“Experientially, for me, I’ll tell you it’s very, very far away. People come up to me and ask me, ‘Can you put your dog in a wormhole?’ So, no,” Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. “…that’s a big jump.”
“There is a difference between something being possible in theory and being possible in reality,” said Joseph Lyken, a physicist at Fermilab, America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory, and co-author of the study. “So don’t hold your breath about sending your dog through a wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think it’s just exciting that we’ve been able to get our hands on this.”
The researchers observed wormhole dynamics on a quantum device called the Sycamore quantum processor at Alphabet’s Google.
A wormhole – a rupture in space and time – is thought to be a bridge between two distant regions in the universe. Scientists refer to them as Einstein-Rosen bridges, after two physicists – Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen.
Such wormholes are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term “wormhole” was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.
Spiropulu said the researchers found a quantum system that displayed key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to be implemented on existing quantum hardware.
“It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that’s all we can say at this point – that we have something that we see in terms of properties, It looks like a wormhole,” Laiken said.