Science Fiction or Fact: Is Science Really Bringing Us Closer to Wormholes?

 Krishant Putrevu

Han Solo pulls back a lever and the stars around the Millenium Falcon bend and curve as the ship leaps to the other side of the galaxy in a matter of seconds. The Doctor flips a few switches and the TARDIS flies through a multicolored vortex pushing past the boundaries of time and space like a car speeding down a highway. Audiences watched in awe as the 20^th century brought people’s wildest dreams to the pages of books and the screens of televisions and theaters. Science fiction has been an ingrained part of cultural representation, embodying the parts of science that people dream of achieving. And with the United States placing people on the moon in 1969, people began to look further than the stars. Wormholes began cementing themselves into the public consciousness as a staple of science fiction.

            In December of 2022 however, people woke up to almost every popular science publication from Quanta to The New York Times all mentioning the same thing- a group of researchers based in the California Institute of Technology had apparently made breakthrough research in wormhole and they’ve taken steps in actually creating one themselves on a quantum computer. The research in question, headed by physicist Maria Spiropulu and conducted using Google’s “Sycamore” quantum processor actually relied on extremely complex ideas and was not necessarily as cut and dry as publications made it out to be.

            And despite any of the eye-catching titles and rather than any prospect of our wildest science fiction dreams coming true, the paper highlights experimental data found using a simulated wormhole. Nothing even close to the real thing. So, what happened? And could this be a possible indicator of the path science as we know it is going down?

            Given the massively technical information of the paper and the fact that it’s reasonable to assume most of the general public isn’t well-versed in both quantum physics and most likely haven’t taken a physics class since either high-school or university. It’s safe to say even a bit of much-needed context can go a long way and is essential to understanding the implications of how the experiment was presented when compared to actuality.

            Now, wormholes as a theory were first proposed through the works of famed physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in the mid-20^th century. Their original theory (abbreviated as the ER model or an Einstein-Rosen bridge) simply connected two separate points in space-time using a black-hole region in which particles would enter and connecting to what’s known as a white-hole region where particles would be expelled. But these wormholes were not connected to quantum mechanics until the ER = EPR wormhole model in 2013, which aimed to finally bring together the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics into a single theory of everything. Now this newer model theorized that the two ends of a wormhole were related in the same way two quantum entangled particles are (with entanglement being the connection between two quantum particles, where one cannot change without the other). The ER=EPR model of a wormhole was simulated with the concept of “holographic duality” which directly connected a pair of entangled particles to a pair of points in space-time.

            But something was missing from the model: it had no way of applying the concepts of quantum gravity unique to quantum mechanic’s model of the universe. However, this issue was finally resolved with a third model- the SYK model. Made up of a complicated network of interconnected building-block particles. This new version of the wormhole designed a model that entangled two of these SYK models to form a wormhole that followed all of the things that came before it, but this time also acknowledged the quantum gravity needed to realistically simulate it.                                 

 

 

Pictured [Above]: A diagram depicting holographic duality, or the proposed relationship between two entangled particles and the two regions of a wormhole (the ER=EPR model).

Pictured [Below]: A diagram of a single SYK network. Each point represents a fundamental particle that can be grouped together with others in different ways.

            Now, the publicized experiment took two SYK models that simulated a quantum processor and used it to gather data on the possible teleportation of particles through the resulting wormhole. However, the group’s model was far different than the theoretical SYK’s. Forced to consider the hardware limitations of the “Sycamore” processor, they instead simplified the SYK model. They explained that this simplification didn’t make any drastic changes to the nature of their SYK model and its quantum gravitational properties. But they acknowledged that other properties were changed nonetheless. Spiropulu and her team ultimately gathered and presented experimental data that they claimed simulated particles teleporting through their wormhole design.

 

Pictured: The node count of a realistic SYK model (Left) compared to the simplified variation used by Maria Spiropulu and her team (Right).

            So, what happened? Why was this blown out of proportion in the first place if the actual experiment was an extremely technical and theoretical framework that expanded attempts at realistic simulation?

            The biggest thing to note is that within the media, Spiropulu and her team’s work was touted as revolutionary. Almost every article ended up overgeneralizing the nature of their work, simply explaining that it either simulated a wormhole perfectly or in extreme cases actually created a testable one, which I suspect was used as a reliant way to generate attention-grabbing media quickly. A member of the general public would have little to no knowledge on the topic and therefore would have to take the media’s overgeneralizations at face value leading to misinterpretation, essentially boiling the experiment and its data down to perfectly empirical information.

            This ultimately is troubling to consider, especially when one realizes that the more recent quantum mechanics that the research uses as just as theoretical in their bases, with minimal concrete or tested evidence to back up these knowledge claims. After all, if Google’s quantum processor could only run a simplified version of a theoretical wormhole simulation, how would anyone be able to test more abstract concepts? This ultimately leads into the issue facing modern science as well. People look to the past when it comes to scientific achievement. They look for things akin to the Scientific Revolution or the impact made by Einstein’s theories of relativity. But, most modern science, particularly modern physics, which has recently been shown to rely on theoretical bases due to their abstractness, is much different. It’s becoming less and less frequent to see game-changing scientific breakthroughs and often with publications’ tendencies to generalize complex topics, it’s easy to mislabel these discoveries as game-changing. This isn’t to bash any of the work put in by the researchers to create this holographic model, but simply to draw attention to the way publications and the media can influence its perceptions.

             

 Pictured Above: A graph modeling the downward trend of what is known as “disruptive science”, or science that drastically changes its field’s current environment.

            In the end, it’s not right to deny the strides this experiment, and its data have made. After all, even with the media’s exaggerated generalizations stripped away, it’s still a simulation of a relatively new way of thinking about wormholes that is as realistic as current hardware constraints allow. But publications and media are the first and foremost catalysts in affects perceptions of scientific discoveries and their need for an eye-catching title or attention-grabbing headline can often outweigh taking the time to properly describe scientific developments and their effects. Especially when it comes to something as complicated as melding quantum physics with wormholes. I really think that Spiropulu and her team made steps towards scientific developments and given the modern lack of disruptive science, these steps are, in my opinion, our best bet at making science fiction a reality.

           

 

Sources

Clavin, W. “Physicists Observe Wormhole Dynamics using a Quantum Computer.” The Caltech Weekly, California Institute of Technology, 2022, https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/physicists-observe-wormhole-dynamics-using-a-quantum-computer

Jafferis, D., Zlokapa, A., Lykken, J.D. et al. “Traversable Wormhole Dynamics on a Quantum Processor.” Nature, vol. 612, pg. 51–55, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3.

Woit, Peter. “This Week's Hype.” Not Even Wrong, Columbia University, Nov. 2022, https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181.  

Wood, Charlie. “Wormhole Experiment Called into Question.” Quanta Magazine, 23 Mar. 2023, https://www.quantamagazine.org/wormhole-experiment-called-into-question-20230323/#:~:text=Last%20fall%2C%20a%20team%20of,wormhole%20in%20a%20quantum%20computer.