense size, scientists have theorized that they may be able to determine the presence of a wormhole by analyzing the gravitational effects on the stars surrounding it and comparing this to historical data to highlight any anomalies.

Cosmologist Dejan Stojkovic of the University at Buffalo was quoted in the Daily Express as saying “If you have two stars, one on each side of the wormhole, the star on our side should feel the gravitational influence of the star that’s on the other side. The gravitational flux will go through the wormhole. So if you map the expected orbit of a star around Sagittarius A*, you should see deviations from that orbit if there is a wormhole there with a star on the other side.”

Scientists plan to sift through over 25 years of data in order to identify any anomalies in the orbit of these stars which could indicate the presence of a wormhole. However even if evidence is found, it still won’t be out and out proof that wormholes exist. Mr. Stojkovic clearly points out that whilst it might prove a probable explanation, we still possess an extremely limited knowledge and understanding of space, its properties and its capabilities, meaning that there could well be some other explanation that we simply don’t know about.

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Wormhole concept 

And for all of those space fans who are getting their hopes up about travelling through these wormholes, it looks like there is further disappointment. Mr. Stojkovic explains that even if wormholes are proven to exist, and are traversable, they would need to be stable and kept open with negative energy. Unfortunately, that is not within our scientific capabilities just yet. 

Roman Konoplya, a RUDN physicist agrees with this and earlier this year was quoted as saying “For wormholes to be traversable and not to collapse because of gravitational effects, the repulsion force in the bottleneck of a wormhole should be extremely high. Some preliminary studies of foreign colleagues seemed to indicate the possibility of such stability. However, we confirmed that a wormhole according to Einstein’s theory with quantum corrections is critically unstable. Evidently, an unstable system cannot exist in nature as any reaction with the environment would cause it to disintegrate. Mathematically, it is expressed in unlimited growth of initially neglected minor system deviation from statistical balance. Unfortunately, these results mean that we still don’t have a theoretically consistent wormhole model without exotic assumptions.”

Further sad news comes from Daniel Jafferis, from Harvard University who earlier this year revealed that that real life wormholes were unlikely to gather the speeds seen in science fiction movies. He was quoted as saying “It takes longer to get through these wormholes than to go directly, so they are not very useful for space travel.”

So whilst the argument for wormholes continues to look promising, it may be a long while before we’ll be using them for human space travel!