Once we clear away the hype (see the previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4), and realize that no one is doing anything as potentially dangerous as making real wormholes (ones you could actually fall into) in a lab, or studying how to send dogs across the galaxy, we are left with a question. Why bother ... Read more
What exactly are these wormholes that certain physicists claim to be trying to make or, at least, simulate?
As we saw last post, quarks and gluons, such as we find in the real world or such as we might find in all sorts of imaginary worlds, are related by the Maldacena conjecture to strings (including quantum gravity) moving around in more dimensions than the three we're used to. One of these, the "radial dimension", is particularly important, and it will play a central role here.Well, now… Don’t get me wrong. What they did is pretty cool! I’d be pretty proud of it, too, had I been involved. Congratulations to the authors of this paper; the methods and the results are novel and thought-provoking. But the hype in the press? Wildly, spectacularly overblown! I’ll try, if I have time next ... Read more