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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."
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 has little to do with dark matter or dark energy -- the matter content is irrelevant, since relativity only really dictates the geometry; basically you have an equation G=T, where G is the geometry and T the matter; what that matter *is* is something for someone else to worry about. It has absolutely damn all to do with the Higgs. The Higgs field is a part of the standard model of particle physics that gives fundamental particles their mass. It has absolutely nothing to do with relativity at all; if it did, we would already have a quantum field theory that was general relativistic in nature, and we'd all be laughing. Or crying, since many of us would now be out of a job.
Quantum electrodynamics throws out infinities as a matter of course. This worried a lot of people, and then "renormalisation" was invented. It basically says "if you see a number multiplying an infinity, just write it as another number". The best example is the electron mass. What we see is actually m_electron * infinity. So we "renormalise it", and say that m_electron is actually m_bare electron * infinity.
It was either Feynman or Schwinger - probably both - who expressed serious doubts about the mathematical validity of renormalisation. Thing is, as they also acknowledged, it works. QED is the most accurate theory we currently possess, so despite the air of bullshit that surrounds renormalisation something's obviously working fine.
The issue comes when you have theories that are non-renormalisable, so you can't ditch the infinities this way. Quantising general relativity typically leads to a non-renormalisable theory. That's where all our problems have been for the last sixty years...
At a certain point quantum physics causes a spooky action in the space between my ears leading to a "Duh, what the heck/" experience.
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"?
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.
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.
I feel sorry for the fields of CS and IT Engineering then. I don't know anyone who go their PhD without doing new research, with about the worst you could say being it was menial or lacks general implications. I also know a large number of coworkers who put considerable effort in outreach, both related and unrelated to their particular research. This ranges from building demos so people can see and play with things first hand to teaching free seminars and courses on things.
I'm not even sure how it makes sense that keep people dumbfounded by quantum mechanics would help academics. It is much harder to sell something or get people to appreciate your work if they don't understand it. I've seen firsthand how people are more supportive of work they understand better, and are more willing to support funding for such work. And understanding the basic principles of quantum mechanics, or even everything covered in the undergrad and graduate level intro courses on the material, is a long way from the experience needed to compete in research in related fields. So helping people understand that is in no way a threat to their jobs. It is more of a threat to pseudoscience/new age scams that re-purpose words from quantum mechanics if anything.
I do agree that it is a failing of researchers to not come up with better analogies. But that doesn't mean all analogies and their holes are equal. Unfortunately, some common analogies don't make it clear what is actually the hole, and instead teach the hole as much as, if not more, than the actual principle trying to be conveyed. The result is only confusion when people are told they are wrong, even though their logic may be sound, but because they're premises were wrong to begin with due to faulty analogies.
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.
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
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
This was an answer to the envelope example, and my intent was mostly to not have this stand unrefuted at a certain filter level.
I am well aware that non-local hidden variables are not ruled out, nor do I find this idea particularly unattractive. But if they were in play QM would still be plenty strange.
Relativity at the very fundamental limits is absolutely broken simply because it is missing huge amounts of information. (namely dark matter and energy ...
Dark matter/energy are the consequence of assuming time/space being homogenous/isotropic - given that we haven't got out from the near neighborhood of the Sun (thus we haven't tested these assumption at larger scales), isn't it possible that these assumption don't hold true?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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
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
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?
Gravity is mysterious. We have never directly observed it, only indirectly by its influence on everything around it.
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.
Note that infinities and singularities can be a feature of the mathematical description rather than reality. For example, any mapping of a sphere to a plane will have at least one singularity (the usual latitude and longitude has singularities at the 180th meridian, including North and South Poles), but the ground or water or ice or whatever there doesn't have any special properties).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes