GNSS & Machine Learning Engineer

Category: Physics

Scientists from Google AI, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab simulate a traversable wormhole with a quantum computer

Researchers from Google AI, Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab simulated a quantum theory on the Google Sycamore quantum processor to probe the dynamics of a quantum system equivalent to a wormhole in a gravity model.

The quantum experiment is based on the ER=EPR conjecture that states that wormholes are equivalent to quantum entanglement. ER stands for Einstein and Rosen who proposed the concept of wormholes (a term coined by Wheeler and Misner in a 1957 paper) in 1935, EPR stands for Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen who proposed the concept of entanglement in May 1935, one month before the ER paper (see historical context). These concepts were completely unrelated until Susskind and Maldacena conjectured in 2013 that any pair of entangled quantum systems are connected by an Einstein-Rosen bridge (= non-traversable wormhole). In 2017 Jafferis, Gao, and Wall extended the ER=EPR idea to traversable wormholes. They showed that a traversable wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation [1][2].

The endeavor was published on Nov 30, 2022 in a Nature article. There is also a nice video on youtube explaining the experiment. Tim Andersen discusses in an interesting article whether or not a wormhole was created in the lab.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2022

Nobel Prize for physics in 2022 goes to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with entangled photons which proved what Einstein once described as “spooky action at a distance”. Anton Zeilinger got his price for his quantum teleportation experiments that you can verify nowadays on a quantum computer over the cloud.
By the way, the spooky action at a distance for entangled photons (i.e. the fact that measuring the polarization of one photon of an entangled pair immediately determines the polarization state of the second photon, no matter of how far the photons are apart, so that there is no possibility that the measurement result can be transferred from the first to the second photon with speed of light) finds a simple explanation in Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that was proposed in 1957, two years after Einstein’s death. Following to this interpretation, with the act of measurement the observer finds himself in a world (of the many worlds) that is consistent with the measurement of the first photon. Thus this observer, who is also a macroscopic quantum object, can only measure this consistent value for the second photon.

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