Ula Šveikauskaitė
WHEN scientists reported they had created a space-time wormhole in November last year, the world’s media were all over the story, even though they struggled to make sense of it. A journalist for the website UNILAD put it neatly when they wrote: “So, you might have to bear with us here a bit, because it’s all very complicated and new.”
As far as many observers could see, physicist at the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues had in fact merely used a quantum computer to simulate a wormhole. Good luck flying a spaceship through that. What confused matters was that the team insisted the work amounted to more than just a simulation. The quantum computation, the researchers said, was fully equivalent to the creation of a wormhole.
If you find that hard to swallow, you aren’t alone. Ask other physicists about Spiropulu’s claims and you tend to get a lot of long pauses, chin-stroking and disagreement. It seems there is genuine confusion about if and when a quantum computation can create real entities or just simulate them.
The putative wormhole isn’t the only thing said to have been conjured up by quantum computers recently – there is also the alluringly named time crystal, as well as strange particles called nonabelions, touted as the ideal ingredient for next-generation quantum computers. But whether these amount to instances of true creation or not is a question that takes us into deep waters. It is a new twist on the riddle that has haunted physics since quantum mechanics was devised in the early 20th century: what is truly real?
Regular computers use…
