I’m glad I was too busy today to respond earlier to a junk science story that has been doing the rounds, in the Guardian, in Quanta and even in Physics World to name but a few. Had I had time to write something as soon as I’d seen these pieces of tripe I would probably have responded with more expletives than would be seemly even for this blog. This sort of crap makes me rather angry, you see.
The story is basically that a group of scientists have created a “wormhole in space-time” that enables quantum teleportation.
Of course they have done no such thing. The paper, like so many stories hyped beyond the bounds of reason, is published in Nature. There are some interesting things in this publication, but nothing to justify the absurd claims that have propagated into the media. The authors must take some of the blame for allowing such tosh to be spread about in their names. I don’t think it will do them any good in the long run.
At least I hope it doesn’t.
You can read it for yourself and make your own , but my take is the following:
- Did the authors create a wormhole (even a baby one) in a laboratory? Definitely not.
- Did they discover anything whatsoever to do with quantum gravity? No way.
- Did they even simulate a wormhole in a lab? Not even close.
- Did they even make progress towards simulating a wormhole in a lab? Still no.
Apart from all that it’s fine.
The author of the Quanta article, Natalie Wolchover, writes:
Researchers were able to send a signal through the open wormhole, though it’s not clear in what sense the wormhole can be said to exist.
Au contraire, it’s absolutely clear that no wormhole can be said to exist in any sense whatsoever.
I hope this clarifies the situation.
UPDATE: I see that Peter Woit has gone to town on this on his blog here.
In the Dark 