Happy 2023 everyone! You’ve noticed, no doubt, that the blog has been quiet recently. That’s because I’ve got a book contract, with a deadline of March 31, 2023. [The book itself won’t be published til spring 2024.] I’ll tell you more about this in future posts. But over the next couple of months I’ll be ... Read moreOnce 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.