Wormholes were first conceived of by Albert Einstein and his fellow physicist Nathan Rosen in 1935, who argued that general relativity allowed for a ‘bridge’ between two black holes. At the same time, Einstein and Rosen, working with their colleague Boris Podolsky, questioned the quantum mechanics view of reality via a paradox that later researchers dubbed ‘entanglement’. These two ideas were brought together in 2013, when Leonard Susskind at Stanford and Juan Malcadena at Princeton argued that wormholes and entanglement are, in fact, the same thing. Three years later, Daniel Jafferis at Harvard and his graduate student Ping Gao proposed a way to traverse a wormhole. This idea was validated this year when a team of physicists led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology built a small-scale wormhole inside a quantum computer. Their experiment was a major breakthrough – the culmination of creative experimentation, emerging quantum computing technology and more than a century of speculation and research. And, as this short documentary from Quanta Magazine explores, in strengthening a link between black holes and quantum entanglement, it may have marked a massive step forward in the quest to bridge the worlds of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Video by Quanta Magazine
Director: Emily Buder
video
Evolution
How – and how not – to think about the role randomness plays in evolution
60 minutes
video
Physics
The rhythms of a star system inspire a pianist’s transfixing performance
5 minutes
video
Art
Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons
4 minutes
video
Biology
A spectacular, close-up look at the starfish with a ‘hands-on’ approach to parenting
5 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes