- A scientist believes his working blueprint for a lab-based wormhole moves us toward “counterportation.”
- The scientist’s claims rely on the creation of a new quantum computer that doesn’t exchange particles.
- Counterportation is like teleportation, except it doesn’t carry particles from one place to another.
We all want wormholes to be real. Or at least possible. Now, one University of Bristol physicist thinks that we can make wormholes work, as soon as our quantum computers get a little more, well, quantum. And he has a blueprint to back it up.
Hatim Salih, an honorary research fellow at Bristol’s Quantum Engineering Technology Labs and co-founder of the start-up DotQuantum, published a paper in the journal Quantum Science and Technology saying there’s a real opportunity to build out “counterportation,” akin to teleportation but without particles actually moving.
Think: a wormhole with a twist.
“Here’s the sharp distinction,” Salih says in a news release. “While counterportation achieves the end goal of teleportation, namely disembodied transport, it remarkably does so without any detectable information carriers traveling across.”
To make his lab-based wormhole sound plausible, Salih writes that computers can harness laws of physics by reconstituting objects across space without any particles crossing this space:
“This is a milestone we have been working toward for a bunch of years. It provides a theoretical as well as practical framework for exploring afresh enduring puzzles about the universe, such as the true nature of spacetime.”
Of course, this wormhole blueprint isn’t yet feasible with today’s technology. “If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built,” he says, “an exchange-free one, where communicating parties exchange no particles.”
Salih admits that no one yet knows how to build these computers. He’s still going to try:
“The goal in the near future is to physically build such a wormhole in the lab, which can then be used as a testbed for rival physical theories, even ones of quantum gravity.”
Oh, the hopes and dreams we all have.
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Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.
