New Equation May Unite General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Once in their separate positions, Alice and Bob smash their particles together with such great force, they create two separate black holes.

The result, says Susskind, is two entangled black holes on opposite sides of the Universe, linked in the middle by a giant wormhole.

"If ER = EPR is right, a wormhole will link those black holes; entanglement, therefore, can be described using the geometry of wormholes," says Tom Siegfried over at Science News.

This is a load of nonsense. Using this logic there should always be a wormhole between entangled particles, not only when you create a black hole with them. There's clearly some link between entangled particles, but I wouldn't exactly call it a wormhole, it's a type of correlation between the particles which operates on a level outside of space-time. I highly doubt entanglement can easily be explained with geometric properties of relativity, it just seems like a rather naive and simplistic interpretation to me.

originally posted by: RedDragon
Does this mean, with a large enough supply of negative energy, you could 'teleport' matter to the spacial location of the other entangled particle anywhere in the universe?

Basically open up portals with one end at each entangled particle?

negative energy dilates time and when you eliminate time you have a portal. not particles colliding and forming 2 entangled black holes and a connecting portal.
till people like susskind embrace GR and work around it, you ain't gonna get any meaningfull portal in a million years.
that ER = EPR is a load of poppycock

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

I think this statement sums it up quite nicely:

What I have done in this lecture is trivial. I've taken some ordinary quantum phenomena and quantum protocols, and by invoking ER=EPR I've reinterpreted them in terms of the geometry of Einstein-Rosen bridges.

Not FTL, no time travel, no instantaneous communication etc...

He says interactions cause entanglement, entaglement happens by creation of (planckian) wormholes. The universe is a complicated network of entanglements and there is no observer.

My two cents:
There is the idea, that all particles may be varying forms of stabilized black holes, which would fit quite nicely into this interpretation. Entanglement/interaction happens by bridging the particles(black holes).

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

First this is theoretical physics. IF you can create quantum wormholes between two black holes through this thought experiment what does that do to space? Well, ends up you can equate two disparate aspects of theoretical physics.

Second, this has not been proven. But IF it is proven there is going to be some rearranging in concepts to do.



a reply to: moebius

Whycome no FTL? If you can explain gravity as emergent from quantum interactions with the fabric of space-time then it is only a matter of time and thought power before some cleaver little monkey figures out a method to keep that interaction from happening using, I don't know, van Der Waals heterostructures perhaps. There is the nullification of gravity right there and a side step of GR which means to an observer watching the ship pull away, FTL. That would be an implication of this neat mathematical construct.

The entanglement aspect of this work is to construct both a quantum world construct and a macro (GR) construct and build a bridge between the two. There is no further need for any entanglements unless you are constructing a quantum computer and need q-bits and quantum gates. The interaction with all matter, both with itself and the fabric of space-time creates gravity which gives structure to the observable universe; that is one of the implications of this equation.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
[ETA: Leonard Susskind Bio Link and has some other published work. I didn't know he was friends with Feynman! Way cool now in my eyes!!]

I'm not really impressed with Susskind or string theory, which hasn't had any experimental verification that I know of.

Is ER=EPR subject to any kind of falsifiable experimental verification or testing?

I think Peter Woit shares my disappointment with string theory in his "not even wrong" blog and he doesn't seem too impressed with ER=EPR either and thinks his time is spent better elsewhere:

Not Even Wrong

I’ve always been dubious that very general speculation about gravity/space/time/black holes, etc., is going to go anywhere. I tried to give the example of Krasnov’s work as the kind of thing that seems more promising. The big problem of quantum gravity to me seems to be the relation of space-time degrees of freedom and the internal degrees of freedom of the standard model. The best argument for string theory vs. LQG was always that string theory would explain this relation.

These days, prominent string theorists seem to have just given up on the problem, and adopted a version of Smolin’s call for “seers”, but on steroids. The world has always been full of people with ideas about how they are going to revolutionize physics,
ideas which are far too vague and speculative to ever go anywhere. What’s weird is that some of the most prominent figures in the theoretical physics community are now headed down this route (one example of recent years is Verlinde and “entropic” gravity). I’m loathe to specifically criticize “firewalls” or “entangled particles = wormholes” too much since I don’t know exactly what these people are doing (I’ve spent enough time looking at it though to decide that my time was better spent on other things).

One thing that is clear though is that, unless it actually achieves something, putting this on the cover of Scientific American, or otherwise giving it a lot of publicity, is not a great idea. More hype is not what this subject needs.

When this idea actually accomplishes something, get back to me. String theory has had 4 decades to do so and it's still more or less as described in my signature. I can't say I expect anything worthwhile to come from ER=EPR either.

As Woit says it's almost getting trendy to propose ideas which nobody can prove wrong, but it's really questionable if the ideas have any real value or not. Feynman did that years ago with his explanation of moogles, which he said was a great idea because nobody could prove it wrong, but he was being sarcastic. The implication he was trying to make is that unless you can verify your ideas in experiment they have little value. So, where is the verification of ER=EPR in experiment?

As far as I can tell there isn't any so to me the idea doesn't seem to have value.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I dunno.



From his bio link

His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology.

So, knock out string theory and there is all the quantum that remains: field theory, statistical mechanics and cosmology are all vast fields. He probably also knows QED from a unique perspective! The idea EP=EPR does not need string theory, so I concede the point.

As for testing EP = EPR that will be done as part of peer review. Quantum events and interactions are verifiable. One aspect of this is very provable: gravity. IF the idea holds, you should be able to demonstrate an effect on gravity. One method involves quantum locking particles and preventing (delaying) the interaction of the other particles with-out some defined space. From the outside it would float or crash through the floor!

How to do that demonstration is the question. How do you prevent quantum fluctuations from interacting with space-time? Perhaps it was already demonstrated by Ning Li by rotating Bose-Einstein condensate? Maybe that is why that line of research came to an end (it would explain the deafening silence from her "company"). But that is just an idea (with a little conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure).

I am not a big fan of string theory either. The quanta on the other hand is very interesting. And I like the idea behind this announcement because it would kill string theory. Then there would be a reworking of certain aspects of physics. Heck, may even discover something like a short cut from doing things the hard way we do things now.

ESA's Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years.

With the multitude of stars and galaxies that populate the present Universe, it's hard to imagine how different our 13.8 billion year cosmos was when it was only a few seconds old. At that early phase, it was a hot, dense primordial soup of particles, mostly electrons, protons, neutrinos, and photons – the particles of light.

In such a dense environment the Universe appeared like an 'opaque' fog, as light particles could not travel any significant distance before colliding with electrons.

As the cosmos expanded, the Universe grew cooler and more rarefied and, after about 380 000 years, finally became 'transparent'. By then, particle collisions were extremely sporadic and photons could travel freely across the cosmos.

Phys.org, Aug. 31, 2016 - First stars formed even later than previously thought.

So rewinding universe gets us to the hippy-dippy "all was one with everything else" point. The early stars lit up, reionising atoms (heating them up, breaking some apart), then cooled down. At that point the matter we all know and love was able to come forth (it starts: HERE). Stars went nova and super nova, heavier particles were cast into space. Dust clouds condensed. New galaxies formed. Fast forward and it is still going on into an ever expanding bubble of space-time.

Maybe the reionization point is when anti-matter and matter worked out their differences (we have more matter than anti-matter). Light has a chirality to it that comes from this interaction. All of our known constants in physics now must obey this new matter point. It would only stand to reason that quantum fluctuations also started in the cooled down universe from this point. (i.e., HERE)

I wonder what EP=EPR means at this point as well. Is this where it started? Or is this just 'confirmation bias' on an idea that makes me smile?

Just a TEOT pondering his place in this big, vast void...

Maldacena stunned the physics world again in 2013 with a cryptic message first delivered in an email to fellow physics giant Leonard Susskind: “ER = EPR.” It meant that wormholes, hypothetical connections between far-apart black holes also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges (ER), are mathematically equivalent to entangled particles, sometimes called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs (EPR). Like AdS/CFT, ER = EPR suggests a deep link between the geometry of space-time and quantum connections between particles, and it provides theorists with another clue in their quest for a theory of quantum gravity.

QuantumMagazine.org - Juan Maldacena, Pondering Quantum Gravity by the Pond.

This is an article about the guy who came up with the idea. Even these guys only got this part right! Wormholes are not "hypothetical connections between far-apart black holes" as stated in the quote. But if the "far-apart black holes" are connected by wormholes then you get "an in" between the two disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics.

Quantum Magazine is part review of ideas, part "explain the hard stuff," and a look at the scientists doing the work. The article is about the guy that came up with idea stated in the equation. I like it and thought I would share every chance I get!

I'm slowly starting to get my mind around this but questions still arise. I also keep coming up against this topic: cohomology rings. Algebraic topology. Which has some new tools to move from discrete objects (math) to infinities (continuous algebraic functions) which make more sense to me (discrete maths, computer science) than head-first into the Susskind-level thinking.

Thanks to all who replied!

The equation can't work. According to quantum mechanics, the correlation between entangled quantum states is instantaneous. Communication between the mouths of a wormhole can never be instantanous, as this would imply the signal travelling through it at an infinite speed to correlate states once a measurement was made on one particle. Admittedly, Lorentz invariance would not hold inside the wormhole, so it does not matter that the field quanta carrying the entanglement-creating information would have to be tachionic. But quantum field theory breaks for tachyons in general and so the idea does not work mathematically. Whilst it is true that two entangled particles could be collided to create two black holes at the ends of a wormhole, it does not follow that entanglement is the result of such wormholes being created in space-time whenever two particles become quantum entangled.

Susskind's idea does not explain entanglement in classical terms because it fails to explain how subatomic particles (which are clearly NOT black holes) can behave as though they are the black hole mouths of wormholes, when they become entangled. As far as quantum mechanics is concerned, composite objects can be entangled, too, and this renders absurd the notion that their entanglement could be due to a wormhole connecting them. Does Susskind really want us to believe that each quark constituent of a proton and each antiquark in an antiproton that has become entangled with it are connected by their own wormholes, for all their constituents become entangled?! His ideas soon become too far-fetched to sound feasible. He should stick to general relativity and leave the mysteries of particle physics to others. The as yet undiscovered bridge that will connect the two subjects is NOT the one that was built by Einstein and Rosen.