Y’all, as a child of the 90s, I will forever quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park when he says that the scientists there were so preoccupied wondering if they could do something they didn’t stop to wonder whether or not they should.
And honestly, I feel like there are way too many stories where scientists aren’t worried enough about setting up the new hit disaster movie.
Because creating a wormhole in a lab honestly seems like a recipe for disaster.
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Hatim Saleh, a research fellow at the University of Bristol and co-founder of DotQuantum, obviously doesn’t think so, because claims to have created “The first ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space.”
He calls his invention “counterportation,” which reconstitutes a small object across space “without any particles crossing.”
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Here’s the thing, though: it’s still all conceptual, as the computers needed to make this happen haven’t been designed or built yet.
“If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built: an exchange-free one, where communicating parties exchange no particles.”
Saleh says he’s not worried, though, as he has plans underway to build the technology described in his paper.
“While counterportation achieves the end goal of teleportation, namely disembodied transport, it remarkably does so without any detectable information carriers traveling across.”
It relies on an aspect of quantum physics called quantum entanglement. This allows entirely separate quantum particles to be correlated without ever interacting.
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According to University of Bristol professor John Rarity,
“This correlation at a distance can then be used to transport quantum information from one location to another without a particle having to traverse the space, creating what could be called a traversable wormhole.”
If this sounds like a long shot, that’s because right now, it definitely is.
But you know. That might not be a bad thing.
