Time travel is no longer a dream? Scientists successfully simulated a "holographic wormhole"!

Recently, scientists have created

News about "holographic wormhole" became a hot topic

It sparked discussion among everyone

What is a wormhole?

Can we really use it to travel through time?

Let’s learn about wormholes today

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Wormhole? Is it a hole where worms live?

A wormhole in the universe is a special tunnel that scientists speculate may exist. Its two ends connect two distant time and space. Theoretically, if you can travel from one end of the wormhole to the other, you can achieve time and space travel that exceeds the speed of light.

At the end of the movie "Interstellar", the protagonist entered a wormhole and traveled through time and space. Students who are interested can go and have a look!

Image source: Screenshot from the movie Interstellar

To understand wormholes, we must first understand "black holes" and "white holes". With the help of Hawking's two popular science books, "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell", the concept of black holes has long been deeply rooted in people's minds. It is a celestial body that has a huge density that even light cannot escape due to its volume contraction and density increase when a star dies. The so-called white hole is actually a special celestial body with opposite properties to a black hole. It is characterized by constantly "spitting out" things and only emitting but not absorbing.

One swallows everything, the other spits out everything. Imagine what would happen if a black hole happened to be connected to a white hole? A worm hole would be formed.

Image source: Schematic diagram of wormhole from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

In 1915, Einstein proposed the theory of general relativity. In Einstein's theory, space and time are no longer absolute and immutable, but plastic and interdependent, and they are affected by the existence of matter. In 1935, Einstein and his assistant Rosen studied black holes under the framework of general relativity and first proposed the concept of "Einstein-Rosen Bridge", which connects two different regions in space and time. In the 1950s, physicist Wheeler named this bridge "wormhole".

Doesn't this sound exciting? Entering a wormhole, you may appear in any corner of the universe, or even travel through time and space, rewrite your life, and re-choose things you once regretted. However, although general relativity allows the existence of wormholes, physicists have never observed wormholes in the universe. Currently, only black holes have been actually observed by humans.

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What is a quantum wormhole?

Although we have not yet discovered wormholes in the universe, scientists have now created wormholes and observed the transmission of information between wormholes. However, don't think about traveling through time and space, this wormhole is not the gravitational wormhole mentioned above, but a quantum wormhole.

Recently, a paper published in the British journal Nature reported for the first time the use of a quantum processor to perform quantum "simulation" of a holographic wormhole. This holographic wormhole successfully transferred quantum states from one quantum system to another through the wormhole.

If the wormhole we imagine that can travel through time and space is called a "space-time wormhole", then the quantum wormhole in the quantum state can be called a "micro wormhole".

So, what is the use of studying quantum wormholes?

This is because, although general relativity and quantum mechanics have each developed for a long time, there is still a fundamental "conflict" between them - quantum gravity.

Specifically, "general relativity" describes gravity and is applicable to large scales such as stars, planets, and galaxies; while "quantum mechanics" describes the other three fundamental forces that act on microscopic scales. Is it possible for the two to "shake hands and make peace"? This depends on the performance of quantum gravity.

Physicists certainly want to test it through experiments, but unfortunately, the energy and scale of quantum gravity cannot be simulated and observed under previous laboratory conditions. This is where "holography" comes in, which can help physicists create a system that is comparable to the original system but less complex. This is similar to using a two-dimensional hologram to display the details of a three-dimensional image.

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How are quantum wormholes created?

In 2019, physicists at Google proposed an experimental hypothesis that a quantum state that can be recreated in a physics laboratory can be interpreted as information traveling through a wormhole between two black holes.

Now, scientists from Google, MIT, Fermilab, and Caltech have simulated the corresponding quantum dynamics using 9 qubits and 1 quantum computer. In the same quantum chip, they created two entangled quantum systems and placed a qubit in one of the quantum systems. As a result, they observed the information from this qubit "traveling through the wormhole" in the other quantum system, and the results were consistent with the expected gravitational properties.

What does this mean? You can imagine putting a wire or any other physical connection between the two sets of entangled particles, allowing the particles to encode the two mouths of the wormhole.

Under this coupling effect, manipulating the particles on one side will cause changes in the particles on the other side, which makes it possible to open a wormhole between the particles on both sides.

Image credit: inqnet/A.Mueller Quantum computer simulation shows how information passes through a wormhole

Although controversial, this unprecedented experiment explores the possibility that space-time can somehow emerge from quantum information. As quantum devices continue to improve, with lower error rates and more powerful chips, the study of gravitational phenomena will become more in-depth.

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Source: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jimu News

Science and Technology Daily, Global Science, Quantum Bit

Compiled by: Dong Xiaoxian

Editor: Guru