Physicists Simulate "Baby Wormhole" in Lab

Facts

• Physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) recently simulated two tiny black holes in a quantum computer and transmitted a message – through the resultant traversable tunnel or a "theoretical" wormhole – without disrupting space and time.
• The team first developed a baby Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) quantum system and entangled it with another SYK system. They then introduced a qubit – the basic unit of quantum computing equivalent to a standard bit in traditional computing – to one of the SYKs.
• As a result, information traveled from one quantum system and emerged from another via quantum teleportation — in the language of quantum physics. However, in the language of gravity, this replicated a journey through a traversable wormhole.
• Also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole is a rupture between two remote regions in spacetime. The Caltech physicists' experiment allows researchers to explore the possibility of sending information from one point in space to another through either wormholes or quantum teleportation.
• "This is important because what we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole," said Maria Spiropulu, Caltech physicist and co-author of the research. Will the latest breakthrough allow spacecraft or living beings to traverse unimaginable distances easily? "Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it's very, very far away," she disclosed.
• Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, claims the experiment, "doesn't teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn't already know," and, "could have been studied using a pencil and paper."

Sources: New York Post, Space, Sci-Tech Daily, New York Times, and Guardian.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by Futurism. Claims in many media outlets that this experiment has turned fiction into reality are overstatements. Scientists did not bring a wormhole into actual physical existence — they merely used Google's 72-qubit Sycamore 2 quantum processor to establish a quantum system which could exhibit the key properties of a gravitational wormhole.
• Narrative B, as provided by Reuters. Per comments from the Caltech researchers, there is still a long way to go before we can send humans or animals through an artificially fabricated portal. However, this trial has made a key step forward in experimental science by successfully finding a way to explore the fundamental ideas of our universe in a laboratory setting. Additionally, wormhole simulation in a quantum computer adds weight to the holographic principle of the universe. This experiment is a huge development.