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A Link Between Wormholes and Quantum Entanglement
sciencehabit writes "Theoretical physicists have forged a connection between the concept of entanglement — itself a mysterious quantum mechanical connection between two widely separated particles — and that of a wormhole — a hypothetical connection between black holes that serves as a shortcut through space (first abstract, second abstract). The insight could help physicists reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity, perhaps the grandest goal in theoretical physics."
This is the direction. Thanks.
I am not a physicist.
But I keep hearing that there is actually nothing mysterious about entanglement at all... Something along the lines of:
You post 2 envelopes containing cards in opposite directions, one with a printed letter A, the other card with the letter B.
At one destination, the envelope is opened to reveal the letter A. ... then through some mysterious quantum mechanical connection.... you know that the envelope at the remote destination contains the letter B.
And that's about all there is to entanglement....
Can any physicist confirm?
Sigs are for the weak.
Since it is physics, perhaps we could trust it better if it was 'LaForged'.
Silence is a state of mime.
Relativity at the very fundamental limits is absolutely broken simply because it is missing huge amounts of information. (namely dark matter and energy, hell, Higgs as well since we only just found it, maybe, and haven't been able to experiment with it much)
Anything that throws out infinities is inherently broken, infinities do not exist in the real world outside of concepts. (and if they do, then we will figure that out when we have exhausted every other possible route)
It is like trying to connect a themed jigsaw piece to a lego piece based on the same themed jigsaw. It will not work no matter how hard you force it. All it will do is break and result in many tears.
I don't even know how to turn this in to a car analogy, it is late.
At a certain point quantum physics causes a spooky action in the space between my ears leading to a "Duh, what the heck/" experience.
i'm really curious why more people havent been paying attention to mathur's idea of fuzzballs which resolve the singularity and information loss problems in a way that obviates the need for the holographic principle and therefore all of this work.... is theoretical physics too invested in all the time its spent on the information paradox the acknowledge that mathur's solution is porbably the correct (albeit boring) one?
It just looks like it's in 2 seperate places at once. This would solve the whole "faster than light speed communication" problem pretty easily if they could come up with a theory utilising extra dinensions to explain it.
I'm the first to admit that anything quantum blows a wormhole through my head. I struggle to find anything that will allow me to grasp it. I'm a programmer, dammit.
"God doesn't play dice with the Universe"
OK, whatever.
Maybe, just maybe, "God doesn't waste CPU cycles rendering windows that are trivially culled from the scene graph".
So. When you observe the particle its window comes to the top and The Program has to do all the rendering calculations.
Cue attempt by actual physicists to explain why this attempt to grasp the concept is totally inadequate or the more enjoyable funny bits about how the Universe is written in either Lisp or Perl.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What if the act of entangling to objects "orients" them in such a way that their measured states will always be opposite?
If you separate two entangled objects by 1000 km and measure their states, how do we know that the result would have been different if we measured them when they were 1cm apart?
imagined entangling the quantum states of two black holes. They then imagined pulling the black holes apart. When that happens, they argued, a bona fide wormhole forms between the two black holes.
Yet back in the real world we don't even know what the gravitational influence of a single photon propagating thru space looks like.
âoeThe wormhole and entangled pair don't live in the same space,â Karch says. But, he adds, mathematically they are equivalent.
Or could it be yet another instance of mathematicians fooling themselves into believing their own delusion? Or flying unicorns? Wake me up when you have made a useful testable prediction. Until then what is the point of advertising your work?
Wormholes are regions of less density than surrounding space. Entanglement is rules enabling coherent interaction of all that interacts.
I'll consider a connection and reevaluating my beliefs after useful, testable predictions are enumerated. Until such time I wish this cast of characters all the best in their endeavors.
call me cynical, but knowing academics (and those who pose as such) I'm sure that no matter how good your analogy is, they will take the areas where the analogy fails and tell you that you are wrong because of it...
all analogies have huge holes...the Scrodinger Cat analogy for example...
nitpicks aside, I agree that the idea that "Quantum" behavior is somehow mysterious, opaque and difficult for laymen to understand is bound in failings in academia (too much competition, not enough money).
to TFA, I myself came here to say that I honestly thought a link between "entanglement" and wormholes had already been established and was accepted.
I honestly feel like the problem is NOT with you, a layman, or your analogy, which is fine for understanding the concept of **non-locality** which is core to undrestanding what makes quantum physics "quantum"
Academia has folded in on itself because of Lord of the Flies like competition. Just recently /. had an article on it...comparing getting Tenure to becoming a drug lord>
My experience in CS and IT Engineering has shown the same.
People must stake their *whole careers* on overly specific theories that are not their own...almost no PhD's, even in physics increasingly, do actual **new research** in the best areas. Because of the competition, older acadmecs see it as part of their job to entrench themselves and the theories **they** have devoted themselves into the DNA of the org.
It's how MBA types work...but it has spread to academia. Everyone wants to put their thumb in the big piece of cake to keep it for themselves.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is just fine, and its the fault of academia that the published research hasn't caught up with even **common understanding**
Thank you Dave Raggett
see, ^^^this is how you talk about physics in common language!
how many times do we scientists alienate people by trying to sound smart instead of making a connection to **their** a priori knowledge?
Thank you Dave Raggett
http://xkcd.com/224/
That said, I have no fucking clue what you were trying to say.
This action at a distance nonsense just has to end someday. This is no such thing implied by Bells theorem or entanglement experiments such as those by Aspect. Just let it go. Entanglement just explores the non-classical nature of quantum probability. The outcome of experiments with entangled particles is predicted by the standard Dirac notation and no mysterious action is needed.
Black-holes are not wormholes and wormholes are not black holes... Black-holes are a collection of phenomena that surround a singularity.
While they are not identical, in the sense there are versions of worm holes distinct from black holes and certainly black holes that are not worm holes, the two are still well connected concepts. One of the "phenomena" that is part of that collection related to singularities is trying to deal with coordinate problems instead of the event horizon when trying to solve the Einstein field equations, and there are versions that include world lines entering then leaving into a space-time distinct from that which surrounds the black hole. That involves a crap ton of assumptions, but nonetheless, there is a lot of overlap between black holes and worm holes, especially when looking at work in GR instead of scifi stuff.
I have more faith in this "Science" magazine then I do in a somebody named "Charliemopps".
Please mod this guy down a few points. It's one thing to do physics as a hobby, it's another to be a professional getting written up in Science.
By performing experiments that rotate the orientation of one half of the pair. If they were predetermined, nothing would happen to the other half when they are finally measured. But instead, we find that they maintain their opposite orientation, and you never see for example them having the same orientation. Whereas if you say just had two coins placed one heads up and one heads down, and randomly flipped them, you would occasionally get two heads and two tails.
ugh...**more** Lord of the Flies academia pissing-contest bullshit!
this problem spans disciplines...I commented based on my experience and I **assumed** a level of knowledge on my /. readers...I assumed they'd know that typically CS and especially engineering tend to be immune to this bullshit....
that's the problem...
theoretical physics (thanks Cambridge) and the engineering disciplines are becomming as bad as a fucking mail order Literature PhD
just because you know people who dont do this doesn't disprove my point, in fact, from reading your comment it seems you agree with the core of my criticism
why not just say you agree? why start off perpetuating the same pointeless academia pissing contest crap you admit is a problem???
Thank you Dave Raggett
yes, it indeed **does** mean that, if *non-locally* entangled, we could have **faster than light communications**
maybe you're the one who should read up...the layman has one up on you using their logic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone
read it and weep...you're wrong and the layman was right
Thank you Dave Raggett
Seconded! Eyes bleeding ... please mod down. Physics isn't about opinion or what people think or analogies they understand --- that isn't the backbone of science. Who cares if you understand, that's your responsibility --- not others to explain it to you.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Atoms are also small enough that quantum effects are significant in understanding their behaviour, and they're not yet at a macro level. Basically anything whose de Broglie wavelength is large enough to be on the scale of the object itself exhibits clear particle behaviour. An object like a baseball (weighing 150 g) thrown in a fastball (approx 90 mph or about 40 m/s) has a momentum of 6 kg m/s. The de Broglie wavelength of the fastball is thus 7.36e-36 m, far smaller than the baseball, so quantum effects would be negligible and it would be just about as accurate to use the classical equations of motion to describe its behaviour rather than the Schrödinger equation. A hydrogen molecule has a mass of 3.35e-24 kg, and at a temperature of 298 K has a velocity of about 99 m/s from the kinetic theory of gases. It thus has a de Broglie wavelength of approximately 2 picometres, whereas the hydrogen molecule is something like 74 pm or so, not too far off, and quantum effects start to become significant. At lower temperatures (say 1 K), the molecular velocity goes down to 5.7 m/s, and the de Broglie wavelength becomes 34 pm, and quantum effects become really significant (e.g. Bose-Einstein condensation).
Plus I dislike the idea of someone spelling "partical" wrong and also claiming to have an "idea" on the subject. You don't spell particle wrong and also have a good set of knowledge in physics.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
The best theory I've read on the subject, or maybe better to say, the theory I have the most faith in at the moment is that the reason sub-atomic partical behave so completely different that macro-level particles like atoms is because they are in fact NOT particles. They are something else that we don't quite understand yet. It's very hard to call them particles when they in no way behave like particles.
Or we just found out that particles act differently than expected from day-to-day intuition. And it isn't that completely different, it is just a superset of behaviors, because you can re-derive classical behavior from quantum systems.
Please moderate this up, it's the correct answer (and yes, I hold a physics degree).
Get a refund. They've only ruled out local hidden variables (which granted does apply to the envelope analogy). Non-local variables may still be needed to explain Quantum Mechanics. It wouldn't surprise me if it was a feature of any unified theory.
You could say the singularity is the star of the show in a black hole, but strictly speaking, the laws of physics outside of a black hole would not be affected if the space inside the black hole folowed completely different laws (modulo conditions at the event horizon).
The event horizon is the point at which you can't rely on observation to resolve your questions.
this is about a condescending phrase you tossed off about laymen and how analogies give them wild notions...
and that is ***exactly*** how the tachyon anti-telephone works
someone with a fucking PhD saw the same behavior as the layman, and made a theoretical faster-than-light telephone design based on it
bottom line is that you're wrong in saying that analogies are bad because they give laymen wild ideas...in fact they have **pretty fucking cool ideas**
Thank you Dave Raggett
you're being unreasonable...
Or, your perception could be wrong!
Or, your collegues and students don't naturally talk to you, a seasoned professor, about the problems from seasoned professors!
It is clear you have already decided how you think about this, as most professors typically do, and are just competing with yourself to see if you can rhetorically "put me in my place"
You are part of the problem, even if it is in a small way.
Thank you Dave Raggett
that's like saying a person who makes a particular analogy that describes a real behavior theorized in reality is making harmful assumptions because your myopic understanding of physics terms and how they are used in conversation compared to in specific literature triggers your egotistical need to use jargon and your knowledge of the history of a certain research to counter updated understandings of how something like non-local quantum entangled particles are theorized to behave and thereby insult a layman AC who actually had the right idea all along
Thank you Dave Raggett
To expand on your reply, here's a different letter game.
you mail two letters with magic XY cards inside. When the first letter is sliced open the probability it shows and X or a Y is equal. If the first letter is sliced open left to right then the other letter will match the contents of this letter. If you open it right to left then the other letter will show the opposite letter.
There's no way the contents of the letters can predetermine the outcome. (i.e. No hidden variables can explain all the possible outcomes). Notice also that this can't be used to transmit information faster than the speed of light. But by doing the experiment we can confirm that the choice of which way to slice changed the outcome of the remote envelope.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
to speak on this topic if you don't have experience as an admin or teaching professor or researcher?
have you been a lab tech for 10 years?
either you are some kind of prof., be it adjunct, post-doc, research only, teaching, admin, etc or you've just been spitballing bullshit about academia this whole time from your imagination
either way...you just backtracked completely then tried to make a deformed version of the point you were trying to make before...
Thank you Dave Raggett
Something that's a little bothersome is that when you are designing a video game that portrays a classical world, the physical limits of the computer end up imposing many of the physical laws we are used to.
for example, consider diffraction limited resolution. Basically the further away something is, the less resolved it becomes. The bigger the eye or telescope you look through the more you can resolve at a distance. In the real world we call this diffraction limited resolution. In a computer game we call it pixels, and the bigger the monitor (in pixels) the better the resolution.
To object oriented variables cannot simultaneously know each other's state. One of them has to be updated first. There's a finite limit on how fast the computer can alter the memory locations and it can't change both at the same time. So there's a kind of speed of light limit on how fast the world can change. If were doing this on distributed architectures or iterating serially over the objects then that limit actually shows up in the connectivity of objects with distance: nearer objects can influence each other sooner than remote objects.
Finally, there is an exception to that rule. Two objects can communicate instantly if they share the same class variables. This is spooky action at a distance. While it's often claimed that quantum mechanics does not allow hidden variable theories , this is a mis-interpretation of Bell's theorem. In fact it only disallows local hidden variable theories. Global hidden variable theories are what QM says do exist. That's exactly how you get entanglement.
So QM emerges because of the class variables, diffraction emerges because of memory limits and the speed of light comes out from serial processing at the CPU or memory access level.
Thus you can't actually create a simmulation of reality that didn't have the characteristics of our weird world even if you wanted to.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I know I'm exhibiting the same passive/aggressive pissing-contest bullshit I have been deploring when I do this....but how about let's settle down a bit? let's find some 'middle ground'
(doesn't that sound like what a dept. chair says right before 'budget cuts' are announced?)
to the myriad AC's who are apparently employed in academia, YES I sympathize greatly with the plight of how faculty are treated. Very much so in fact.
i'm not going to list my resume...but I've been an adjunct & worked on post-doc projects in weird arrangements, and taught college classes as a contract staff and as a TA being misused....
I think we are all on the same side here...but somehow somewhere an AC took a part of a comment of mine and ran with it
I'd really appreciate some discussion about TFA in relation to layman's terms...
We could start by discussing how Feynman himself said that a scientist doesn't "know" something unless they can explain it to an upper-level undergrad majoring in the field of the specific piece of challenging theory.
That's not exactly "layman" but I'd venture to say the general /. reader is either a college graduate or self-taught to that approximate level.
Thank you Dave Raggett
there is no faster than light communication between the two particules. They are entangled and form a *single* system. In other word it is not particle A any,opre or particle B anymore but a system composed of partcile A and B. When you interract with the particle you are interracting with the whole system. You are NOT interracting with particle A and then changing particle B. You are interracting with the system composed of both. There is no FTL communication ! What goes against our common sense (like a lot of stuff in QM) is that two particle so far away from each other actually compose a single system.
I think it is safe to assume that if someone describes quantum mechanics as "mysterious", most of their knowledge of quantum physics comes from youtube videos, not contemporary science.
In other words, it is most likely a reasoning analogical to this: "There is a mysterious connection between two separated bodies called gravitation. I wonder whether it's the same force that causes men to be attracted to women."
Just because you use the same words (e.g. "attraction" or "connection") it does not make it the same thing.
Or is all just mental masturbation paid for by grant money and dimwitted/gullible rich people ??
Any proof that 'quantum particles (whatever they are) have been manipulated -- first to read their state and then to 'move' them to check that they were 'entangled' ?? How about actually changing a quantum state of one of these so called 'particles' ???
All theory?? (no more reality than instead of 'strings' its really treenie tiny purring cats (who can do exactly the same things and satisfy anll the same requirements -- but maybe with more likelihood??)
Wormholes ? Yeaaaaah........ OK ....... More MM keeping various charlatans in sushi....
How many of the people who believe in this stuff call religion 'fantasy' ???
Quantum entangle a particle and a black hole so you can play spin the black hole.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
More fascinating than watching a monkey shit a grandfather clock
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Am I the only one that misread the summary?
If two entangled particles are connected with a wormhole, then it makes total sense that the state of one affects the state of the other, because if these two points in spacetime are connected via a wormhole, then communication between them is instant.
I thought the title was suggesting a new Zelda game before I reread it. "The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Wormholes"
Are we talking Star Trek wormhole, or Stargate wormhole, or Farscape wormhole...
The insight could help physicists reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity
What? QM is COMPLETELY in line with relativity. If you had FTL communication, it wouldn't, but that doesn't exist- quantum teleportation requires a classical channel to relay information (namely, which state Bob's particle collapsed into). I admit I haven't read the linked articles yet, but I doubt the authors made any such claim (and that was input by the submitter/editor)
Source: I am a PhD student in Quantum Computer Science.
Wormholes are not connections between black holes. That's just SciFi bullshit. Why does /. have an article from an author who doesn't know the difference?
I can't believe SLASHDOT hasn't covered this yet!! ( sorry that this is a little off topic, but it's backed by empirical evidence)
Magnetic portals are not wormholes but the do exist. They are difficult to detect. They extend from Earth to somewhere near the sun.
Space portals are created between the sun and its affect on the Earth's magnetic field. They at vortecis of magnetic tunnels composed of outer space (Vaccuum space) on the inside of them and chaotic outer space blasted with solar wind energy from the sun.
There are man made portals creating engines called VAZIMIR engines that create a magnetic tunnel thru which hot hot ignited Argon gas passes thru. The inventor of this engine, former astronaut Chang Diaz, claimed that this tech can get us to Mars in 39 days!