# What’s in a Conjecture? An ER=EPR Example

A few weeks back, Caltech’s Institute of Quantum Information and Matter released a short film titled Quantum is Calling. It’s the second in what looks like will become a series of pieces featuring Hollywood actors popularizing ideas in physics. The first used the game of Quantum Chess to talk about superposition and entanglement. This one, featuring Zoe Saldana, is about a conjecture by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind called ER=EPR. The conjecture speculates that pairs of entangled particles (as investigated by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen) are in some sense secretly connected by wormholes (or Einstein-Rosen bridges).

The film is fun, but I’m not sure ER=EPR is established well enough to deserve this kind of treatment.

At this point, some of you are nodding your heads for the wrong reason. You’re thinking I’m saying this because ER=EPR is a conjecture.

I’m not saying that.

The fact of the matter is, conjectures play a very important role in theoretical physics, and “conjecture” covers a wide range. Some conjectures are supported by incredibly strong evidence, just short of mathematical proof. Others are wild speculations, “wouldn’t it be convenient if…” ER=EPR is, well…somewhere in the middle.

Most popularizers don’t spend much effort distinguishing things in this middle ground. I’d like to talk a bit about the different sorts of evidence conjectures can have, using ER=EPR as an example.

Our friendly neighborhood space octopus

The first level of evidence is motivation.

At its weakest, motivation is the “wouldn’t it be convenient if…” line of reasoning. Some conjectures never get past this point. Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture, for instance, points out that physics (and to some extent logic) has a hard time dealing with time travel, and wouldn’t it be convenient if time travel was impossible?

For ER=EPR, this kind of motivation comes from the black hole firewall paradox. Without going into it in detail, arguments suggested that the event horizons of older black holes would resemble walls of fire, incinerating anything that fell in, in contrast with Einstein’s picture in which passing the horizon has no obvious effect at the time. ER=EPR provides one way to avoid this argument, making event horizons subtle and smooth once more.

Motivation isn’t just “wouldn’t it be convenient if…” though. It can also include stronger arguments: suggestive comparisons that, while they could be coincidental, when put together draw a stronger picture.

In ER=EPR, this comes from certain similarities between the type of wormhole Maldacena and Susskind were considering, and pairs of entangled particles. Both connect two different places, but both do so in an unusually limited way. The wormholes of ER=EPR are non-traversable: you cannot travel through them. Entangled particles can’t be traveled through (as you would expect), but more generally can’t be communicated through: there are theorems to prove it. This is the kind of suggestive similarity that can begin to motivate a conjecture.

(Amusingly, the plot of the film breaks this in both directions. Keanu Reeves can neither steal your cat through a wormhole, nor send you coded messages with entangled particles.)

Nor live forever as the portrait in his attic withers away

Motivation is a good reason to investigate something, but a bad reason to believe it. Luckily, conjectures can have stronger forms of evidence. Many of the strongest conjectures are correspondences, supported by a wealth of non-trivial examples.

In science, the gold standard has always been experimental evidence. There’s a reason for that: when you do an experiment, you’re taking a risk. Doing an experiment gives reality a chance to prove you wrong. In a good experiment (a non-trivial one) the result isn’t obvious from the beginning, so that success or failure tells you something new about the universe.

In theoretical physics, there are things we can’t test with experiments, either because they’re far beyond our capabilities or because the claims are mathematical. Despite this, the overall philosophy of experiments is still relevant, especially when we’re studying a correspondence.

“Correspondence” is a word we use to refer to situations where two different theories are unexpectedly computing the same thing. Often, these are very different theories, living in different dimensions with different sorts of particles. With the right “dictionary”, though, you can translate between them, doing a calculation in one theory that matches a calculation in the other one.

Even when we can’t do non-trivial experiments, then, we can still have non-trivial examples. When the result of a calculation isn’t obvious from the beginning, showing that it matches on both sides of a correspondence takes the same sort of risk as doing an experiment, and gives the same sort of evidence.

Some of the best-supported conjectures in theoretical physics have this form. AdS/CFT is technically a conjecture: a correspondence between string theory in a hyperbola-shaped space and my favorite theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills. Despite being a conjecture, the wealth of nontrivial examples is so strong that it would be extremely surprising if it turned out to be false.

ER=EPR is also a correspondence, between entangled particles on the one hand and wormholes on the other. Does it have nontrivial examples?

Some, but not enough. Originally, it was based on one core example, an entangled state that could be cleanly matched to the simplest wormhole. Now, new examples have been added, covering wormholes with electric fields and higher spins. The full “dictionary” is still unclear, with some pairs of entangled particles being harder to describe in terms of wormholes. So while this kind of evidence is being built, it isn’t as solid as our best conjectures yet.

I’m fine with people popularizing this kind of conjecture. It deserves blog posts and press articles, and it’s a fine idea to have fun with. I wouldn’t be uncomfortable with the Bohemian Gravity guy doing a piece on it, for example. But for the second installment of a star-studded series like the one Caltech is doing…it’s not really there yet, and putting it there gives people the wrong idea.

I hope I’ve given you a better idea of the different types of conjectures, from the most fuzzy to those just shy of certain. I’d like to do this kind of piece more often, though in future I’ll probably stick with topics in my sub-field (where I actually know what I’m talking about 😉 ). If there’s a particular conjecture you’re curious about, ask in the comments!

# Have You Given Your Kids “The Talk”?

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend reading this delightful collaboration between Scott Aaronson (of Shtetl-Optimized) and Zach Weinersmith (of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). As explanations of a concept beyond the standard popular accounts go, this one is pretty high quality, correcting some common misconceptions about quantum computing.

I especially liked the following exchange:

I’ve complained before about people trying to apply ontology to physics, and I think this gets at the root of one of my objections.

People tend to think that the world should be describable with words. From that perspective, mathematics is just a particular tool, a system we’ve created. If you look at the world in that way, mathematics looks unreasonably effective: it’s ability to describe the real world seems like a miraculous coincidence.

Mathematics isn’t just one tool though, or just one system. It’s all of them: not just numbers and equations, but knots and logic and everything else. Deep down, mathematics is just a collection of all the ways we’ve found to state things precisely.

Because of that, it shouldn’t surprise you that we “put complex numbers in our ontologies”. Complex numbers are just one way we’ve found to make precise statements about the world, one that comes in handy when talking about quantum mechanics. There doesn’t need to be a “correct” description in words: the math is already stating things as precisely as we know how.

That doesn’t mean that ontology is a useless project. It’s worthwhile to develop new ways of talking about things. I can understand the goal of building up a philosophical language powerful enough to describe the world in terms of words, and if such a language was successful it might well inspire us to ask new scientific questions.

But it’s crucial to remember that there’s real work to be done there. There’s no guarantee that the project will work, that words will end up sufficient. When you put aside our best tools to make precise statements, you’re handicapping yourself, making the problem harder than it needed to be. It’s your responsibility to make sure you’re getting something worthwhile out of it.

# Pi in the Sky Science Journalism

You’ve probably seen it somewhere on your facebook feed, likely shared by a particularly wide-eyed friend: pi found hidden in the hydrogen atom!

From the headlines, this sounds like some sort of kabbalistic nonsense, like finding the golden ratio in random pictures.

Read the actual articles, and the story is a bit more reasonable. The last two I linked above seem to be decent takes on it, they’re just saddled with ridiculous headlines. As usual, I blame the editors. This time, they’ve obscured an interesting point about the link between physics and mathematics.

So what does “pi found hidden in the hydrogen atom” actually mean?

It doesn’t mean that there’s some deep importance to the number pi in nature, beyond its relevance in mathematics in general. The reason that pi is showing up here isn’t especially deep.

It isn’t trivial either, though. I’ve seen a few people whose first response to this article was “of course they found pi in the hydrogen atom, hydrogen atoms are spherical!” That’s not what’s going on here. The connection isn’t about the shape of the hydrogen atom, it’s about one particular technique for estimating its energy.

Carl Hagen is a physicist at the University of Rochester who was teaching a quantum mechanics class in which he taught a well-known approximation technique called the variational principle. Specifically, he had his students apply this technique to the hydrogen atom. The nice thing about the hydrogen atom is that it’s one of the few atoms simple enough that it’s possible to find its energy levels exactly. The exact calculation can then be compared to the approximation.

What Hagen noticed was that this approximation was surprisingly good, especially for high energy states for which it wasn’t expected to be. In the end, working with Rochester math professor Tamar Friedmann, he figured out that the variational principle was making use of a particular identity between a type of mathematical functions, called Gamma functions, that are quite common in physics. Using those Gamma functions, the two researchers were able to re-derive what turned out to be a 17th century formula for pi, giving rise to a much cleaner proof for that formula than had been known previously.

So pi isn’t appearing here because “the hydrogen atom is a sphere”. It’s appearing because pi appears all over the place in physics, and because in general, the same sorts of structures appear again and again in mathematics.

Pi’s appearance in the hydrogen atom is thus not very special, regardless. What is a little bit special is the fact that, using the hydrogen atom, these folks were able to find a cleaner proof of an old approximation for pi, one that mathematicians hadn’t found before.

That, if anything, is the interesting part of this news story, but it’s also part of a broader trend, one in which physicists provide “physics proofs” for mathematical results. One of the more famous accomplishments of string theory is a class of “physics proofs” of this sort, using a principle called mirror symmetry.

The existence of  “physics proofs” doesn’t mean that mathematics is secretly constrained by the physical world. Rather, they’re a result of the fact that physicists are interested in different aspects of mathematics, and in general are a bit more reckless in using approximations that haven’t been mathematically vetted. A physicist can sometimes prove something in just a few lines that mathematicians would take many pages to prove, but usually they do this by invoking a structure that would take much longer for a mathematician to define. As physicists, we’re building on the shoulders of other physicists, using concepts that mathematicians usually don’t have much reason to bother with. That’s why it’s always interesting when we find something like the Amplituhedron, a clean mathematical concept hidden inside what would naively seem like a very messy construction. It’s also why “physics proofs” like this can happen: we’re dealing with things that mathematicians don’t naturally consider.

So please, ignore the pi-in-the-sky headlines. Some physicists found a trick, some mathematicians found it interesting, the hydrogen atom was (quite tangentially) involved…and no nonsense needs to be present.

# What’s so Spooky about Action at a Distance?

With Halloween coming up, it’s time once again to talk about the spooky side of physics. And what could be spookier than action at a distance?

Pictured here.

Ok, maybe not an obvious contender for spookiest concept of the year. But physicists have struggled with action at a distance for centuries, and there are deep reasons why.

It all dates back to Newton. In Newton’s time, all of nature was expected to be mechanical. One object pushes another, which pushes another in turn, eventually explaining everything that every happens. And while people knew by that point that the planets were not circling around on literal crystal spheres, it was still hoped that their motion could be explained mechanically. The favored explanations of the time were vortices, whirlpools of celestial fluid that drove the planets around the Sun.

Newton changed all that. Not only did he set down a law of gravitation that didn’t use a fluid, he showed that no fluid could possibly replicate the planets’ motions. And while he remained agnostic about gravity’s cause, plenty of his contemporaries accused him of advocating “action at a distance”. People like Leibniz thought that a gravitational force without a mechanical cause would be superstitious nonsense, a betrayal of science’s understanding of the world in terms of matter.

For a while, Newton’s ideas won out. More and more, physicists became comfortable with explanations involving a force stretching out across empty space, using them for electricity and magnetism as these became more thoroughly understood.

Eventually, though, the tide began to shift back. Electricity and Magnetism were explained, not in terms of action at a distance, but in terms of a field that filled the intervening space. Eventually, gravity was too.

The difference may sound purely semantic, but it means more than you might think. These fields were restricted in an important way: when the field changed, it changed at one point, and the changes spread at a speed limited by the speed of light. A theory composed of such fields has a property called locality, the property that all interactions are fundamentally local, that is, they happen at one specific place and time.

Nowadays, we think of locality as one of the most fundamental principles in physics, on par with symmetry in space and time. And the reason why is that true action at a distance is quite a spooky concept.

Much of horror boils down to fear of the unknown. From what might lurk in the dark to the depths of the ocean, we fear that which we cannot know. And true action at a distance would mean that our knowledge might forever be incomplete. As long as everything is mediated by some field that changes at the speed of light, we can limit our search for causes. We can know that any change must be caused by something only a limited distance away, something we can potentially observe and understand. By contrast, true action at a distance would mean that forces from potentially anywhere in the universe could alter events here on Earth. We might never know the ultimate causes of what we observe; they might be stuck forever out of reach.

Some of you might be wondering, what about quantum mechanics? The phrase “spooky action at a distance” was famous because Einstein used it as an accusation against quantum entanglement, after all.

The key thing about quantum mechanics is that, as J. S. Bell showed, you can’t have locality…unless you throw out another property, called realism. Realism is the idea that quantum states have definite values for measurements before those measurements are taken. And while that sounds important, most people find getting rid of it much less scary than getting rid of locality. In a non-realistic world, at least we can still predict probabilities, even if we can’t observe certainties. In a non-local world, there might be aspects of physics that we just can’t learn. And that’s spooky.

# When to Look under the Bed

Last week, blogged about a rather interesting experiment, designed to test the quantum properties of gravity. Normally, quantum gravity is essentially unobservable: quantum effects are typically only relevant for very small systems, where gravity is extremely weak. However, there has been a lot of progress in putting larger and larger systems into interesting quantum states, and a team of experimentalists has recently proposed a setup. The experiment wouldn’t have enough detail to, for example, distinguish between rival models of quantum gravity, but it would provide evidence as to whether or not gravity is quantum at all.

Lubos Motl, meanwhile, argues that such an experiment is utterly pointless, because there is no possible way that gravity could not be quantum. I won’t blame you if you don’t read his argument since it’s written in his trademark…aggressive…style, but the gist is that it’s really hard to make sense of the idea that there are non-quantum things in an otherwise quantum world. It causes all sorts of issues with pretty much every interpretation of quantum mechanics, and throws the differences between those interpretations into particularly harsh and obvious light. From this perspective, checking to see if gravity might not actually be quantum (an idea called semi-classical gravity) is a bit like checking for a monster under the bed.

You might find semi-classical gravity!

In general, I share Motl’s reservations about semi-classical gravity. As I mentioned back when journalists were touting the BICEP2 results as evidence of quantum gravity, the idea that gravity could not be quantum doesn’t really make much sense. (Incidentally, Hossenfelder makes a similar point in her post.)

All that said, sometimes in science it’s absolutely worth looking under the bed.

Take another unlikely possibility, that of cell phone radiation causing cancer. Things that cause cancer do it by messing with the molecular bonds in DNA. In order to mess with molecular bonds, you need high-frequency light. That’s how UV light from the sun can cause skin cancer. Cell phones emit microwaves, which are very low-frequency light. It’s what allows them to be useful inside of buildings, where normal light wouldn’t reach. It also means it’s impossible for them to cause cancer.

Nevertheless, if nobody had ever studied whether cell phones cause cancer, it would probably be worth at least one study. If that study came back positive, it would say something interesting, either about the study’s design or about other possible causes of cancer. If negative, the topic could be put to bed more convincingly. As it happens, those studies have been done, and overall confirm the expectations we have from basic science.

Another important point here is that experimentalists and theorists have different priorities, due to their different specializations. Theorists are interested in confirmation for particular theories: they want not just an unknown particle, but a gluino, and not just a gluino, but the gluino predicted by their particular model of supersymmetry. By contrast, experimentalists typically aren’t very interested in proving or disproving one theory or another. Rather, they look for general signals that indicate broad classes of new physics. For example, experimentalists might use the LHC to look for a leptoquark, a particle that allows quarks and leptons to interact, without caring what theory might produce them. Experimentalists are also very interested in improving their techniques. Much like theorists, a lot of interesting work in the field involves pushing the current state-of-the-art as far as it will go.

So, when should we look under the bed?

Well, if nobody has ever looked under this particular bed before, and if seeing something strange under this bed would at least be informative, and if looking under the bed serves as a proving ground for the latest in bed-spelunking technology, then yes, we should absolutely look under this bed.

Just don’t expect to see any monsters.

# Bras and Kets, Trading off Instincts

Some physics notation is a joke, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Take bras and kets. On the surface, as silly a physics name as any. If you want to find the probability that a state in quantum mechanics turns into another state, you write down a “bracket” between the two states:

$\langle a | b\rangle$

This leads, with typical physics logic, to the notation for the individual states: separate out the two parts, into a “bra” and a “ket”:

$\langle a|$$|b\rangle$

It’s kind of a dumb joke, and it annoys the heck out of mathematicians. Not for the joke, of course, mathematicians probably have worse.

Mathematicians are annoyed when we use complicated, weird notation for something that looks like a simple, universal concept. Here, we’re essentially just taking inner products of vectors, something mathematicians have been doing in one form or another for centuries. Yet rather than use their time-tested notation we use our own silly setup.

There’s a method to the madness, though. Bras and kets are handy for our purposes because they allow us to leverage one of the most powerful instincts of programmers: the need to close parentheses.

In programming, various forms of parentheses and brackets allow you to isolate parts of code for different purposes. One set of lines might only activate under certain circumstances, another set of brackets might make text bold. But in essentially every language, you never want to leave an open parenthesis. Doing so is almost always a mistake, one that leaves the rest of your code open to whatever isolated region you were trying to create.

Open parentheses make programmers nervous, and that’s exactly what “bras” and “kets” are for. As it turns out, the states represented by “bras” and “kets” are in a certain sense un-measurable: the only things we can measure are the brackets between them. When people say that in quantum mechanics we can only predict probabilities, that’s a big part of what they mean: the states themselves mean nothing without being assembled into probability-calculating brackets.

This ends up making “bras” and “kets” very useful. If you’re calculating something in the real world and your formula ends up with a free “bra” or a “ket”, you know you’ve done something wrong. Only when all of your bras and kets are assembled into brackets will you have something physically meaningful. Since most physicists have done some programming, the programmer’s instinct to always close parentheses comes to the rescue, nagging until you turn your formula into something that can be measured.

So while our notation may be weird, it does serve a purpose: it makes our instincts fit the counter-intuitive world of quantum mechanics.

# Romeo and Juliet, through a Wormhole

Perimeter is hosting this year’s Mathematica Summer School on Theoretical Physics. The school is a mix of lectures on a topic in physics (this year, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement) and tips and tricks for using the symbolic calculation program Mathematica.

Juan Maldacena is one of the lecturers, which gave me a chance to hear his Romeo and Juliet-based explanation of the properties of wormholes. While I’ve criticized some of Maldacena’s science popularization work in the past, this one is pretty solid, so I thought I’d share it with you guys.

You probably think of wormholes as “shortcuts” to travel between two widely separated places. As it turns out, this isn’t really accurate: while “normal” wormholes do connect distant locations, they don’t do it in a way that allows astronauts to travel between them, Interstellar-style. This can be illustrated with something called a Penrose diagram:

Static “Greyish Black” Diagram

In the traditional Penrose diagram, time goes upward, while space goes from side to side. In order to measure both in the same units, we use the speed of light, so one year on the time axis corresponds to one light-year on the space axis. This means that if you’re traveling at a 45 degree line on the diagram, you’re going at the speed of light. Any lower angle is impossible, while any higher angle means you’re going slower.

If we start in “our universe” in the diagram, can we get to the “other universe”?

Pretty clearly, the answer is no. As long as we go slower than the speed of light, when we pass the event horizon of the wormhole we will end up, not in the “other universe”, but at the part of the diagram labeled Future Singularity, the singularity at the center of the black hole. Even going at the speed of light only keeps us orbiting the event horizon for all eternity, at best.

What use could such a wormhole be? Well, imagine you’re Romeo or Juliet.

Romeo has been banished from Verona, but he took one end of a wormhole with him, while the other end was left with Juliet. He can’t go through and visit her, she can’t go through and visit him. But if they’re already considering taking poison, there’s an easier way. If they both jump in to the wormhole, they’ll fall in to the singularity. Crucially, though, it’s the same singularity, so once they’re past the event horizon they can meet inside the black hole, spending some time together before the end.

Depicted here for more typical quantum protagonists, Alice and Bob.

This explains what wormholes really are: two black holes that share a center.

Why was Maldacena talking about this at a school on entanglement? Maldacena has recently conjectured that quantum entanglement and wormholes are two sides of the same phenomenon, that pairs of entangled particles are actually connected by wormholes. Crucially, these wormholes need to have the properties described above: you can’t use a pair of entangled particles to communicate information faster than light, and you can’t use a wormhole to travel faster than light. However, it is the “shared” singularity that ends up particularly useful, as it suggests a solution to the problem of black hole firewalls.

Firewalls were originally proposed as a way of getting around a particular paradox relating three states connected by quantum entanglement: a particle inside a black hole, radiation just outside the black hole, and radiation far away from the black hole. The way the paradox is set up, it appears that these three states must all be connected. As it turns out, though, this is prohibited by quantum mechanics, which only allows two states to be entangled at a time. The original solution proposed for this was a “firewall”, a situation in which anyone trying to observe all three states would “burn up” when crossing the event horizon, thus avoiding any observed contradiction. Maldacena’s conjecture suggests another way: if someone interacts with the far-away radiation, they have an effect on the black hole’s interior, because the two are connected by a wormhole! This ends up getting rid of the contradiction, allowing the observer to view the black hole and distant radiation as two different descriptions of the same state, and it depends crucially on the fact that a wormhole involves a shared singularity.

There’s still a lot of detail to be worked out, part of the reason why Maldacena presented this research here was to inspire more investigation from students. But it does seem encouraging that Romeo and Juliet might not have to face a wall of fire before being reunited.