Recent headlines about physicists having created a wormhole using Google’s quantum computer are misleading. Not only did they not create a wormhole in spacetime, the kind that Einstein’s equations suggest is possible, they didn’t even create a hologram of a wormhole, as the original Nature article claimed. Martin Bauer explains what the Sycamore experiment was actually all about.

A ‘wormhole’ is a structure connecting disparate points in space based on special solutions of Einstein’s field equations. It’s a feature of the geometry of spacetime often depicted by a folded paper, bringing distant points in direct contact. Dreams of sending information or even overcoming enormous distances in space by travelling through a tunnel in spacetime have fascinated scientists and science fiction writers since wormholes were first described by Einstein and Rosen in 1935. However, we have never observed such a wormhole, nor is it clear whether they even exist in our Universe.