Two separate research groups, one of which is from MIT, have presented evidence that wormholes — tunnels that may allow us to travel through time and space — are “powered” by quantum entanglement. Furthermore, one of the research groups also postulates the reverse — that quantum entangled particles are connected by miniature wormholes.
A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge to give its formal name, is a hypothetical feature of space-time that exists in four dimensions, and somehow connects to another wormhole that’s located elsewhere in both space and time. The theory, essentially, is that a wormhole is a tunnel that isn’t restricted by the normal limitations of 3D Cartesian space and the speed of light, allowing you to travel from one point in space and time, to another point in space and time — theoretically allowing you to traverse huge portions of the universe, and travel in time.
Wormholes, though, have never been observed — and while we’ve done a lot of theorizing about how a wormhole might work, and how they fit into general relativity, we’re still talking in purely theoretical terms. We don’t even know if wormholes would be traversable. Those caveats aside, though, a ton of new research suggests that each end of the wormhole is connected through space-time with quantum entanglement.
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| Teleporting quantum entangled particles, via lasers |
Both quantum entanglement and wormholes share a very important property: They appear to be linked through some kind of dimension or medium that we can’t yet discern. With quantum entanglement, two particles can be separated by an infinite amount of space, and yet they still seem to be able to communicate their quantum state instantly, much faster than the speed of light. Wormholes, if they exist, would bend the fabric of space-time to allow faster-than-light travel between two arbitrary points — just like entangled particles.
The researchers stipulate that wormholes are actually entangled black holes. This entanglement might be caused by two black holes being created simultaneously, or perhaps radiation emitted by one black hole could be captured by another black hole, creating some kind of entanglement. To be honest, because we’re dealing with an area of science that we know very little about, we can only guess at the process that would result in entangled black holes.
Furthermore, though, related research also postulates that it’s actually wormholes that link entangled particles together — it is thanks to wormholes in space and time that quantum entanglement can create “spooky action at a distance.” Two of the researchers, Kristan Jensen and Andreas Karch, suggest that entanglement and wormholes are actually one and the same — just entanglement works in the fourth dimension, while wormholes need a model of the universe that has five dimensions.
For now, we’ll just have to keep doing more research into quantum entanglement here on Earth — and ideally, we need to probe some black holes as well. It might be a long time until we actually have a chance of traversing an entangled black hole (wormhole) — the nearest black hole is 1,600 light-years away — but if we build extremely powerful telescopes, we might be able to observe “wormholing” from a distance.
This research was published in 2014, and this article is updated and holds more information than the previous.
Research papers: DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.211603
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