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Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox 157

An anonymous reader writes: Like initials carved in a tree, ER = EPR, as the new idea is known, is a shorthand that joins two ideas proposed by Einstein in 1935. One involved the paradox implied by what he called "spooky action at a distance" between quantum particles (the EPR paradox, named for its authors, Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen). The other showed how two black holes could be connected through far reaches of space through "wormholes" (ER, for Einstein-Rosen bridges). At the time that Einstein put forth these ideas — and for most of the eight decades since — they were thought to be entirely unrelated.

But if ER = EPR is correct, the ideas aren't disconnected — they're two manifestations of the same thing. And this underlying connectedness would form the foundation of all space-time. Quantum entanglement — the action at a distance that so troubled Einstein — could be creating the "spatial connectivity" that "sews space together," according to Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University and one of the idea's main architects. Without these connections, all of space would "atomize," according to Juan Maldacena, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who developed the idea together with Susskind. "In other words, the solid and reliable structure of space-time is due to the ghostly features of entanglement," he said. What's more, ER = EPR has the potential to address how gravity fits together with quantum mechanics.
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Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox

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  • Please to beggings for a version around which I can wrap my tiny brain? Something related to automobiles perhaps?
    • Re:me dumb (Score:5, Interesting)

      by I4ko ( 695382 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:03PM (#49546573)
      The exhaust pile runs along the entire car, from the engine to the tail, and all other parts of the car stay together because they hold on to it.
    • Or maybe a sports analogy please?
      • Re:me dumb (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dunng808 ( 448849 ) <garydunnhi@ g m a i l . com> on Friday April 24, 2015 @02:36PM (#49547059) Journal

        The quarterback and receiver are together when the play begins. As the play develops they remain entangled, even over an increasing distance, up until the moment the ball is caught. Some quarterbacks are better at entanglement than others. As for wormholes, fans manifest their existence every time they shout their disapproval at the officials -- as if they were standing next to them.

    • So... basically.... the car has struts and shocks, which keeps it so that the main body doesn't come crashing into the ground and making sure your ride is comfortable.

    • Re:me dumb (Score:5, Funny)

      by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:07PM (#49546601) Homepage

      Really big things nobody really understands are surprisingly similar to really little things nobody understand -- with both groups exhibiting some really confusing long-distance connections we don't really understand.

      Beyond that .. I confess I don't have a clue, and you're on your own for a car analogy.

    • Re:me dumb (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:15PM (#49546633)

      Best analogy is Einstein's explaination of how radio works:

      "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

      • That explains the first paragraph, not the second .. which I must confess sounds like gobbledigook, and more or less says "the radio only exists because the cat (which we established isn't there) makes it possible, but don't ask us how".

        Then it's just a big WTF ... but, that's true of everything everyone ever says about Quantum anything.

        I distrust anything which even most physicists can't actually say they understand.

        Like pudding. Nobody has yet explained pudding to me. Quantum stuff is the pudding of th

      • Einstein's explaination

        That's one of them urban myths. The earliest record of the joke is from 1866, albeit with a dog instead of a cat, cats having been invented by Jesus in 1892.

      • by fisted ( 2295862 )
        But does the tail meow when you pull the head?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Please to beggings for a version around which I can wrap my tiny brain? Something related to automobiles perhaps?

      They're just saying that quantum entanglement and wormholes are basically the same thing. Kind of like when you see a car on the street and say "Wow, spiffy Chevy Tahoe you have there" when it's actually a GMC Yukon. The only thing different is the labeling.

    • Re:me dumb (Score:5, Funny)

      by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:20PM (#49546659) Homepage
      There are two strange issues in car-physics.

      1) The ER effect, is when you go with your dad to buy a cool convertible, but somehow comeback from the dealership with an beat up AMC Gremlin

      2) The EPR effect is when two cars that were once touching, continue to effect each other at a distance, the primary example of which is how when you are behind a slow car, when you move over to the fast lane, suddenly the slow car speeds up, leaving you in the distance.

      They have discovered that both of these effects are actually the same thing - it is fact the Gremlin that causes the previous fast lane to slow down.

      • They have discovered that both of these effects are actually the same thing - it is fact the Gremlin that causes the previous fast lane to slow down.

        The GURPS_NPC Law: Sooner or later every difficult problem in physics is attributed to Gremlins.

    • by arth1 ( 260657 )

      Here's the cliff notes version:
      EPR = ER is true if Podolsky equals 1.

    • by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:56PM (#49546833)

      Imagine a chicken's butt. picture it. Okay hang onto that thought because we'll come back to that later.
      There's a house made of rubber with a lot of rooms. While all the guests including the butler are gathered in the living room, the guests hear the sound of the master of the house being murdered in his bedroom which is at the end of a distant series of hallways. They also notice that at that moment the butler is missing, but a moment later he's back. It's too far from the dining room to the bedroom for the Butler to have walked there and walks back, so he's not a suspect. But we have two mysteries
      1) how did the butler vanish and re-appear. Very suscipicious. could he teleport?
      2) how did they hear the scream of the master in his distant bedroom.

      The second fact seems to clear the butler since no one wants to believe in teleportation.

      Then they discover the house is U-shaped and there's a secret passage directly connecting the bedroom to the living room. The spooky actions and effects at a distance are explained by a wormhole. Also it's the secret passage way that holds the rubber house in a U-shape.

      Now remember that chicken butt? I thought so. See if you can get it out of your mind.

    • Re:me dumb (Score:5, Informative)

      by lgw ( 121541 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:57PM (#49546839) Journal

      I can't explain the mathematics Leonardo is using (best nickname ever), but I can explain the basic idea.

      Wormholes can connect two arbitrary points in spacetime - this allows FTL travel, but that means time travel, with raises all sorts of paradoxes. The current understanding of this style (ER bridge) of wormhole is that they're inherently unstable - the math allows them to form, but they'd collapse as soon as anything interacted with them.

      Quantum entanglement says that two entangled particles have this oddball relationship that one somehow knows that the other has bean "measured" (any real interaction between two particles is a "measurement" in QM, it's not some special thing), in a way that's seemingly faster than light, but can't be used to send information.

      These two ideas dovetail nicely - if quantum entanglement means the two particles are connected by a wormhole, which collapses the moment either is "measured" (i.e., any time they interact with anything new), then you have a way for that communication to happen FTL, an then the two particles are disconnected and no longer have any special relationship. You don't get time travel paradoxes, because it's the nature of entanglement that you can't use it to send data FTL even though the effect is FTL.

      It sounds neat, but that almost counts against you in QM. The key is whether the math works. Exciting if true, however.

      • by Rob Riggs ( 6418 )

        1. What new behavior does this theory predict?

        2. How can this theory be falsified?

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          It's early days for this idea. This is theoretical physics, so it's usual for it to take a while for someone to come up with a proper experiment. Compelling, convincing experiments that have demonstrated the Bell inequalities (the EPR paradox) really started in 1998, decades after the theory was broadly accepted.

          This paper was more about black holes than quantum entanglement, and that stuff is harder still to test. It's the implications for QM that are really the exciting bit. It may well be that this i

      • Wormholes can connect two arbitrary points in spacetime - this allows FTL travel,

        but that means time travel, with raises all sorts of paradoxes.

        Instantaneous state transfers which don't operate by means of propagation or the taking of shortcuts traveling less than FTL locally thru said mystical shortcut raise no paradox of any kind in any frame of reference. There is no grandfather paradox or inversion of cause and effect.

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          OK, I tried to read your first sentence 3 times, and I still can't parse it, so I'm not sure what you're saying. Naturally, slower-than-light state transfer doesn't introduce paradox. FTL state transfer does allow inversion of cause and effect - the clear examples of this involve two pairs of wormholes, moving quickly relative to one another, which allows you go send a signal out through one pair and back through the other, and get the signal before you sent it.

          • OK, I tried to read your first sentence 3 times, and I still can't parse it, so I'm not sure what you're saying. Naturally, slower-than-light state transfer doesn't introduce paradox. FTL state transfer does allow inversion of cause and effect - the clear examples of this involve two pairs of wormholes, moving quickly relative to one another, which allows you go send a signal out through one pair and back through the other, and get the signal before you sent it.

            The only thing that matters is propagation. Lets say I can only go 10 spaces in 10 ticks.

            - - - - - - - - - -
            1.................10

            Now lets try covering the same external distance through a wormhole:

            - - -
            1.................3

            Well I went 3 spaces in 3 ticks... but the rest of the universe thinks I went 10 spaces...silly fools.

            You just think FTL propagation because your losing track of the configuration of space through which the propagation is being done. Your assuming the result matters when what

            • by lgw ( 121541 )

              Well, there are several "kinds" of wormholes. In one, the distance really is 3 ticks, in every way that matters, and the fact that there's also a 10-tick path (which used to be the shortest path before the wormhole) means nothing, as there are an infinity of circuitous paths. But that's not this kind of wormhole.

              Me
              A1----------A2
              B1>>>>>>>>>>B2

              To see the problem, imagine 2 wormholes, A and B, each with widely separated endpoints. In my reference frame, the endpoints A1 and A2

              • To see the problem, imagine 2 wormholes, A and B, each with widely separated endpoints. In my reference frame, the endpoints A1 and A2 are stationary - I'm standing by A1 and can send a message instantly to A2. The endpoints B1 and B2 are stationary relative to one another, but are moving close to c relative to A. In B's reference frame, my message goes back in time.

                Sounds like adding vectors while neglecting Lorentz. When you travel thru such a wormhole you gain only incidental mass and potential energy as observed by an external frame stationary to wormhole, you don't see the universe contracting to a point, your observers don't see your mass increasing or your clock slowing. No observer ever gets to see your mass/energy dwarfing the rest of the universes and there isn't any backwards time travel. You can't add or subtract the apparent external velocity of message

                • If I were to magically snap my fingers and magically materialize between "earth" and "earth2" 100 light years away without having propagated thru space ... at no point will any observer in any frame be able to detect an inversion of cause and effect.

                  Only if it took 100 years for you to make the trip. Otherwise you will be moving backward in time for some possible observers.

                  • Only if it took 100 years for you to make the trip. Otherwise you will be moving backward in time for some possible observers.

                    Superluminal propagation of the light cone is needed to invert cause and effect and that did not occur in my scenario.

                    The information I took with me simply took a more efficient path. The consequences of that never propagated superluminally.

                    • The consequences of that never propagated superluminally.

                      So you went 100 light years in less than 100 years. That's basically the definition of superluminal. It doesn't matter how it's done.

                      Superluminal propagation of the light cone is needed to invert cause and effect...

                      I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. "Magic" or not, you'd be travelling outside of your future light cone, and that's exactly the problem - to you and people on Earth it would appear instantaneous, but for some observers you would be traveling backward in time.

                      On other words, "instant" travel is nonsense because spatially separated things can't happen "at the same t

                    • I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. "Magic" or not, you'd be travelling outside of your future light cone

                      There is no traveling. One moment here the next 100 light years away without propagation through 100 light years worth of space to get there.

                      and that's exactly the problem - to you and people on Earth it would appear instantaneous, but for some observers you would be traveling backward in time.

                      You use the word "traveling" which is not occurring. Superluminal "traveling" = backwards time travel. If you don't propagate information superluminally there is no backwards travel.

                      On other words, "instant" travel is nonsense because spatially separated things can't happen "at the same time" for all observers. Relativity of simultaneity and all that.

                      Yes instant travel is nonsense. Instantly appearing out of thin air without traveling through intervening space is what I'm talking about.

                      The distinction is important because when trave

                    • There is no traveling.

                      If you were to travel through 100 light years of space in 4 minutes ... nobody sees a time reversal in any frame of reference.

                      You're at two events events (leaving one place and appearing at another) separated by what in relativity is called a space-like interval - and by definition there are observers that 'see' them happen at the same time, others that 'see' one happen first, and others that 'see' the other happen first. This isn't a problem because (as far as we can tell) those events can't affect each other.

                      My best guess as to what you're trying to say is that because you don't end up in your own past light-cone (i.e. the eve

                    • You're at two events events (leaving one place and appearing at another) separated by what in relativity is called a space-like interval - and by definition there are observers that 'see' them happen at the same time, others that 'see' one happen first, and others that 'see' the other happen first.

                      Events can appear at same time or not regardless of whether they occurred at the same time or not however there is never an observable ordering disagreement.

                      My best guess as to what you're trying to say is that because you don't end up in your own past light-cone (i.e. the events don't have an inverted time-like separation) there are no paradoxes, no violations of causality, etc. Which is true if this kind of trav ... er ... 'changing position' is one-off, or fairly strictly limited in certain ways.

                      If I appear back on "earth" from "earth2" and announce discovery of a supernova 100 years before that information reaches earth such information at no point traveled superluminally. It went with me thru my shortcut slower than light. Any observer astute enough to know this would not see a problem. Those who see problems are naively drawing out a diagr

                    • Events can appear at same time or not regardless of whether they occurred at the same time or not however there is never an observable ordering disagreement.

                      This is true only for things that are separated by time-like (and, being the edge case, light-like) intervals. For events that are separated by space-like intervals they might be simultaneous in my frame of reference but not in yours - i.e. simultaneity is relative.

                      It went with me thru my shortcut slower than light.

                      You mean didn't exceed the local speed of light, which is fine. But that doesn't change the fact that in some other reference frame you arrived 50 years before you left. And if there was a return wormhole at rest in that frame of reference you co

                    • Events can appear at same time or not regardless of whether they occurred at the same time or not

                      "At the same time"? Are you postulating some sort of absolute time? If so, you're throwing out Special Relativity, the basis of a lot of modern physics.

                      If one of the spacecraft were to go through a wormhole their inertial history would not be changed as a result and neither would their clock or energy not in their frame or relative to their twins frame or anyone else's as a consequence of traveling through t

                • by lgw ( 121541 )

                  It seems like you're missing a key concept here: "simultaneous" depends on reference frame. If two events separated in space, A and B, happen at the same time in my reference frame, there's a reference frame in which A happens before B, and a reference frame in which B happens before A. There's no one true order of events. [wikipedia.org]

                  This causes no paradoxes in relativity, precisely because you can't send information, or cause an action, faster than the speed of light. The propagation delay between A and B ensures c

      • but that means time travel,

        NO IT DOESN'T. I REALLY wish people would stop saying these things.

        Using traditional methods of propulsion to accelerate in normal space-time causes time dilation.

        The formula entirely falls apart when you hit the speed of light which according to the formulas in question require infinite energy.

        FULL STOP.

        Leaving one location and arriving at another faster than light traveling through normal space does not require that you do exactly as specified above.

        If you can avoid the acceleration portion, its a whole

        • by lgw ( 121541 )

          If you can avoid traveling in normal space-time, then you've just potentially solved the problem entirely.

          That doesn't help in the least. It doesn't matter how you travel: two events, separated in space, that happen "at the same time" in my frame of reference don't do so in another. If I depart A and arrive at B "instantly" in some reference frame, then I have travelled backwards in time from another. There's no getting around that: we live in a relativistic universe.

    • by shoor ( 33382 )

      EPR is 'spooky action at a distance'. Two things are somehow connected in that if you do something to one, the other is affected, and the effect gets there faster than light (FTL). You can't communicate FTL though, because you can't set up something in advance with another party where you're going to affect one particle in a way that the other party, watching the other particle will know you did it to send a message.

      ER is wormholes, a way to send stuff around faster than light (FTL again) except there are

    • The problem is that people keep insisting that action at a distance is spooky because it doesn't match their model of how things behave, forgetting about the fact that the scale of our perception is different from parsecs or nanometers.

      What's wrong with particle A being entangled to particle B without nothing ever being between them? What's wrong with the same entanglement working with a positive or negative time delay, so the result is visible before the choice itself (which doesn't BTW imply the lack of f

  • by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:20PM (#49546665) Homepage

    ...in fiction, basic discoveries of this magnitude promptly lead to anti-gravity, flying cars, space travel, and replicators.

    In real life, some PhDs are pleased with themselves and now understand why we exist and aren't a cloud of random particles - but I *still* don't get a damn jet pack.

    Oh, well: the announced today that they have asthma figured out at last and can probably cure it soon. I don't have asthma, but I'm glad we also got a practical discovery.

    • Yes some people like to exercise their imaginations outside of textbooks that will almost certainly be rewritten by this time next century, depressing stuff indeed. I've even heard that some of the cretins even enjoy such flights of fancy!

      The horror.

  • Finally proof of the existance of the Ether. Now onto the subether. R.I.P E.E. Smith. ;)
  • P=1 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:31PM (#49546705)

    There, solved it for you. Where's my grant money?

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:33PM (#49546721)

    If quantum entanglement is a manifestation of 'communications' through a wormhole, then can we create an entangled particle pair, drag one far, far away and start poking it (with some signal). Then, we should be able to observe it's paired partner and extract that signal.

    Even if this doesn't give us faster-than-light communications, it has uses. Imagine a submarine with one of a pair of particles in a transmitter. Wiggle (bounce, or whatever) that particle and watch its partner on land. You now have a comm link (possibly at a high speed) from or to an environment that isn't affected by the r.f. propagation problem. Also, untappable optical (or whatever) links. Because there is no physical medium between the endpoints for the NSA to tap.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by itzly ( 3699663 )

      Quantum entanglement cannot be used to send information.

    • Yes, the idea you described is being used in Quantum key distribution as part of Quantum cryptography. It can never lead to FTL communication (because you are moving something (information, particle, etc) at the speed of light), but does make the key unbreakable.
    • Unfortunately observing these type of quantum interactions has a tendency to break links thanks to Heisenberg Uncertainty principle I believe. So you get one bit of info.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 )

      Can we use this for FTL communication? Short answer: no.

      Longer answer: you can only observe the state of a pair of entangled particles, you can't control the state. So, you can't "wiggle" one particle to force the other entangled particle into a complementary state at will.

      • by smaddox ( 928261 )

        Quite true about not being able to control the state. However, quantum mechanics requires either nonlocal effects or no hidden variables (no well defined state). The latter is consistent with the Copenhagen interpretation, in which Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead until you observe it. In the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, all particles have a well defined but unknown state and "entanglement" is actually an inherently nonlocal effect that occurs when a "measurement" is mad

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          There are many variations of this. One I *think* works (but I don't have the skill to check) is that the universe is "sort of" like a simulation, where only macroscopic items have a defined state, but the macroscopic items have defined contents and a defined energy spectrum, and when you arrange to "look closely" at one of those items, it alters the state of the rest of the item in a computationally conservative way, such that you can't detect the difference until you start getting really close to the limi

          • There are many variations of this. One I *think* works (but I don't have the skill to check) is that the universe is "sort of" like a simulation, where only macroscopic items have a defined state

            Favorite simulation analogy paints entanglement as the consistency contract of some sort of transactional memory controller.

            People are forbidden from seeing sausage being compiled because conveyance of this knowledge violates the consistency contract leading to undefinable behavior and is frankly gross. "Dirty read" = NMI = BSOD = Matrix Reloaded.

    • Scott Adams already talked about this many decades ago in The Dilbert Future
    • Imagine you have two marbles, one red, one black. Put both of them in a bag, shake it up, and pick one out to put in your pocket. Don't look at it.

      Now send the bag with the other marble inside somewhere. Across the country, to the ISS, to Mars, next star system, where ever.

      Now pull out the marble in your pocket. If it's red, the other one must be black, and vise versa. However far they are apart.

      Replace marbles with particles, and colors with spins.

      You have been able to determine the other particle'
  • by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @02:03PM (#49546873) Homepage Journal

    All I'm seeing is "some guy posted a blog entry about a three-year-old paper". Surely it must have been on Slashdot before, though I can't actually find it with Google.

  • by Trax3001BBS ( 2368736 ) on Friday April 24, 2015 @02:26PM (#49546999) Homepage Journal

    Here’s the heart of their argument: If a black hole’s event horizon is a smooth, seemingly ordinary place, as relativity predicts (the authors call this the “no drama” condition), the particles coming out of the black hole must be entangled with particles falling into the black hole. Yet for information not to be lost, the particles coming out of the black hole must also be entangled with particles that left long ago and are now scattered about in a fog of Hawking radiation. That’s one too many kinds of entanglements, the AMPS authors realized. One of them would have to go.

  • by Anonymous Coward
  • ... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

  • Why can't we just assume that since there are 9 dimensions, the connection between quantum entangled particles travels through a higher dimension. Doesn't that solve everything more tidily? In fact, I don't remember if NASA's experiment with entanglement on the space station disproved faster than light communication (I think the rocket with the experiment onboard blew up) but it would even explain that if it were true. It travels faster than light because it doesn't, it shortcuts through a higher dimensi
    • by itzly ( 3699663 )

      The question is : can you make the math work out, and agree with all observations ?

      If yes, please collect nobel prize. If no, don't bother. If you have no clue, why even speculate ?

      • by Livius ( 318358 )

        If no, don't bother.

        Science (and civilization in general) wouldn't make much progress if everyone had that attitude.

  • Science has not proved and cannot prove that Quantum Entanglement is a real phenomenon, because it cannot be measured: as soon as one measures the particles, the entanglement is destroyed.

    Furthermore, science has not proved that quantum entanglement is particles linked or particles created symmetrically. For all we know, entangled particles may be born in symmetrical state and not be linked at all.

    Thirdly, we haven't even proved that a single photon is a wave. We have shown that a stream of light particles

    • by Agripa ( 139780 )

      Thirdly, we haven't even proved that a single photon is a wave. We have shown that a stream of light particles acts as a wave, through the double slit experiment, but not an individual photon.

      The double slit experiment works fine with one photon at a time. If you do not measure which path the photon takes, then each photon takes both paths and interferes with itself.

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