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
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Design and fashion
The mundane becomes mesmerising in this deep dive into segmented displays
14 minutes
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Physics
A song of ice, fire and jelly – exploring the physics and history of the trumpet
9 minutes
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Animals and humans
An artist and ants collaborate on an exhibit of ‘tiny Abstract Expressionist paintings’
5 minutes
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Mathematics
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
9 minutes
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Physics
A dreamy tribute to the music of Brian Eno, rendered in paint, soap and water
2 minutes
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Biology
To understand how an animal sees the world, start with the shape of its pupils
5 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why we should worry less about ‘sentient’ AIs and more about what we’re teaching them
16 minutes
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Physics
Why does the Sun occasionally flash green as it eclipses the horizon?
7 minutes
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The environment
Tree-sit with activists as they fight industrial logging from 100 feet above the ground
25 minutes