How Google Created a Quantum Wormhole in the Lab - EXPLAINED

a few days ago on November 30th 2022 a team of physicists led by Maria spirapulu of the California Institute of Technology opened a wormhole using a quantum computer and sent information from one side to the other for the first time ever potentially showing that quantum entanglement and wormholes may be two different explanations for the very same phenomena this story is a follow-on from a couple of weeks ago when we talked about the discovery of entanglement and its proof that the Universe isn't locally real if you need a recap on quantum entanglement I recommend checking out that video first and then coming back here let's start at the beginning with the story of the discovery of wormholes foreign the idea of wormholes originates from the mind of Einstein and his assistant Rosen first described in a paper in 1935 known as the ER paper while attempting to extend Einstein's theory of general relativity to a unified theory of everything Einstein's theory of general relativity and space-time work really well as a theory across the expanses of the universe we use it in GPS systems around the world to counteract things like time dilation experienced by satellites we can use it to detect the light from stars that are hidden behind other galaxies it has been proven to be accurate at planetary Galactic and universe sized scales time and time again however at the scale of very small things like subatomic particles it starts to fall apart and produce singularities or nonsense answers back in 1916 just a few months after Einstein first published his general relativity Theory Carl Swartz child showed that if enough mass is located together it can gravitationally attract itself so strongly that it becomes infinitely concentrated at a point and developed a set of masks to explain this kind of singularity in the ER paper Einstein and Rosen suggested using this Singularity idea might be a way of introducing small particles into the theory of general relativity and substituted a smooth space-time description for Schwartz child's sharp singularities this mathematical's description the so-called Einstein Rosen Bridge was essentially a bridge from one part of space-time to another and I always think the interesting thing here is that just two months earlier Einstein podolsky and Rosen in their epr paper had spent a significant amount of effort to prove that quantum mechanics was an incomplete Theory because of quantum entanglement the idea that two particles separated by a large distance say hundreds of millions of light years could be still intimately connected and communicate such that taking a measurement on one would instantly transfer some information to the other hundreds of millions of light years away Einstein argued that this was impossible because it would violate locality and would mean that information had traveled instantly faster than the speed of light to influence that other particle however just two months later almost as an extra credit project Einstein himself had proposed a mechanism of how to connect two different points in space but what if both of these phenomena had a single common source foreign to the 1980s black hole theorist John Wheeler suggested that perhaps space and time were actually emergent properties of information and maybe this information existed at a lower Dimension better described maybe but Gerard hoofed as what we were experiencing as the universe was actually a projection of this information kind of like a hologram they suggested that by trying to create theories of how space and time worked we might forever be frustrated because we were missing out the fact that maybe space and time were controlled by some lower Dimension they were particularly excited by the idea that we may in fact find some cases where different dimensional theories say one of space-time and one of some lower dimensional space May yield the same results they called these ideas holographic dualities where two different theories produce the same game physics in 1994 Leonard suskind argued that a region of space-time as described by general relativity is equivalent to a lower dimensional system of quantum particles in a paper titled slightly dramatically the world as a hologram three years later in 1997 a quantum gravity theorist Juan maldacia discovered that for a particular entanglement pattern involving two sets of entangled particles this state is mathematically identical to a pair of black holes in anti-disitter space whose Interiors are connected via a wormhole it took a decade before the gravity of that Insight fully struck him in 2013 he penned a simple but powerful equation ER equals epr that may be between any pair of entangled particles there exists a wormhole foreign the problem with traditional Einstein rows and bridges or wormholes is that even if you are able to enter one the gravitational attraction of your mass passing through that tunnel would act to pull the Wormhole closed this obviously comes as hugely disappointing news to both sci-fi directors and writers out there in the world no God please no no and the universe as far as we can tell doesn't have any good answers gravitationally at least as to how we would keep a wormhole open making a stable Wormhole requires some kind of extra ingredient to push against the force of this collapse and as we don't have a negative gravitational force in this universe or any anti-gravity particles it's difficult to find a candidate that would allow us to successfully Traverse a standard Wormhole however the same constraint isn't true for our quantum entanglement analog we have both positive and negative of magnetic as well as electric fields to play with it was quantum field theorist Daniel jaffris of Harvard University that imagined that driving some sort of propagating field through one side of the quantum entangled Wormhole should provide some effect to enable stable passage from one side to the other could this be the mechanism that makes that wormhole traversable it wasn't until 2018 until the current full experimental realization of this discovery really started to take shape after significantly simplifying earlier work on quantum teleportation using two systems of entangled particles to act as either mouth of the Wormhole Maria spirapullu and her team now just needed a reliable way to build and control these Quantum States and finally open the Wormhole they turned to Google's Quantum AI team to gain access to Google's Sycamore device one of the world's most powerful but still comparatively small scale and still error-prone quantum computers the team's goal was to assemble the quantum States necessary to create a wormhole in the Sycamore device by assembling and encoding seven Quantum bits on the left hand side of the Sycamore device as the entrance with each bit entangled to one of seven other qubits on the right hand side which would act as the exit by swapping in an eighth bit for one of the seven left hand side qubits that qubit's information quickly scattered across the seven left hand side particle system entangling with its local neighbors essentially moving the qubit into the mouth of the Wormhole to create the pulse of negative energy required to hold to the Wormhole open and push the qubit through the team rotated the spin directions of the qubits at the mouth of the Wormhole by controlling the electric field this spin rotation is holographically dual essentially equivalent to a negative energy pulse traveling through space-time pushing the qubit through and emerging at a predictable time out the other side of the Wormhole the information from that original qubit then unspreads across the right hand side system like running the universe in reverse and focuses on just a single particle on the right hand side it was only after two years of gradual improvements and noise reduction efforts that late one night in January the team ran the process on Sycamore and saw a peak that confirmed their results by measuring this process many many times and looking at the input states that were injected into the Wormhole versus those that emerged from it the team showed reliably that they could in fact send a qubit Through the Wormhole [Music] the holographic principle that this experiment is founded upon is the idea that the quantum description and the space-time description are alternating versions of the same physics but what does this actually mean and how do we think about it is still maybe slightly confusing it isn't to be clear anything that we can look at or see unlike a real hologram say but that doesn't mean that the results aren't real unlike simple quantum entanglement where it's very difficult to come up with any digestible or understandable interpretation of how or why possibly a measurement on one particle affects its partner even thousands of light years away the results of this experiment feel much more concrete the Wormhole system has received a pulse of energy pushing information through it that will arrive at the other side at a known amount of time later however this experiment will also probably trigger a lot of opinions about its practicality and its interpretation and whether it actually holds true for our universe the biggest problem with it that most physicists will see is that the holography theory it is built upon which relates Quantum phenomena to space-time maps to different sort of space-time than what our universe actually occupies our universe is something called a decita space an ever-expanding sphere driven outward by its own positive energy which sounds really quite wholesome whereas the quantum phenomena mapped to something called an antidisitter space a hyperbolic space geometry with a minus sign rather than a plus sign around some important gravitational constants what is clear though for the very first time in human history is that we are making contacts between gravity and quantum mechanics we are starting to understand the Holy Grail of what our universe actually is this is what Einstein committed the latter half of his life towards and here we are more than one century later finally unraveling some of the Mysteries that he left for us [Music]

Channel: Dr Ben Miles

Views: 428,747

Keywords: science, startup, spinout, research, how to run a business, business, innovation, future, investment, deep tech, deep science, future technology

Id: NRBygsNCYr0

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022