Quantum romance: Wormhole unites star-crossed lovers

"Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's some entangled photons, so jump into a wormhole with me maybe?"

It's Alice's last desperate plea to her sweetheart, Bob. The lovebirds, rebellious teenagers with a firm grasp of advanced physics, have just been sent light-years apart by their warring families. These star-crossed lovers don't need to cross the stars to meet again though, as long as they are willing to pay the ultimate price.

Welcome to the first romance enabled by quantum physics. The pair can be reunited thanks to a new theory of wormholes that says these tunnels in space-time emerge via quantum entanglement a new theory of wormholes that says these tunnels in space-time emerge via quantum entanglement . Wormholes are a sci-fi staple, but until now there was no sure-fire way to make them using known materials. The theory offers a recipe.

The resulting wormholes are not ideal - you could not use them to go time-travelling, say - but there's at least one instance where they might be useful. Here's what Alice and Bob need to do to meet again:

• Alice may be locked in her room, but she has still got access to her physics kit. Burning out several stars to keep the electricity running, she prepares an enormous batch of entangled photon pairs. She sends one half of each pair off to Bob at the speed of light, keeping the other for herself.
• Photons are massless, but energy and mass are equivalent - so pack them together densely enough and Alice and Bob can create two entangled black holes.
• At a pre-arranged moment, Alice and Bob each jump into their black holes.
• Alice and Bob can meet up in the common interior of the entangled black holes - the connecting wormhole that arises from the entanglement.
• As they speed toward the singularity inside the wormhole, which will end their lives, Alice and Bob spend their last moments together. Depending on the mass of the black holes, they could have anywhere from a fraction of a second together (for a black hole the mass of a planet or star) to days or even weeks (for a black hole with the mass of a small galaxy or more).

This article appeared in print under the headline "Thoroughly modern Romeo and Juliet"

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