- “Counterportation” – Landmark Quantum Breakthrough Paves Way for World-First Experimental Wormhole SciTechDaily
- Scientists Have Blueprint for Actual Wormhole: How It Works Popular Mechanics
- Blueprint of a Quantum Wormhole Teleporter Could Point to Deeper Physics ScienceAlert
- Researchers Say They’ve Come Up With a Blueprint for Creating a Wormhole in a Lab Futurism
- New Quantum Computing Study Proposes First-Ever Practical Blueprint for a Verifiable Lab-Created Transversable Wormhole The Debrief
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Wormhole
No, physicists didn’t make a real wormhole. What they did was still pretty cool
Enlarge / Artist’s illustration of a quantum experiment that studies the physics of traversable wormholes.
Wormholes are a classic trope of science fiction in popular media, if only because they provide such a handy futuristic plot device to avoid the issue of violating relativity with faster-than-light travel. In reality, they are purely theoretical. Unlike black holes—also once thought to be purely theoretical—no evidence for an actual wormhole has ever been found, although they are fascinating from an abstract theoretical physics perceptive. You might be forgiven for thinking that undiscovered status had changed if you only read the headlines this week announcing that physicists had used a quantum computer to make a wormhole, reporting on a new paper published in Nature.
Let’s set the record straight right away: This isn’t a bona fide traversable wormhole—i.e., a bridge between two regions of spacetime connecting the mouth of one black hole to another, through which a physical object can pass—in any real, physical sense. “There’s a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality,” co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab said during a media briefing this week. “So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through a wormhole.” But it’s still a pretty clever, nifty experiment in its own right that provides a tantalizing proof of principle to the kinds of quantum-scale physics experiments that might be possible as quantum computers continue to improve.
“It’s not the real thing; it’s not even close to the real thing; it’s barely even a simulation of something-not-close-to-the-real-thing,” physicist Matt Strassler wrote on his blog. “Could this method lead to a simulation of a real wormhole someday? Maybe in the distant future. Could it lead to making a real wormhole? Never. Don’t get me wrong. What they did is pretty cool! But the hype in the press? Wildly, spectacularly overblown.”
So what is this thing that was “created” in a quantum computer if it’s not an actual wormhole? An analog? A toy model? Co-author Maria Spiropulu of Caltech referred to it as a novel “wormhole teleportation protocol” during the briefing. You could call it a simulation, but as Strassler wrote, that’s not quite right either. Physicists have simulated wormholes on classical computers, but no physical system is created in those simulations. That’s why the authors prefer the term “quantum experiment” because they were able to use Google’s Sycamore quantum computer to create a highly entangled quantum system and make direct measurements of specific key properties. Those properties are consistent with theoretical descriptions of a traversable wormhole’s dynamics—but only in a special simplified theoretical model of spacetime.
Lykken described it to The New York Times as “the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making.” Even then, perhaps a “collection of atoms with certain wormhole-like properties” might be more accurate. What makes this breakthrough so intriguing and potentially significant is how the experiment draws on some of the most influential and exciting recent work in theoretical physics. But to grasp precisely what was done and why it matters, we need to go on a somewhat meandering journey through some pretty heady abstract ideas spanning nearly a century.
Enlarge / Diagram of the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence (aka the holographic principle) in theoretical physics.
APS/Alan Stonebraker
Revisiting the holographic principle
Let’s start with what’s popularly known as the holographic principle. As I’ve written previously, nearly 30 years ago, theoretical physicists introduced the mind-bending theory positing that our three-dimensional universe is actually a hologram. The holographic principle began as a proposed solution to the black hole information paradox in the 1990s. Black holes, as described by general relativity, are simple objects. All you need to describe them mathematically is their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge. So there would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. That information is lost.
But problems arise when quantum gravity enters the picture because the rules of quantum mechanics hold that information can never be destroyed. And in quantum mechanics, black holes are incredibly complex objects and thus should contain a great deal of information. Jacob Bekenstein realized in 1974 that black holes also have entropy. Stephen Hawking tried to prove him wrong but wound up proving him right instead, concluding that black holes, therefore, had to produce some kind of thermal radiation.
So black holes must also have entropy, and Hawking was the first to calculate that entropy. He also introduced the notion of “Hawking radiation”: The black hole will emit a tiny bit of energy, decreasing its mass by a corresponding amount. Over time, the black hole will evaporate. The smaller the black hole, the more quickly it disappears. But what then happens to the information it contained? Is it truly destroyed, thereby violating quantum mechanics, or is it somehow preserved in the Hawking radiation?
Per the holographic principle, information about a black hole’s interior could be encoded on its two-dimensional surface area (the “boundary”) rather than within its three-dimensional volume (the “bulk”). Leonard Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft extended this notion to the entire universe, likening it to a hologram: our three-dimensional universe in all its glory emerges from a two-dimensional “source code.”
Juan Maldacena next discovered a crucial duality, technically known as the AdS/CFT correspondence—which amounts to a mathematical dictionary that allows physicists to go back and forth between the languages of two theoretical worlds (general relativity and quantum mechanics). Dualities in physics refer to models that appear to be different but can be shown to describe equivalent physics. It’s a bit like how ice, water, and vapor are three different phases of the same chemical substance, except a duality looks at the same phenomenon in two different ways that are inversely related. In the case of AdS/CFT, the duality is between a model of spacetime known as anti-de Sitter space (AdS)—which has constant negative curvature, unlike our own de Sitter universe—and a quantum system called conformal field theory (CFT), which lacks gravity but has quantum entanglement.
It’s this notion of duality that accounts for the wormhole confusion. As noted above, the authors of the Nature paper didn’t make a physical wormhole—they manipulated some entangled quantum particles in ordinary flat spacetime. But that system is conjectured to have a dual description as a wormhole.
A ‘Wormhole’ Built on a Quantum Computer Teleported Information as Predicted : ScienceAlert
For the first time, scientists have created a quantum computing experiment for studying the dynamics of wormholes – that is, shortcuts through spacetime that could get around relativity’s cosmic speed limits.
Wormholes are traditionally the stuff of science fiction, ranging from Jodie Foster’s wild ride in Contact to the time-bending plot twists in Interstellar. But the researchers behind the experiment, reported in the December 1 issue of the journal Nature, hope that their work will help physicists study the phenomenon for real.
“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole, yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu said in a news release. Spiropulu, the Nature paper’s senior author, is the principal investigator for a federally funded research program known as Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics.
Don’t pack your bags for Alpha Centauri just yet: This wormhole simulation is nothing more than a simulation, analogous to a computer-generated black hole or supernova.
And physicists still don’t see any conditions under which a traversable wormhole could actually be created. Someone would have to create negative energy first.
Columbia theoretical physicist Peter Woit warned against making too much of a to-do over the research.
“The claim that ‘Physicists Create a Wormhole’ is just complete bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about this a disgrace, highly unhelpful for the credibility of physics research in particular and science in general,” he wrote on his blog, which is called Not Even Wrong.
The main aim of the research was to shed light on a concept known as quantum gravity, which seeks to unify the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Those two theories have done an excellent job of explaining how gravity works and how the subatomic world is structured, respectively, but they don’t match up well with each other.
One of the big questions focuses on whether wormhole teleportation might follow the principles that are behind quantum entanglement.
That quantum phenomenon is better understood, and it’s even been demonstrated in the real world, thanks to Nobel-winning research: It involves linking subatomic particles or other quantum systems in a way that allows for what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
Spiropulu and her colleagues, including principal authors Daniel Jafferis and Alexander Zlokapa, created a computer model that applies the physics of quantum entanglement to wormhole dynamics.
Their program was based on a theoretical framework known as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, or SYK.
The big challenge was that the program had to be executed on a quantum computer. Google’s Sycamore quantum processing chip was just powerful enough to take on the task, with an assist from conventional machine learning tools.
“We employed [machine] learning techniques to find and prepare a simple SYK-like quantum system that could be encoded in the current quantum architectures and that would preserve the gravitational properties,” Spiropulu said.
“In other words, we simplified the microscopic description of the SYK quantum system and studied the resulting effective model that we found on the quantum processor.”
The researchers inserted a quantum bit, or qubit, of encoded information into one of two entangled systems – and then watched the information emerge from the other system. From their perspective, it was as if the qubit passed between black holes through a wormhole.
“It took a really long time to arrive at the results, and we surprised ourselves with the outcome,” said Caltech researcher Samantha Davis, one of the study’s co-authors.
The team found that the wormhole simulation allowed information to flow from one system to the other when the computerized equivalent of negative energy was applied, but not when positive energy was applied instead. That matches what theorists would expect from a real-world wormhole.
As quantum circuits become more complex, the researchers aim to conduct higher-fidelity simulations of wormhole behavior – which could lead to new twists in fundamental theories.
“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,” Spiropulu said.
“We are excited to take this small step toward testing these ideas on quantum hardware and will keep going.”
In addition to Jafferis, Zlokapa, Spiropulu and Davis, the authors of the Nature paper, titled “Traversable Wormhole Dynamics on a Quantum Processor,” include Joseph Lykken, David Kolchmeyer, Nikolai Lauk, and Hartmut Neven.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.
Physicists Create Theoretical Wormhole Using Quantum Computer
Artwork depicting a quantum experiment that observes traversable wormhole behavior. Credit: inqnet/A. Mueller (Caltech)
Physicists observe wormhole dynamics using a quantum computer in a step toward studying quantum gravity in the lab.
For the first time, scientists have developed a quantum experiment that allows them to study the dynamics, or behavior, of a special kind of theoretical wormhole. The experiment allows researchers to probe connections between theoretical wormholes and quantum physics, a prediction of so-called quantum gravity. Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories that seek to connect gravity with quantum physics, two fundamental and well-studied descriptions of nature that appear inherently incompatible with each other. Note that the experiment has not created an actual wormhole (a rupture in space and time known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge).
“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” says Maria Spiropulu, the principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research program Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics (QCCFP) and the Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics at Caltech.
“This work constitutes a step toward a larger program of testing quantum gravity physics using a quantum computer. It does not substitute for direct probes of quantum gravity in the same way as other planned experiments that might probe quantum gravity effects in the future using quantum sensing, but it does offer a powerful testbed to exercise ideas of quantum gravity.”
The research was published in the journal Nature on December 1. Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Alexander Zlokapa (BS ’21), a former undergraduate student at Caltech who started on this project for his bachelor’s thesis with Spiropulu and has since moved on to graduate school at
This illustration of a wormhole (Einstein-Rosen bridge) depicts a tunnel with two ends at separate points in spacetime. A wormhole is a speculative structure connecting disparate points in spacetime, and is based on a special solution of the Einstein field equations.
Wormholes are bridges between two remote regions in spacetime. They have not been observed experimentally, but scientists have theorized about their existence and properties for close to 100 years. In 1935, Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen described wormholes as tunnels through the fabric of spacetime in accordance with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of spacetime. Researchers call wormholes Einstein–Rosen bridges after the two physicists who invoked them, while the term “wormhole” itself was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.
The notion that wormholes and quantum physics, specifically entanglement (a phenomenon in which two particles can remain connected across vast distances), may have a connection was first proposed in theoretical research by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind in 2013. The physicists speculated that wormholes (or “ER”) were equivalent to entanglement (also known as “EPR” after Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky [PhD ’28], and Nathan Rosen, who first proposed the concept). In essence, this work established a new kind of theoretical link between the worlds of gravity and quantum physics. “It was a very daring and poetic idea,” says Spiropulu of the ER = EPR work.
Later, in 2017, Jafferis, along with his colleagues Ping Gao and Aron Wall, extended the ER = EPR idea to not just wormholes but traversable wormholes. The scientists concocted a scenario in which negative repulsive energy holds a wormhole open long enough for something to pass through from one end to the other. The researchers showed that this gravitational description of a traversable wormhole is equivalent to a process known as quantum teleportation. In quantum teleportation, a protocol that has been experimentally demonstrated over long distances via optical fiber and over the air, information is transported across space using the principles of quantum entanglement.
The present work explores the equivalence of wormholes with quantum teleportation. The Caltech-led team performed the first experiments that probe the idea that information traveling from one point in space to another can be described in either the language of gravity (the wormholes) or the language of quantum physics (quantum entanglement).
A key finding that inspired possible experiments occurred in 2015, when Caltech’s Alexei Kitaev, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, showed that a simple quantum system could exhibit the same duality later described by Gao, Jafferis, and Wall, such that the model’s quantum dynamics are equivalent to quantum gravity effects. This Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev, or SYK model (named after Kitaev, and Subir Sachdev and Jinwu Ye, two other researchers who worked on its development previously) led researchers to suggest that some theoretical wormhole ideas could be studied more deeply by doing experiments on quantum processors.
Furthering these ideas, in 2019, Jafferis and Gao showed that by entangling two SYK models, researchers should be able to perform wormhole teleportation and thus produce and measure the dynamical properties expected of traversable wormholes.
In the new study, the team of physicists performed this type of experiment for the first time. They used a “baby” SYK-like model prepared to preserve gravitational properties, and they observed the wormhole dynamics on a quantum device at Google, namely the Sycamore quantum processor. To accomplish this, the team had to first reduce the SYK model to a simplified form, a feat they achieved using machine learning tools on conventional computers.
“We employed learning techniques to find and prepare a simple SYK-like quantum system that could be encoded in the current quantum architectures and that would preserve the gravitational properties,” says Spiropulu. “In other words, we simplified the microscopic description of the SYK quantum system and studied the resulting effective model that we found on the quantum processor. It is curious and surprising how the optimization on one characteristic of the model preserved the other metrics! We have plans for more tests to get better insights on the model itself.”
In the experiment, the researchers inserted a qubit—the quantum equivalent of a bit in conventional silicon-based computers—into one of their SYK-like systems and observed the information emerge from the other system. The information traveled from one quantum system to the other via quantum teleportation—or, speaking in the complementary language of gravity, the quantum information passed through the traversable wormhole.
“We performed a kind of quantum teleportation equivalent to a traversable wormhole in the gravity picture. 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,” says Zlokapa.
Co-author Samantha Davis, a graduate student at Caltech, adds, “It took a really long time to arrive at the results, and we surprised ourselves with the outcome.”
“The near-term significance of this type of experiment is that the gravitational perspective provides a simple way to understand an otherwise mysterious many-particle quantum phenomenon,” says John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM). “What I found interesting about this new Google experiment is that, via machine learning, they were able to make the system simple enough to simulate on an existing quantum machine while retaining a reasonable caricature of what the gravitation picture predicts.”
In the study, the physicists report wormhole behavior expected both from the perspectives of gravity and from quantum physics. For example, while quantum information can be transmitted across the device, or teleported, in a variety of ways, the experimental process was shown to be equivalent, at least in some ways, to what might happen if information traveled through a wormhole. To do this, the team attempted to “prop open the wormhole” using pulses of either negative repulsive energy pulse or the opposite, positive energy. They observed key signatures of a traversable wormhole only when the equivalent of negative energy was applied, which is consistent with how wormholes are expected to behave.
“The high fidelity of the quantum processor we used was essential,” says Spiropulu. “If the error rates were higher by 50 percent, the signal would have been entirely obscured. If they were half we would have 10 times the signal!”
In the future, the researchers hope to extend this work to more complex quantum circuits. Though bona fide quantum computers may still be years away, the team plans to continue to perform experiments of this nature on existing
“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,” says Spiropulu. “We are excited to take this small step toward testing these ideas on quantum hardware and will keep going.”
Reference: “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor” by Daniel Jafferis, Alexander Zlokapa, Joseph D. Lykken, David K. Kolchmeyer, Samantha I. Davis, Nikolai Lauk, Hartmut Neven and Maria Spiropulu, 30 November 2022, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science via the QCCFP research program. Other authors include: Joseph Lykken of Fermilab; David Kolchmeyer, formerly at Harvard and now a postdoc at MIT; Nikolai Lauk, formerly a postdoc at Caltech; and Hartmut Neven of Google.
Scientists create ‘baby’ wormhole as sci-fi moves closer to fact
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In science fiction – think films and TV like “Interstellar” and “Star Trek” – wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. If only it were that simple.
Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two minuscule simulated black holes – those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape – in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.
It was a “baby wormhole,” according to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature. But scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal, she said.
“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,” Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. “That’s a huge leap.”
“There’s a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality,” added physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory. “So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think to me it’s just exciting that we’re able to get our hands on this at all.”
The researchers observed the wormhole dynamics on a quantum device at Alphabet’s Google called the Sycamore quantum processor.
A wormhole – a rupture in space and time – is considered a bridge between two remote regions in the universe. Scientists refer to them as Einstein-Rosen bridges after the two physicists who described them – Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.
Such wormholes are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term “wormhole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.
Spiropulu said the researchers found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to implement on existing quantum hardware.
“It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that’s what we can say at this point – that we have something that in terms of the properties we look at, it looks like a wormhole,” Lykken said.
The researchers said no rupture of space and time was created in physical space in the experiment, though a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on quantum information teleported using quantum codes on the quantum processor.
“These ideas have been around for a long time and they’re very powerful ideas,” Lykken said.
“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. It’s not just, ‘Well, wormholes are cool.’ This is a way to actually look at these very fundamental problems of our universe in a laboratory setting.”
Did physicists create a wormhole in a quantum computer?
Physicists have used a quantum computer to perform a new kind of quantum teleportation, the ability of quantum states to be transported between distant places, as though information could travel instantly. Although teleportation is an established technique in quantum technology, the purpose of the latest experiment was to simulate the behaviour of a passage called a ‘wormhole’ through a virtual universe.
The researchers behind the experiment, described in Nature on 30 November1, say that it is a step towards using ordinary quantum physics to explore ideas about abstract universes where gravity and quantum mechanics seem to work harmoniously together. Quantum computers could help to develop a quantum theory of gravity in these ‘toy’ universes (developing a quantum theory of gravity for our own Universe is one of the biggest open questions in physics). “It’s a test of quantum-gravity ideas on a real lab experimental testbed,” says Maria Spiropulu, a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology who led the study.
Tunnels in space-time
Physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen proposed the idea of wormholes — passages through space-time that could connect the centres of black holes — in 1935. They calculated that, in principle, wormholes were allowed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as an effect of the curvature of space-time. (Physicists soon realized that even if wormholes exist, they are unlikely to allow anything like the interstellar travel that feature in science fiction.)
Because they were working with an exotic toy universe, the latest research didn’t simulate anything resembling the kind of wormhole envisioned by Einstein and Rosen that could conceivably exist in our Universe. But their teleportation experiment can be interpreted as analogous to a wormhole in their virtual system — quantum information fed into one side of the researchers’ ‘wormhole’ reappeared on the other side.
“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” write the authors of an accompanying News and Views article. “However, this is easily understood from the gravitational description: the message arrives unscrambled on the other side because it has traversed the wormhole.”
Exotic physics
The experiment was inspired by earlier research linking the physics of exotic universes and their own version of gravity to more-standard — but still virtual — quantum system. The main idea is that some abstract versions of space-time emerge from the collective behaviour of ordinary quantum particles living in a sort of ‘shadow world’ — similar to how a two-dimensional hologram can create the illusion of a three-dimensional image. That ‘holographic’ behaviour dictates how the emergent space-times curve upon themselves, producing the effects of gravity.
Although physicists do not yet know how to write quantum theories of gravity for emergent universes directly, they know that such phenomena should be fully encapsulated in the physics of the shadow world. This means that gravitational phenomena such as black holes — which still pose riddles to theoretical physicists — or wormholes must be compatible with quantum theory.
The latest experiment follows a scheme that co-author Daniel Jafferis, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his collaborators proposed in 20172. That work focused on the simplest such holographic correspondence, known as SYK after the initials of its creators. In this toy model universe, space has only one dimension rather than three.
In the latest study, Jafferis and colleagues simulated an even more stripped-down version of such a hologram using the quantum bits, or qubits, of Google’s Sycamore processor. They expected their simulated quantum particles to reproduce some behaviours of gravity in the virtual universe — but they were limited by the capabilities of today’s quantum computers. “We had to find a model that kind of preserves the gravity properties and that we can code on a quantum processor that has a limited amount of qubits,” says Maria Spiropulu, a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology who led the study. “We shrunk it down to a baby model, and we checked that it preserves gravitational dynamics.”
“Before we worked on this project, it wasn’t obvious that a system with such a small number of qubits could exhibit this phenomenon,” Jafferis adds.
Some researchers believe that this line of research is a promising pathway for developing a quantum theory of gravity for our own Universe, although others see it as a dead end. The theory tested at the Google lab “only has a very tangential relationship to any possible theories of quantum gravity in our Universe”, says Peter Shor, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Scientists simulate ‘baby’ wormhole without rupturing space and time | Space
It’s a mainstay of science fiction, it’s tiny and it doesn’t exist in physical space, but researchers say they’ve created what is, theoretically, a worm hole.
Researchers have announced that they simulated two miniscule black holes in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.
They said that based on the quantum information teleported, a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged, but that no rupture of space and time was physically created in the experiment, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
A wormhole – a rupture in space and time – is considered a bridge between two remote regions in the universe. Scientists refer to them as Einstein-Rosen bridges after the two physicists who described them: Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.
“It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that’s what we can say at this point – that we have something that in terms of the properties we look at, it looks like a wormhole,” said physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory.
Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research, described it as having the characteristics of a “baby wormhole”, and now hopes to make “adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step”. The wormhole dynamics were observed on a quantum device at Google called the Sycamore quantum processor.
Experts who were not involved in the experiment cautioned that it was important to note that a physical wormhole had not actually been created, but noted the future possibilities.
Daniel Harlow, a physicist at MIT, told the New York Times the experiment was based on a modelling that was so simple that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.
“I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know,” Harlow wrote. “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.”
The study authors themselves made clear that scientists remain a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a 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,” Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. “… That’s a huge leap.”
Lykken added: “There’s a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality.
“So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think to me it’s just exciting that we’re able to get our hands on this at all.“
Such wormholes are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term “wormhole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.
“These ideas have been around for a long time and they’re very powerful ideas,” Lykken said. “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. It’s not just, ‘Well, wormholes are cool.’ This is a way to actually look at these very fundamental problems of our universe in a laboratory setting.”
With Reuters
James Webb telescope appears to picture wormhole in ‘Phantom Galaxy’
The James Webb Space Telescope appears to have pictured a wormhole spinning in the “Phantom Galaxy,” a place whose very center scientists believe may contain a black hole. Image by Judy Schmidt/NASA
July 22 (UPI) — NASA’s latest deep-space telescope continues to shock astronomers and amateurs with jaw-dropping new images captured from the outer reaches of the cosmos.
The James Webb Space Telescope appears to have pictured a wormhole spinning in the “Phantom Galaxy,” a place whose very center scientists believe may contain a black hole.
“I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and [Webb] data is new, different and exciting,” Judy Schmidt, who processed raw data from NASA into a stunning photo of the Phantom Galaxy, told Space.com. “Of course I’m going to make something with it.”
The latest images come as the telescope — a $10 billion behemoth six times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Telescope — braves the depths of space in its first series of missions.
Based on the new images, a team of scientists from the University of Manchester now believes the early universe may have included as many as 10 times more galaxies similar to ours.
One of the study’s co-authors, Professor Christopher Conselice, told the BBC the new telescope is able to show scientists the nature of objects that “we knew existed but didn’t understand how and when they formed.”
“We knew we would see things Hubble didn’t see — but in this case we’re seeing things differently,” Conselice said.
“These are the processes we need to understand if we want to understand our origins,” said Conselice, who will present his discovery Saturday in the United Kingdom. “This might be the most important telescope ever — at least since Galileo’s.”
Scientists the world over remain abuzz as they sift through piles of data coming from the Webb telescope. Two independent teams have recently said they may have found the very origins of the universe.
“This is the oldest galaxy we’ve ever seen,” tweeted Paul Byrne, an associate professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis, who is on one of the teams.
“It was spotted with early-release [James Webb] data, and is sufficiently red-shifted to have formed only 300 million years after the Big Bang — which means it’s 97.8% the age of the universe.”
The James Webb telescope has been transmitting images from space since early July. At 21 feet across, its primary mirrors are nearly three times larger than the Hubble, which was launched in 1990.
The edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region, NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image, released on July 12, 2022, reveals previously obscured areas of star birth. Photo courtesy of NASA | License Photo
JWST’s stunning ‘Phantom Galaxy’ picture looks like a wormhole
A fresh image based on brand-new deep-space data appears to show a wormhole spinning before our very eyes.
The appropriately named “Phantom Galaxy” glows eerily in a new image by Judy Schmidt based on James Webb Space Telescope data collected nearly a million miles away from our planet using the observatory’s mid-infrared instrument (MIRI).
“I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and [Webb] data is new, different, and exciting,” Schmidt told Space.com. “Of course I’m going to make something with it.”
Live updates: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope mission
Gallery: James Webb Space Telescope’s 1st photos
The image highlights the dust lanes in the galaxy, which is more properly known as NGC 628 or Messier 74. Dubbed the “perfect spiral” by some astronomers because the galaxy is so symmetrical, the Phantom Galaxy is scientifically interesting because of the intermediate-mass black hole scientists believe is embedded at its heart.
The galaxy has been imaged professionally many times before, including by space observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). What makes Webb imagery stand apart from these past efforts is the mid-infrared range that highlights cosmic dust, along with the power of its unique 18-segment hexagonal mirror and deep-space location.
Webb observed M74 earlier this week. The data was also shared on Twitter (opens in new tab) (with different filtration) by Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the Cosmic Dawn Center in the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Denmark.
A selected of raw Webb imagery is made publicly available at this portal (opens in new tab) a few hours or days after observations, and amateur imagers and scientists are free to use the data as long as they credit the source when publishing.
The busy deep-space telescope released its first operational images on July 12 of deep-space objects, including a nebula and a view of very young galaxies. An infrared view of Jupiter, along with the gas giant’s moons and rings, joined the iconic new images on July 14.
That week’s work alone showcases Webb’s flexibility in switching between faraway objects near the cosmic dawn — when stars began shining — and solar system objects much closer to its viewfinder.
As for the Phantom Galaxy, Schmidt used Photoshop and FITS Liberator for most of the work and said many of the concepts in her 2017 YouTube imaging tutorial (opens in new tab) will help with the more advanced software of today.
You can check out more spectacular imagery of Webb photos and other cosmic objects at Schmidt’s Flickr page (opens in new tab).
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Wormholes Could Help Solve an Infamous Black Hole Paradox, Says Fun New Paper
What happens to information after it has passed beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help us solve this vexing problem – but the math has been tricky, to say the least.
In a new paper, an international team of physicists has found a workaround for better understanding how a collapsing black hole can avoid breaking the fundamental laws of quantum physics (more on that in a bit).
Although highly theoretical, the work suggests there are likely things we are missing in the quest to resolve general relativity with quantum mechanics.
“We discovered a new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure that had been overlooked in conventional computations,” says physicist Kanato Goto of Cornell University and RIKEN in Japan.
“Entropy computed using this new geometry gives a completely different result.”
The black hole information paradox is one of the unresolved tensions between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Under general relativity, the event horizon of a black hole is a point of no return. Everything that passes beyond that critical point is inexorably slurped into the black hole’s gravity well, and no speed in the Universe, not even that of light in a vacuum, is sufficient for escape velocity. It’s gone, that’s it. Kaput. Irretrievable.
Then along came Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, suggesting that, when quantum mechanics is taken under consideration, black holes could emit radiation after all.
This, according to theory, occurs as a result of the black hole’s interference with surrounding particles’ wave-like properties, effectively making it ‘glow’ with a temperature that gets hotter as the black hole gets smaller.
Eventually, this glow should make a black hole shrink to nothing.
“This is called black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks, just like an evaporating water droplet,” Goto explains.
Since the ‘glow’ doesn’t look like what went into the black hole in the first place, it would appear that whatever entered into the evaporated black hole is gone for good. But according to quantum mechanics, information cannot simply vanish from the Universe. Many physicists have explored the possibility that somehow, that information is encoded in Hawking radiation.
Goto and his team wanted to mathematically explore this idea by computing the entropy of Hawking radiation around a black hole. That’s the measure of disorder in a system, and can be used to diagnose information loss in Hawking radiation.
According to a 1993 paper by physicist Don Page, if disorder reverses and entropy drops down to zero as a black hole vanishes, the paradox of the missing information should be avoided. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in quantum mechanics that would allow this reversal to happen.
Enter the wormhole, or at least a mathematical replica of one under very specific models of the Universe. This is a connection between two regions of a curved sheet of spacetime, a bit like a bridge across a ravine.
Thinking of it this way in conjunction with black holes gives us a different means of calculating the entropy of Hawking radiation, Goto says.
“A wormhole connects the interior of the black hole and the radiation outside, like a bridge,” he explains.
When the team performed their calculations using the wormhole model, their results matched the Page entropy curve. This suggests that information hoovered beyond the event horizon of a black hole might not be lost forever after all.
But there are, of course, still some questions that remain. Until these are answered, we can’t consider the black hole information paradox definitively resolved.
“We still don’t know the basic mechanism of how information is carried away by the radiation,” Goto says. “We need a theory of quantum gravity.”
The research has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.