Physicists have purportedly created a wormhole using a quantum computer
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
While I advise reading the whole post, here is a notable quote:
"The two senior physicists behind this, Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, have histories that go way back of successfully promoting to the press nonsense about exotic space-time structures appearing in experiments that have nothing to do with them."
I could be wrong, since I'm relying on memory, and I can not find an indication that the article was edited.
I have to say that I have a general suspicion of quantum computing research as it seems that the scientists could be making up success criteria as they go along and we'd have zero idea either way. That said, I respect these institutions enough to accept that people much more brilliant than myself are solving problems I can't begin to understand, and so I take these sorts of pronouncements at face value until proved otherwise.
Also:
>To avoid further confusion with wormhole in the sci-fi sense of a passageway that a person can fly through...
I don't know if there is a name for this flavor of "sorry-not-sorry", but it's upsetting that a professional writer would engage in it. The wormhole did not have to be a full blown "science fiction" gate that people can "fly through" for the article to have been accurate. It could have been a nanometer-sized space that existed for a microsecond, across which a single bit of data was transmitted.
It's not really a simulation because if they used all ~infinite qubits then IIUC it would have created the actual wormhole. This is more like a wireframe diagram. The fact that they ran it on a real device is irrelevant.
Though, I'd love to be wrong.
>Surprisingly, despite the skeletal simplicity of their wormhole, the researchers detected a second signature of wormhole dynamics, a delicate pattern in the way information spread and un-spread among the qubits known as “size-winding.” They hadn’t trained their neural network to preserve this signal as it sparsified the SYK model, so the fact that size-winding shows up anyway is an experimental discovery about holography. “We didn’t demand anything about this size-winding property, but we found that it just popped out,” Jafferis said. This “confirmed the robustness” of the holographic duality, he said. “Make one [property] appear, then you get all the rest, which is a kind of evidence that this gravitational picture is the correct one.”
Seems like their argument is that because they didn't train for the size-winding, but observed it, that some gravitational interaction is probably happening, despite there only being finitely many cubits unlike true SYK.
>Most comments say it's simulated. I think it's not even that... The fact they ran it on a real device is irrelevant.
I don't fully understand the theory around holography but I'm not convinced by the commenters saying that it's "simulated". IIUC, the certain quantum system that is equivalent to gravity is "another view of" the wormhole transport in AdS space and that in some sense it did indeed happen "in reality". Although it's not so clear what reality means anymore if these theories are true for real dS spacetime and everything can be described via a bunch of degrees of freedom on a boundary surface.
As an aside, I wish the article was written in plainer English. I laughed when they wrote that the physicist was "a gifted programmer" because they could use pytorch or whatever. What a puff piece.
At least if that's what happened. I can't wait to see this replicated. I am optimistic but skeptical, given the reputation of physicists like Spiropulu and the exaggerated presentation.