Researchers claim to create what looks like a wormhole

It's a mainstay of science fiction, it is tiny and doesn't exist in physical space, but researchers say they have created what is theoretically a worm hole.

The researchers 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.

A traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on the quantum information teleported, but 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 of the universe. Scientists refer to them as the 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. That s what we can say at this point that we have something that looks like a wormhole in terms of the properties we look at, said Joseph Lykken, a physicist and accelerator researcher at 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 noted that a physical wormhole had not actually been created, but was important to note that future possibilities were not actually created.

Daniel Harlow, a physicist at MIT, told the New York Times that the experiment was based on a modelling that was so simple that it could just as easily 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 know, Harlow wrote. It is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can't do this, and until now we couldn't simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would certainly be off the table. The authors of the study made clear that scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal.

For me, I will tell you that it is very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, Can you put your dog in the wormhole? Spiropulu was not talking to reporters during a video briefing. That is a huge leap. Lykken said there is a difference between what is possible in principle and what is possible in reality.

Don't hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. I think it is exciting that we can 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. In the 1950s, the term wormhole was coined by physicist John Wheeler.

These ideas have been around for a long time and they are very powerful ideas, Lykken said. We're in experimental science in the end, and we've been struggling for a long time to find a way to explore these ideas in the laboratory. That is really exciting about this. It is not just wormholes that are cool. This is a way to look at these very fundamental problems of our universe in a laboratory setting.