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.

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Recently reports on a new result seem to suggest otherwise: ‘Physicists Create the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’ writes for example the New York Times. So have physicists created a wormhole by changing the geometry of spacetime? No, they haven’t. The Nature headline on the same result reads “A holographic wormhole traversed in a quantum computer". Holograms are 2 dimensional images that look 3 dimensional, or more generally they capture all the information of a 3-dimensional object. So does this mean physicists created a hologram of a wormhole, showing that the information of an actual spacetime tunnel can be captured on a surface? No, they haven’t done that either.