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Wormhole entanglement gives space-time the bends

24 July 2013

�鶹��ý. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine. — Can’s open, wormholes everywhere
(Image: Jonathan Kantor/Taxi/Getty)

SPACE-TIME, the very fabric of our universe, may be a tangled place. Entanglement, a feature of quantum mechanics that links objects over great distances, could be responsible for its structure. What’s more, entanglement may fill the universe with a thicket of cosmic tunnels called wormholes.

All these ideas fall out of a new theory that is making inroads into unifying gravity, which operates on large scales, with quantum mechanics, the science of the very small. A successful theory of quantum gravity is one of the biggest goals of modern physics.

The…

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