The most interesting (and understandable, to my layman’s POV) aspect of this is that it supports the so-called ER = EPR conjecture; that is, that the Einstein-Rosen Bridge – now commonly known as a wormhole – and the quantum entanglement first described in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper (“EPR”) are in fact equivalent phenomena. The implication of this conjecture, if true, is that if you have entangled particles in two different black holes, there will necessarily be a wormhole between them because the two phenomena are essentially the same thing. This also provides a point of unification between general relativity and quantum mechanics and provides an insight into quantum gravity.
For those who like watching videos, there is a cool video about this here:
My, admittedly low knowledge level, hot take is the support for the holographic principle, which to me is a take that the universe is not physical stuff described with information but that the information begets the physical.
So low knowledge level questions. Entanglement itself has been shown to exist despite much
more significant distances already, yes? The deal here is that the toy wormhole is the model for the engagement supporting the fundamental connection?
Entanglement has certainly been observed over sufficiently-large distances and sufficiently-short timescales that it can’t be explained by any sort of subluminal information transfer. Every so often a lab demonstrates it over a new record distance, but at this point, any such larger distances don’t have any real physical significance, but are just showing off how good their instrumentation is (though high-quality instrumentation could also produce real results that aren’t as easy to point to and make interesting).
How exactly you describe the entanglement depends on how exactly you’re describing quantum mechanics, and there are a whole bunch of ways of doing that, that all produce exactly the same predictions, so it’s not really meaningful to ask which interpretation of quantum mechanics is “right”.
Quantum entanglement is definitely a real thing – a quantum computer fundamentally exploits the fact that all its qubits are necessarily entangled, and that’s why it’s so difficult to scale it up in the systematic incremental manner of a classical computer.
But it’s also axiomatic that entanglement can not be used to transmit information. One might trivially conclude that entangled particles simply have pre-existing correlated quantum states that reveal themselves when some property like spin is measured, and so there’s no mystery that entanglement is found no matter how far apart the particles are – but this simple explanation is just not true.
The fact is that such a scenario requires some hitherto deterministic property to exist within the quantum particles, which has come to be called “local hidden variables”, and subsequent experiments have shown that no such local hidden variables exist (technically, experiments showing “violations of Bell’s inequality”). IOW, it is not the case that entangled particles have predetermined quantum states. So quantum entanglement (which Einstein called "spooky action at a distance) remains a truly enduring paradox, and it’s one that may well hold clues to the fundamental nature of the universe.
But what this particular experiment appears to be doing is certainly not transmitting information via entanglement, but rather something more akin to quantum teleportation.
Incidentally, the original article in Nature that I referenced more than a year ago is now only semi-paywalled (you can read it, but not save or print it) but for most of us (including me, for sure) the simplified layman’s article is more comprehensible.
I went to watch the video, and a note popped up that there had been some kind of update. That in turn linked to this article, where they say that experiment wasn’t what the experimentalists say it was, though it’s not clear that these guys can say with full confidence what it was either.
