Voting for Super Tuesday isn’t even over and we probably won’t know the final results of how many delegates each contender for the Democratic nomination will get until the end of the week. Maybe. And then there will be more primaries after that until we reach the final showdown of the general and … just, please, let us rest.
It feels like the election has been going on for seven years and honestly, we’re considering ways to just make it go faster. Here at TMS, we sometimes joke that we want to be put into a medically-induced coma until after election day. So let’s examine that. Sure. Why not. Medically-induced comas are totally a thing … for drug rehab and okay, it would cost around, um … $1,500 a day for care and you’d be missing work so the net cost would be … carry the one … a fuck ton. With 245 days to go until election day, that’s roughly $367,500 for care alone.
I think a better solution might just be straight-up time travel, maybe via a wormhole? Now, I know that sounds unlikely, but the possibility of accessible wormholes might be closer than we ever thought.
Scientists in California have put forward a bold new plan to create a wormhole in a lab to study the very fabric of spacetime and the concept of quantum entanglement and all that stuff that we usually only hear about in the technobabble on The Flash (in fact, wasn’t Black Hole a character this season?). It sounds incredibly complicated but also incredibly cool.
The plan is simple: make some black holes, link them, see if you can send stuff through the connection! Easy peasy, right? Well, no, of course not. This is high-level theoretical quantum physics at this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
This group of scientists at CalTech led by Sepehr Nezami has made this new proposal. Their idea is creating two black holes which are quantum entangled and thus linked and then sending information through the wormhole created by the black holes which would be encoded on a quantum particle, and it is is mind-bending. But it’s also, theoretically, not too dangerous.
You see, these scientists would be creating small black holes, the size of a single particle (do NOT ask me how they will do that), not the kind that comes from a collapsing star. This sounds impossible to me, but if there’s one thing I know about quantum physics it’s that nothing is really impossible in the quantum realm.
What this experiment really aims to test is not just the behavior of black holes, but the behavior of information that goes into them, meaning, in this case, wave patterns. The idea that “information is lost forever” in a black hole is baffling to me, a layperson, and frustrating to physicists. They want to see if the information that gets sucked into a black hole goes somewhere … like into a wormhole.
What does this mean for my election coping hopes? Well … It sounds like since this is just a proposal, there is no wormhole to travel through yet. (And that apparently might “kill you” but whatever). If information is destroyed forever in black holes though, maybe we can put Donald Trump’s twitter in there and see what happens!
For now, it’s back to the drawing board for me …
(via Quanta Magazine)
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