by Eleni Petrakou
It’s late 2022. Scientists announce the creation of a spacetime wormhole. A flurry of articles and press releases of the highest caliber spread the news. Involved researchers call the achievement as exciting as the Higgs boson discovery. Pulitzer-winning journalists report on the “unprecedented experiment”. US government advisory panels hear it is a poster child for doing “foundational physics using quantum information systems”. Media the world over are on fire.
All the while, the scientific community is watching, dumbfounded.
Because, of course, nobody had created any spacetime wormhole.
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Now that all the rage is well gone, it’s probably worthwhile to revisit that episode with the proverbial hindsight.
Specifically, the events of November ’22 kick off with an article in Nature detailing the creation of a “holographic wormhole” in Google’s quantum labs. On the same day, the prescheduled publicity by respected science outlets is crazy –the announcements by participating elite universities don’t hurt either– and sure enough the story quickly makes headlines all across muggle media.
To keep things in context: in case you are wondering if wormholes are something whose existence would shake a large part of what physics we know and, even if they exist, we might be technological centuries away from their handling, you are right. This is why all experts not connected to the study reacted with unbridled skepticism. Read more »