W wormholes appear to be making progress

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In science fiction, think films and TV like Interstellar and Star Trek wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through space and time for spacecraft to traverse unimaginable distances with ease. Scientists have been studying wormholes for a long time and now they seem to be making progress. Two minuscule simulated black holes are extremely dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape from a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time.

According to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, co-author of the research, it was a baby wormhole. She said that scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal.

I will tell you that it is very, very far away, experimentally. People come to me and they ask me, Can you put your dog in the wormhole? Spiropulu was talking to reporters during a video briefing. That is a huge leap. There is a difference between what is possible in principle and possible in reality, said Joseph Lykken, a physicist and study co-author of Fermilab, America's particle physics and accelerator laboratory. Don't hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. I think it's exciting that we can get our hands on this at all. The researchers observed the wormhole dynamics on a quantum device at Alphabet s Google, called the Sycamore quantum processor.

A wormhole is a rupture in space and time and is considered a bridge between two remote regions in the universe. Scientists call them Einstein-Rosen bridges after the two physicists who described them as Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.

Such wormholes are consistent with the theory of general relativity by Einstein, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term wormhole was coined in the 1950s by physicist John Wheeler.

Spiropulu said that the researchers found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to implement on existing quantum hardware.

It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. That is what we can say at this point that we have something that looks like a wormhole, according to Lykken.

The researchers said that there was no rupture of space and time in physical space, though a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on quantum information teleported using quantum codes on the quantum processor.

These ideas have been around for a long time and they are very powerful ideas, Lykken said.

In the end, we are in experimental science and we have 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.