bluedot 2018 | Jim Al-Khalili: Entanglement and Wormholes

[Music] welcome from the University of Surrey professor Jim al-khalili thank you thank you thank you who's had a good time this weekend who's staying for the chemical brothers who came to my talk yesterday on quantum biology very good okay so this is a different talk you'll be pleased to hear our best wishes to Anna who's just going through surgery now to have her her shut shoulder fixed but my wife sort of roped me into giving this talk so they said oh we haven't got a replacement Western we're gonna do it the last talk of the oh yeah Jim will give a talk here so he's got plenty of sleep so anyway like I'm doing you a favor I enjoy showing off and being up on stage don't worry so um this talk and I'll try and sort of synchronize it with the music so that you know when the music gets exciting our thing is say something exciting apologies for the comics and script I'm sure lots of people think oh my god why did you choose that I want to talk about a new idea in theoretical physics that may turn out to be a load of rubbish but if true actually I guess even more exciting than quantum biology if you could possibly believe that and it's going to cover two of the strangest most counterintuitive ideas in the whole of physics now for most of the last hundred years physicists have been trying to find a theory of everything a theory that unifies all the forces of nature a theory that brings together the big ideas the the world of very small quantum mechanics and the world of the very large Einstein's general theory of relativity and there are various candidates that may or may not turn out to be the right theory so this is my way of depicting the struggle between strings which tries to unify the forces of nature and something called loop quantum gravity which basically tries to have a quantum description of space and time itself the fabric of reality they come at this idea the theory of everything from two different directions and we don't know which one is the correct theory yet and maybe both the wrong so what I want to tell you about in the next half hour or so is a new idea there isn't string theory or loop quantum gravity now um most famous equation in physics equals MC squared you as a 12 you know very intelligent audience you'll all know what that means Einstein's special theory of relativity energy whose mass times the speed of light squared now that's actually quite boring a much more interesting equation that I want to tell you about is e R equals e PR now if you know your algebra you know K once I've got an e there and E there they cancel going R cancels on y'all and I'm left with one equals P which would be much more boring than the equals MC squared right but that's not what I mean by ER equals e PR because this is not an algebraic equation this the the letters here aren't variables mathematical quantities there are initials of scientists and no prizes for guessing that the e stands for Einstein so one of the main reasons why this new idea is so exciting is because it relies on two ideas that Einstein developed back in 1935 that may turn out to be related in a way that no one realized certainly Einstein never realized it he published two papers in 1935 just a few weeks apart the first one was about quantum mechanics Iceland famously wasn't happy with aspects of quantum mechanics despite him being such a revolutionary scientist giving us those time is the fourth dimension the theory of relativity time slows down and all we know black holes cosmology most of what we know about cosmology goes back to Einstein's theory of general relativity but quantum mechanics he was rather unhappy about so he publishes paper with two other collaborators Podolsky and Rosen which I will talk about a minute where he criticizes quantum mechanics and says look it can't be right and here's that here's an idea that proves that some some problem with quantum mechanics that was published in May 1935 on July the 1st of that same year he published another paper with one of those co-authors Nathan Rosen on general relativity so now he was talking about a problem he had with his own theory his general theory of relativity the theory it tells us how space and time is warped and and bent by by mass and energy that theory led to the prediction of the existence of black holes and those of you who are listening to Renee's talk just now you'll have heard a lot about black holes and how they form and what their properties are well Einstein didn't like the idea that a black holes center was a singularity a point of zero size in effect for him it was like if you divide by zero on your calculator or for anyone under the age of thirty on your smartphone dividing by zero is nonsense it gives infinity Einstein said that the singularity ascent to a black hole is equally weird so what he and Nathan Rosen did was mess around with the mathematics describing the interior of a black hole and came up with a different solution and that was published in that paper absolutely nothing to do with The Strangers of quantum mechanics that in fact the first paper or the Biddle quantum Akash Einstein was unhappy about something called Heisenberg's uncertainty principle the idea that a quantum thing like an electron I call it a theme because it can be a wave or a particle can somehow be both or neither until you measure it and then it makes up its mind what it is so now I thought I didn't like that idea so he came up with what's called a thought experiment described in this first paper so I wanted explain a little bit about I start these two ideas then campus of the grand finale and say how they might be connected together the first paper on quantum mechanics relies on something called quantum entanglement Einstein famously hated this idea two particles that were once together and then move apart remain if their their quantum properties you know are not destroyed by someone looking or observing them they remain entangled that means their fates are somehow intertwined that what you do to one will instantaneously affect the other Einstein didn't like this he called it spooky action at a distance because for I'm Stein you can't get from point A to B faster than the speed of light that's the maximum speed in our universe and it nothing cat it's not that we've not found anything that goes faster than light it doesn't make sense for something to go faster than light at least to all sorts of paradoxes so as I said how can two quantum entangled particles in inner in principle there could be light years apart but somehow instantaneously you do something to one it affects the other one they said that can't be right so quantum and yet we now know quantum entanglement does exist it's a property of our universe well what in Einstein have to say about it well of course Einstein developed his theory of relativity a few years before quantum mechanics quantum castle developed in the 1920s I just nicked this off off of the Internet nice picture depicting quantum stuff yeah oh there's the sciences like DNA and then there's muslins chemistry and radiates Colangelo quantum mechanics but anyway um so in their paper so this is n Stein Podolsky and Rosen a decade or so after quantum mechanics were developed came up with a thought experiment it's called a Gedanken in in German means thought experiment means not an experiment that they've actually carried out in the lab but one that they hypothesized theoretically if you were to do this you should see this right um they came up with this thought experiment that gave rise to a paradox and it's now known as the EPR paradox after their letters hence the EPR in that equation I showed you so basically this is what they suggested imagine you have some sort of instrument a device that produces two quantum particles say two photons particles of light and you send them out away from each other back to back right and then so the photons I've described them not as a particle or a wave but somehow were a mixture of the two right just to keep my options open so you got photon one and photon two if piece I'm Stein velocity already said if you look at photon one they can be at any point if their quantum entangled doesn't matter how far apart they are if you look at photon one and you measure its wavelength it's the particle of light light can behave like a wave okay so it has a wavelength that means you're measuring a property about the photon that tells you it's spread out so it's not fixed in one place so if you have a device an instrument that measures its wavelength you can do that and you can do it very accurately and that means that photon will start behaving will behave like a wave because we know in quantum mechanics the nature of what you're looking at depends on what you measure depends on the observer one of the weird things that quantum mechanics that Einstein was sort of sort of happy with so it says right you measure the wavelength of photon one photon to will have the same wavelength if they're both produced by the same source they are they're balancing each other they have the same energy the same color they have the same way they so felt on two without looking at it you know what its wavelength is but said Einstein if you were to measure photon ones position so you you bring a different instrument a different detector which detects where the photon is you can locate it in a certain position now it doesn't have a spread out wave-like nature now it's in one place and if you know where it is photon two will be the same distance on the other side of the box so you'll know where photon two is precisely so photon two now has a position not as spread out wave-like property so they said we look fine with photon 1 we know quantum mechanics is weird and the nature of a particle depends on what you measure if you measure its wave-like nature you'll see it as a spread out wave if you want to measure where it is you'll see it as a particle that's the uncertainty principle but that's not our problem our problem is Lizabeth out onto it could have been a wave it could have been a particle we've not touched it and yet somehow we could have known where it is and what its wavelength is at the same time therefore it couldn't possibly have those things at the same time because it's not even being observed it must have been one or the other it cannot depend on what we measure when we look at photon 1 right so photon 2 must be independent of photon 1 that was their problem with entanglement they can't their faiths can't be intertwined they said the fact that the two photons are entangled would suggest that the instant you measure photon 1 detecting it as a wave photon 2 will be away you measure photon 1 as a particle you see as a particle the other side of the galaxy photon 2 will behave like a particle as well this is nonsense somehow they must be instantaneous communication between the two and the EPR paradox was something that not only baffled Einstein baffled a lot of physicists well in 1960s and Irish physicist called John Bell a very smart guy he wrote history at his PhD thesis it only took a few pages because it was such a brilliant idea he said the EPR paradox there's a way of testing whether I'm Stein Podolsky and Rosen were right or whether quantum mechanics is right you can go beyond their simple thought experiment and devise a real experiment and see which one is right and Bell came up with an equation called bells inequality that if you plug the numbers in you could infinitely say was Einstein right or wrong so basically so an inequality which adds that's like science in black translated into English if I stand was right then there's a limit to how much to distant particles can have in common now of course the photon one and photon two will have some properties in common because they both came from the same place but that's not the same as them remaining somehow in contact across distances okay and actually in the early 1980s an experiment was carried out in Paris which confirmed that Einstein was wrong quantum mechanics quantum entanglement it does actually work and it isn't is the property of nature and most quantum physicists basically that oh well say Einstein was a great revolutionary but he got it wrong in quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is brilliant lovely and it works and and let's just get on with life but it's still a worry how does photon one tell photon two exactly what's happening instantaneously so those philosophers of science the people who think about quantum mechanics come up with ever more exotic ideas to explain away what we see in nature and it's all very counterintuitive that's quantum mechanics that's the first paper Einstein second paper on general relativity I say Einstein developed general relativity during the first world war it's commonly regarded as the most beautiful theory in the whole of science but also quite hard to understand Einstein himself had to learn a whole new area of mathematics in order to develop the equations of general relativity but once he'd done that to develop the theory it gave rise to cosmology it gave rise to the prediction of the Big Bang the expansion of the universe the properties of black holes gravitational waves all the negative the nature of space and time on the vaster scale all is predicted beautifully by Einstein's equations of general relativity and as I mentioned one of those predictions is the existence of black holes so Einstein published this second paper the particle problem as the title doesn't do it justice basically this was the first paper that predicted the existence of wormholes which we now know from Hollywood movies right so einstein-rosen publishes paper we know that when a star a large star much bigger than our Sun I sound like Donald Trump there the biggest star when it runs out of its nuclear fuel and stops burning it collapses under its own gravitational weight and as it collapses it collapses inward sends shockwaves outwards and explodes as a supernova if it's a big enough star at its center it leaves behind a black hole it was not big enough to leave a neutron star but a massive enough star will leave a black hole and this is predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity and we sort of know quite a bit about black holes and and and their their nature but what we don't know is exactly what it's like inside a black hole you see um we can see black holes out in space we know that would have been discovered back in the 1970s we understand what they look like we know that they have this accretion disk that's that's where all this is the gas and dust that they that falls into their gravitational pull spirals into a black hole like water going down a plug hole but inside could be this tunnel this wormhole remember I said the beginning Einstein didn't like the singularity the point at the center of a black hole and what he said was it's possible that a black hole is a bridge a tunnel to somewhere else that became known as the einstein-rosen bridge today we would call it a wormhole back then it's named after Einstein arose in the ER in that equation now no one's been inside a black hole right we've not sent any probes to a black hole and if we did and they fell in they wouldn't be able to send us a message back out again and tell us what it's like it has a stopped Hollywood from utilizing the whole idea of what a wormholes as means of getting across the universe as a shortcuts um but the basic idea of an einstein-rosen bridge or wormhole is that it does provide this shortcut through space so if you imagine we live in a galaxy a the Milky Way galaxy and imagine some you know it's some time in the distant future when we have interstellar trouble and we want to get to galaxy B let me imagine that the the shortest route is a straight line through space but of course Einstein says that space or space-time more correctly can be curved can be warped by gravity so imagine if space could be bent over and fold it over suddenly a and B are a lot closer together if you take that shortcut tunnel out of the universe so what I've done here is I said the universe of collapse hours forget time because it just gets too messy to think about our three dimensions of space we know we live in three dimensions imagine squashing our space down to a surface and that's what I've depicted there and that surface is then curved around so that distance between a and B is now much shorter roots the long way around and that became known as the einstein-rosen bridge now I stein didn't believe in the existence of our elder bridge but then he didn't believe black holes existed back in the 1930s for him it was just like a weird solution of the mathematics that his theory predicted they didn't think in reality these things actually existed but of course I mean it's wonderful sort of fodder for Hollywood movies the first idea of a wormhole was was in in Carl Sagan's book contacts which was then made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and a young Matthew McConaughey so I'm sure many of you seen the film contact or maybe even read the book Carl Sagan wanted this idea of a shortcut between two points in space but he wanted the idea to make sense scientifically and he sent the script to what was then known who probably still is today the greatest living expert on our Stein's theory after Einstein died a man called Kip Thorne in California and Kip Thorne came up with the idea of a wormhole basically he extended the einstein-rosen bridge idea you see einstein-rosen bridge if it joins two black holes so you you've got a black hole you jump in and there's a tunneling it's another black hole as I'm sure Rene would have mentioned to you in his talk earlier a black hole is surrounded by an event horizon that's yuka if you go in you can't come back out again so it's no point jumping into a black hole down an einstein-rosen bridge because you're gonna get trapped by the event horizon of the other black hole what kept form did for Carl Sagan's novel was to again mess around with the mathematics so that he created a spacetime that doesn't contain any event horizons and the idea of a traversable wormhole was born and so there are many movies that can come up with the idea of a traverse a wormhole including Carl Sagan's contact a slightly older Matthew McConaughey and interstellar also explores the idea of a wormhole and as another lovely sort of connection not only does Matthew McConaughey star in interstellar and contact but whereas contact was based on a Carl Sagan book which got help for this guy Kip Thorne the screenplay for interstellar was written by Kip Thorne so if you've seen interstellar and you think it's gets a bit weird and trippy by the end you know he's floating behind the bookcase and a higher dimension load of rubbish actually everything in interstellar scientifically is correct in as much as it doesn't violate Einstein's theory of relativity okay so when I say correct I mean Einstein's theory as far as we know is the correct description of space and time and it predicts everything that we see in the film interstellar by the way Kip Thorne when won the Nobel Prize last year for his part in the discovery of gravitational waves so you know what quite quite a big shot um so we had the idea of a wormhole all the einstein-rosen bridge that joins two distant points in space-time in 2013 two physicists in the States published a paper maldacena and Erskine both hugely influential guys they know what they're talking about so when they published this paper cool horizons for entangled black holes again the title doesn't tell you anything right but physicists sat up and took notice because they pulled together the two ideas that Einstein published in 1935 let me explain what it is so these these pictures and I'm really pleased about so I have to show off and tell you this the pic these pictures were produced by the same CGI company that worked on interstellar they're called double negative and I know the guy who runs the the company and and I was producing this talk and I'd asked him if they had anything lying about any nice pictures graphics and I explained what I needed Zoe I don't worry we'll work on it so that and they went away and and it took me several weeks and I had this fear that they're gonna hit me with a bill of like you know two million quid or whatever is it you know they were charging Hollywood for their first battery they did it for me for free so so here's how I understand this picture that was described in this paper by these two physicists imagine these are two mouths of a wormhole right so these are not two black holes because when you look inside you can see light now if that was a black hole it would be black inside right because nothing no lights can escape it that's the definition of a black hole no these are mouths of a wormhole so you go in one mouth you will come out the other end and we can't soak so where is the passage where do you go because you're not travelling sort of in between them you're going out of our space and again the only way to really understand this is to squash our space down to two dimensions so then we have a third dimension to show you where the wormhole is right so squash it down a bit okay so now there is two dimensions stick a nice pretty grid on it because it makes it look sciency and there's your wormhole joining the two points in space okay now if you look at this you think well actually it'll be quicker just to go straight through space rather go through the wormhole but that's because we're playing with higher dimensions and it's it's difficult for our feeble three-dimensional brains or indeed the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe to actually depict what's going on here but in principle those two mouth of the wormhole could be in different galaxies and the the roots the path between them the fruit of the wormhole could be just a few meters in fact there are even theories that suggest that one mouth could be an our universe and another could be in a parallel universe entirely again speculation what does this have to do with entanglement well let's get rid of space-time in all the stars and galaxies what if the reason two entangled quantum particles can communicate with each other say two atoms that are very far apart are the two photons is because they're joined by an einstein-rosen bridge it's yeah I suppose that would work wouldn't it so however far apart these entangled particles get they are still connected by a via this wormhole and the theory it has been a bit and is still being developed today we don't know if it's correct or not a lot of papers are being published but the idea is that down at the very quantum level space and time themselves lose their meaning space and time becomes foamy and all and bubbly and all sorts of shapes exist there could be wormholes existing down at the quantum level and if they do then those maybe those wormholes join particles up so that when two quantum particles are produced when we say they remain quantum entangled they remain in instantaneous communication with each other that's because they're joined by an einstein-rosen bridge we don't know if wormholes exist we don't know if this is the way the structure of space-time although we we have a good feeling that at some level when you zoom down small enough mechanics are start to play it's fuzzy probabilistic roll we certainly don't know if quantum entanglement is connect it is explained away by the idea of a an einstein-rosen bridge the maths works and the idea as they explain that if you put energy into if you observe one of the particles and the EPR paradox by observing it you're putting energy into the system and you destroy the bridge so you kill the entanglement by the act of observation and that all fits beautifully with quantum mechanics so we don't know if this is the correct theory but it appeals to me because wouldn't it be wonderful if Einstein had published these two papers just six weeks or so apart on entirely different areas of physics without a clue that what he was talking about was exactly the same thing and it sort of sweeps away two mysteries in one we explain away quantum entanglement because the contem entangled particles are wormholes don't go away and say Jim al-khalili said quantum entanglement is where holes I'm just saying it could be and I would love it if it's true but time will tell thank you very much thank you thank you [Applause] so please raise your hands I've left lots of time for questions so pick me but right ok just they're closest to you okay the answer is some information can be transmitted but it's not information that we can make use of there's a whole area in quantum physics at the moment researching the idea of quantum encryption of quantum teleportation the idea that these two particles interconnected can you learn something about the distant particle instantaneously the answer is no because by in order to gain information or to transmit information you have to observe you have to interact with the system and in doing so you destroy the entangled pair and so you can't win you can't not disturb the system by observation having said that as a caveat as our there's a new area of research called weak quantum measurements which attempt to get round there but that's still unclear how how would work but the short answer is so this is why physicists have said don't worry Einstein about the spooky action instantaneous connections it's not really instantaneous because we can't use it to send signals faster the light and I hate that I think that's intellectually lazy to say that just because we can't use quantum entangled to send signals doesn't mean they're not instantaneously connected what we call non-local in in physics but it doesn't look at the moment like we can make any use of it practically I would say yes I agree with you the universe does know that these particles are that's what quantum entanglement means in quantum mechanics we're saying they're described by the same quantum state the same wave function but for us that's just math it's just that what it tells us is if you do what you do to one wouldn't stand instantaneously affect the other we can't use that information but the universe knows that they're there they're connected so yeah they are that that information is there for the universe but as soon as we try and access it we destroy it right it's good to end with a nice simple talk isn't it for therefore the whole festival hello [Music] [Music] right so the wormhole mouth can be any size so there can be if you know we've never built a wormhole so we don't know what it would look like but Matthew the the maps can tell us what it might look like and you can scope it fly into it through your spaceship and it would feel normal to you and what you what you'd see when you fly into it is the other end of the wormhole so it could be short it could be long but because okay I'm trying to explain generality to a little girl I'm trying it's challenging but since you asked the question you deserve an answer right the the fact that you have a wormhole means that space and time are warped they're bent that means what you see is optically weird even a black hole forget wormholes even a black hole it's gravity bends light around it so what you see looks very different so you might see something that looks bigger or smaller than it should be you might see something over here when it's really over there because gravity is is is changing space and time it changes what you see so it might be a small bat wormhole looks bigger or larger wormhole look smaller but I've never been in one so I can't say for sure what might in my imagination what they look like is the way Hollywood depicts them unfortunately otherwise I'm just playing with the math right thank you where are you thank you yes right what would happen if we detected the wave nature of the photon and the position of it we can't that's the simple answer that was something that Verner Heisenberg a German physicist the 1920s came up with his uncertainty principle he said it's impossible to devise an experiment that could tell us what what whether photons in a place or spread out at the same time it doesn't doesn't make sense if the more you try and localize where a particle is in space the more it wants to jiggle about the more it wants to have whizzed around and spread itself out so by trying to see where it is you will lose any information about its wavelength but if you measure its energy its color if we talk about light a photon and you measure this wavelength that means you're measuring it as spread out then you can know nothing about where it is so that so there's all lots of jokes about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but it's true if we try it we cannot devise it experiment it's not because we're not clever enough or that our instruments are too clumsy it simply defies logic at the quantum level to be able to do both those measurements at the same time we can know one or the other or we can know both roughly so we can roughly know where the photon is and have a rough idea what it's what its color is what its wavelength is but we can't know both precisely if you the more you learn about one the more you have to sacrifice information about the other right can i guide it by you the big guy by your whether for questions are [Music] [Music] you you've hit upon the issue with wormholes right so so to explain the an idea in not even in Iceland general theory and it's a special theory of relativity and this is one of the reasons why nothing can go fast of the light because if you see an object that looks you going faster than the speed of light thousand three hundred thousand kilometers per second there can always be someone else who's moving relative to you who wouldn't only see the object go faster like that would see it moving backwards in time and that can't be possible because for something to move backwards in time it means cause and effect gets switched over so you know imagine someone firing a gun and shooting someone efforts a violent example I don't why I always use it I shoot a gun the questioner if you don't mind falls to the ground dead now if that bullet traveled from the gun to the victim faster than light there could be someone else flying past us in a spaceship who would see the victim fall to the ground before I'd even fired the gun which in principle means they could see they all here he's he said he's been shot let's go and take the gun off Jim and they could take the gun off me before I fired it but somehow he's already been shot so it just doesn't make sense so that that's one of the reasons why nothing you're faster than light but with a wormhole it's joining two points in space instantaneously and it leads to the same issue so absolutely it is possible see what I didn't explain thank you um when Kip Thorne was helping car Fagan out in writing a contact he and his research group in California very quickly realized that a wormhole doesn't just join two points in space one Einstein's big lesson is that time and space are combined into four-dimensional space-time so two miles of the wormhole wouldn't just join two points of space they would join two points in time so in principle I could if I created a wormhole here with one mouth here and the other mouth over there I could create it not only that it joins two points of space but I can jump in this mouth today and come out that mouth yesterday so I could then you know wander backstage and and wait for myself and then today comes around we can both jump in the wormhole together then we can both come out there and you can wander around and join the two of us here in all four of us jump in and so on just doesn't make sense so as soon as you have a wormhole that joins two distant points of space you are left with this issue that it leads to time travel paradoxes and that's one of the reasons why we think there must be something else either Einstein's theory is incomplete and that wormholes are impossible or that they are but we're missing something else maybe the fact that parallel universes exist it may be that if you jump into a wormhole you do in fact not just come out somewhere else in your universe you must come out in a parallel reality where the different version of history evolves and we start to get to this whole time travel paradoxes ideas which it which is delicious in itself and I'm sure people like meld the same answer skin are aware of this but down at the quantum level it's different if these icetown roads and bridges are doing entangled particles then that has to be constrained by the fact that you know you can't have the two particles so far apart that they are space like separated they're there that they can violate some of these logical problems a way to go to get this all sorted out just yet [Music] [Music] we disappear as well if so how do we go about creating stable where the holes that we see in the movies and I've just kind of wondered whether your Lewis response about maybe one of the hell is my link to after The Chemical Brothers I might feel enough in a better state of mind to um yeah right okay so when two parts are created if one hits an antimatter partner and I Nile Xing and a burst of energy that's the equivalent of it being observed so you basically if you detect that energy you know it's happen you've destroyed that particle you've destroyed the entanglement but of course the other particle can still exist if you put in enough energy to make both particles that energy has created them and then this particle annihilates the antimatter particle there's a bit of energy there this particle still exists that best pouring but your second question more interesting about how you can make a wormhole stable these einstein-rosen bridge wormholes that we're talking about the giant angle particles are not stable they are very very delicate the slightest touch the slightest quantum you know measurement will destroy them but the sort of traversable wormholes that you want in the movies they have to have scaffolding in a sense to keep them open I say scaffolding um it sounds like what you just need to you know sort of you know I don't know this of concrete or and a wormhole that is stable that is not an einstein-rosen bridge there isn't going to collapse at the slightest touch will the slightest observation needs to be held open by something called exotic matter now exotic matter we don't know if it exists basically it has negative mass and if you think you know what I'm talking about then you clearly don't there's definition of quantum mechanics what does negative how can something weigh - five kilograms the least it can weigh is nothing the least it can have is zero right and negative mass doesn't mean antimatter or it doesn't mean it have anti-gravity for it negative mass is almost illogical but in the quantum world you can get it you can get negative energy you can get energy out of the vacuum energy out of the vector um um and so it's possible on the quantum level that you can have negative energy and of course e equals MC squared so energy and mass are interchangeable so you should also get at negative mass but we don't have a clue how to get enough of this exotic matter this negative mass to create wormholes if we have a in principle we don't think it violates any laws of physics but we're like a thousand years away from that sort of technology so don't imagine that anytime soon we're going to be able to create stable wormholes that certainly for our lifetime I'm afraid is constrained to Hollywood movies but at least there's that possibility [Music] [Music] it in terms of time and space dimensions inside the wormhole it is fine the mathematics is okay so one holes forget you know that they are their quantum wormholes that might explain entanglement the notion of a wormhole during two points the geometry the mathematics satisfies Einstein's theory of relativity it's just that we don't know if if they are real things now ice I didn't even think black holes are real he was proven wrong the black holes do exist out in space but we don't know what is inside them we don't know form holes are real it may be a lot of physics that we have yet to understand but in terms of how far it takes us towards the theory of everything we simply don't know there's a whole community of theoretical physicists since the night mid 1980s they've been working on super string theory and then we'll argue blind almost like another religion that their version of a theory of everything is the right way to go you've got another camp doing loop quantum gravity and they will take the mick out of string theory so they're just complete you know that idiot they know what they're talking about so when you get to this speculative sort of edge of understanding in theoretical physics it's almost an article of faith or witchcamp you belong to which team you support because we're still developing the mass we still don't understand I mean this idea er a cos e PR may take us some way towards my hunch and what do you know what do I know I'm it's not even my research specialism but my hunch is that if it's true it takes it leans towards loop quantum gravity quantizing space-time and I've never been a fan of string theory but again I haven't devoted my career researching string theory so if we still have a very long way to go keep them quick yeah that's quantum space-time my hand I mean you must recognize it I nicked it off the web alright okay hi does every particle or wave have no no no not at all well certainly if this idea is true the vacuum of space is filled with what called virtual particles particles and their anti back to partners popping in and out of existence all the time and this theory would argue that every particle in its antimatter partner are quantum entangled but that doesn't mean that all real particles are entangled with each other in fact entanglement in in the real physical universe of real matter particles is quite rare because quantum entanglement is a delicate thing so most particles are doing their thing they're interacting with others there are there are some physicists that will say that have a sort of a holistic view that says the whole universe all particles of the universe are entangled with each other but that doesn't really take us anywhere we think of quantum entanglement is something quite special but it may happen all the time in the vacuum between virtual particles again it's in some sense it depends on who you talk to and how they define entanglement and yet another sense it's probably too early to say too much about it but time will tell again right I think we've run out of time and it's time for some music because this is the end of the physics lectures you know much

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Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 30 2018