The caterpillar ...

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Back in 2012 and 2024, yours truly talked about wormholes in blurbs titled Entanglement, the journey to forever and A temporary arrangement discussing, in part, the brilliant ER=EPR conjecture written by Leonard Susskind and Juan Maldacena in 2013 explaining how entanglement happens via wormholes in the context that ... ER = EPR, a conjecture in physics stating that two entangled particles (a so-called Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen or EPR pair) are connected by a wormhole (or Einstein–Rosen bridge)[1][2] and is thought by some to be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.[1]

Now it seems this notion of ER=EPR has legs based on the latest findings that
this radical take on reality just might be true.

For obvious reasons, we do not know what the inside of a black hole looks like. But thanks to theoretical physics, we can ask what the inside should look like if Einstein's theory of gravity and the rules of quantum mechanics are both true. A new study published in the journal Physical Review Letters has done exactly this by concentrating on two black holes that are deeply entangled (linked together by quantum rules).

The research by scientists from the U.S. and Argentina theoretically mapped the shared inner space between the two objects—the wormhole connecting them. They found that for a typical, messy entangled pair, the interior isn't the smooth tunnel of science fiction.

The ER caterpillar is a long, bumpy wormhole supported by an inhomogeneous matter distribution, with correlation scale set by ℓΔ and average length set by ℓ(t).

Instead, it's a long, lumpy structure they called the "Einstein-Rosen caterpillar." It's named after the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, the mathematical structure that connects two regions of spacetime, and "caterpillar" because of its bumpy, segmented shape. This discovery is a significant step toward proving that the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics can control the shape of spacetime inside a black hole.

This result supports the idea that two of the strangest concepts in physics (quantum entanglement and wormholes) are equivalent, or two sides of the same coin—the ER=EPR conjecture. The authors say, "The construction and main result of this Letter support a vastly more general form of ER = EPR and seem to be in some tension with arguments against semiclassicality of typical interiors."

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