For most of the twentieth century, wormholes lived comfortably in the realm of thought experiments and science fiction screenplays. They were theoretically permitted by Einstein’s general relativity, sure, but few physicists expected them to be physically meaningful in any practical sense.
That perception has been shifting. A wave of research connecting quantum entanglement to the geometry of spacetime has pushed wormholes back into serious scientific conversation. The implications, if the underlying ideas hold up, reach far beyond any single discovery.
What a Wormhole Actually Is
A wormhole, in the strictest physics sense, is a hypothetical tunnel connecting two separate regions of spacetime. The concept emerged from the mathematics of general relativity, first formalized by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935, which is why they’re also called Einstein-Rosen bridges.
The original versions were unstable and essentially useless for travel or information transfer. They would collapse faster than anything, even light, could pass through them. The modern conversation around wormholes is considerably more nuanced than that early picture.
The ER Equals EPR Conjecture
In 2013, physicists Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind proposed something striking: that Einstein-Rosen bridges and quantum entanglement might be the same phenomenon described in two different languages. The conjecture is shorthand as ER equals EPR, connecting the initials of Einstein-Rosen with Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, the authors of the famous 1935 entanglement paper.
The idea suggests that when two particles are quantum entangled, they may be connected not just statistically but through an actual geometric structure in spacetime. It’s a profound claim, and while it remains a conjecture rather than a proven theorem, it has driven a substantial amount of theoretical work over the past decade.
Quantum Gravity and the Fabric of Space
One of the central puzzles in modern physics is reconciling general relativity, which governs large-scale gravity and spacetime, with quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of particles at the smallest scales. These two frameworks are extraordinarily successful individually but deeply incompatible when pushed to their limits together.
The emerging picture from researchers working on quantum gravity suggests that spacetime itself might be built from entanglement. Rather than being a smooth, pre-existing backdrop, space could be something that emerges from the quantum connections between microscopic degrees of freedom. Wormholes, in this picture, aren’t exotic tunnels punched through space. They might be a fundamental feature of how space is stitched together.
The 2022 Wormhole Simulation Experiment
In late 2022, a team using Google’s Sycamore quantum processor published results in the journal Nature describing what they called a wormhole simulation. The researchers used a simplified holographic model of gravity to create two entangled quantum systems and pass information between them through what they described as a traversable wormhole-like dynamic.
The experiment was careful to note that no actual spacetime wormhole was created. The processor simulated the quantum behavior predicted by wormhole physics rather than opening a physical tunnel. Still, the fact that quantum hardware could meaningfully model these dynamics was considered a genuine step forward, even as some physicists pushed back on the language used to describe it.
Holography and the Role of Black Holes
Much of the current theoretical framework draws on the AdS/CFT correspondence, a mathematical relationship developed by Maldacena in 1997. It links a theory of gravity in a higher-dimensional space to a quantum field theory living on its lower-dimensional boundary, essentially suggesting the two descriptions are equivalent.
Black holes play a central role in these discussions. When two black holes are entangled in this holographic framework, their interiors can be geometrically connected, forming something that behaves like a wormhole. The connection between black hole thermodynamics, entanglement entropy, and spatial geometry has become one of the most active frontiers in theoretical physics over the past several years.
Why Traversable Wormholes Remain Deeply Problematic
Even within this more optimistic theoretical climate, physically traversable wormholes face serious obstacles. Most wormhole solutions that remain stable require exotic matter with negative energy density, something that has no known physical realization at macroscopic scales. The amounts required tend to be enormous relative to what any known process could produce.
There are also deep issues with causality. A traversable wormhole connecting two regions of spacetime could, under certain configurations, allow for closed timelike curves, essentially loops that allow effects to precede their causes. Whether nature actually forbids this or whether it simply hasn’t been observed yet remains an open question. Most physicists consider traversable wormholes for human-scale travel implausible, not because the math prohibits it entirely, but because the physical requirements appear wildly out of reach.
Where the Research Stands in 2026
The theoretical landscape has matured considerably. Researchers are no longer simply asking whether wormholes could exist in principle. They’re probing whether wormhole-like structures are genuinely encoded in quantum information, and what that would mean for understanding spacetime at its most fundamental level.
Quantum computing is increasingly a tool in this investigation, allowing physicists to run simulations of holographic models that would be analytically intractable by hand. The path from these simulations to any experimental verification in actual spacetime remains long and uncertain. Still, the questions being asked now are sharper and more specific than they were even a decade ago.
A Quiet Revolution in How We Think About Space
What makes the wormhole research of the past few years genuinely interesting isn’t the prospect of tunneling across the galaxy. It’s the deeper possibility that the geometry of spacetime is not fundamental at all, but something emergent, built from quantum information and entanglement at a level we’re only beginning to probe.
If spacetime is woven from entanglement, then the distinction between “here” and “there” might be less absolute than it appears. That isn’t a claim physics has proven. It’s a direction the math keeps pointing toward, and it’s compelling enough that serious researchers are devoting careers to following it.
The honest summary is this: wormholes almost certainly won’t be delivering interstellar travelers any time soon. What they might be delivering, slowly and carefully, is a new understanding of what space and time actually are. That’s a quieter payoff than the science fiction version, but in the long run, it may be the more important one.
