This post has nothing to do with politics.

One of the big mysteries or surprises in quantum physics is “non-locality”. This is the apparent fact that two particles can be “entangled”, such that even though they’re a billion miles apart, when something happens to one, something automatically happens to the other. The particles are far away in spacetime, but it’s as if they’re somehow right next to each other, possibly in some “deeper” reality. If that’s true, it’s pretty damn cool. 

From Quanta Magazine:

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects. . . .

What it all means is being intensely debated in Zoom calls and webinars. The work is highly mathematical and has a Rube Goldberg quality to it, stringing together one calculational trick after another in a way that is hard to interpret. Wormholes, the holographic principle, emergent space-time, quantum entanglement, quantum computers: Nearly every concept in fundamental physics these days makes an appearance, making the subject both captivating and confounding.

And not everyone is convinced. . . .

But almost everyone appears to agree on one thing. In some way or other, space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, implying that space-time is not the root level of reality, but an emergent structure from something deeper. Although Einstein conceived of gravity as the geometry of space-time, his theory also entails the dissolution of space-time, which is ultimately why information can escape its gravitational prison. . . .

The researchers drew on a concept that Richard Feynman had developed in the 1940s. Known as the path integral, it is the mathematical expression of a core quantum mechanical principle: Anything that can happen does happen. In quantum physics, a particle going from point A to point B takes all possible paths, which are combined in a weighted sum. The highest-weighted path is generally the one you’d expect from ordinary classical physics, but not always. If the weights change, the particle can abruptly lurch from one path to another, undergoing a transition that would be impossible in old-fashioned physics.

The path integral works so well for particle motion that theorists in the ’50s proposed it as a quantum theory of gravity. That meant replacing a single space-time geometry with a mélange of possible shapes. To us, space-time appears to have a single well-defined shape — near Earth, it is curved just enough that objects tend to orbit the center of our planet, for example. But in quantum gravity, other shapes, including much curvier ones, are latent, and they can make an appearance under the right circumstances. . . .

For [Stephen Hawking], space-time might knot itself into doughnut- or pretzel-like shapes. The extra connectivity creates tunnels, or “wormholes,” between otherwise far-flung places and moments. These come in different types.

Spatial wormholes are like the portals beloved of science-fiction writers, linking one star system to another. So-called space-time wormholes are little universes that bud off our own and reunite with it sometime later. Astronomers have never seen either type, but general relativity permits these structures, and the theory has a good track record of making seemingly bizarre predictions, such as black holes and gravitational waves, that are later vindicated. Not everyone agreed with Hawking that these exotic shapes belong in the mix, but the researchers doing the new analyses of black holes adopted the idea provisionally. . . .

Theorists in the West Coast group imagined sending [radiation escaping from a black hole] into a quantum computer. After all, a computer simulation is itself a physical system; a quantum simulation, in particular, is not altogether different from what it is simulating. So the physicists imagined collecting all the radiation, feeding it into a massive quantum computer, and running a full simulation of the black hole.

And that led to a remarkable twist in the story. Because the radiation is highly entangled with the black hole it came from, the quantum computer, too, becomes highly entangled with the hole. Within the simulation, the entanglement translates into a geometric link between the simulated black hole and the original. Put simply, the two are connected by a wormhole. “There’s the physical black hole and then there’s the simulated one in the quantum computer, and there can be a replica wormhole connecting those,” said Douglas Stanford, . . . a member of the West Coast team. This idea is an example of a proposal by [Juan Martin] Maldacena and Leonard Susskind  . . . in 2013 that quantum entanglement can be thought of as a wormhole. The wormhole, in turn, provides a secret tunnel through which information can escape the interior [of the black hole] . . .

Theorists have been intensely debating how literally to take all these wormholes. The wormholes are so deeply buried in the equations that their connection to reality seems tenuous, yet they do have tangible consequences. . . .

But rather than think of the wormholes as actual portals sitting out there in the universe, [some physicists] speculate that they are a sign of new, nonlocal physics. By connecting two distant locations, wormholes allow occurrences at one place to affect a distant place directly, without a particle, force or other influence having to cross the intervening distance — making this an instance of what physicists call nonlocality. “They seem to suggest that you have nonlocal effects that come in” [one physicist] said. In the black hole calculations, the island and radiation are one system seen in two places, which amounts to a failure of the concept of “place.” “We’ve always known that some kind of nonlocal effects have to be involved in gravity, and this is one of them . . . Things you thought were independent are not really independent.”

At first glance, this is very surprising. Einstein constructed general relativity with the express purpose of eliminating nonlocality from physics. Gravity does not reach out across space instantly. It has to propagate from one place to another at finite speed, like any other interaction in nature. But over the decades it has dawned on physicists that the symmetries on which relativity is based create a new breed of nonlocal effects. . . 

All this reinforces many physicists’ hunch that space-time is not the root level of nature, but instead emerges from some underlying mechanism that is not spatial or temporal. . . 

Skepticism is warranted if for no other reason than because the recent work is complicated and raw. It will take time for physicists to digest it and either find a fatal flaw in the arguments or become convinced that they work. . . .

Unquote.

So it looks like the universe is making more sense. Maybe we’ve entered a more sensible timeline, in which physics is less paradoxical and the president behaves like an adult politician/human being!