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Abstract
(Developing a quantum theory of gravity for our own Universe is one of the biggest open problems in physics.) "It's a test of quantum-gravity ideas on a real lab experimental test bed," says Maria Spiropulu, a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who led the study. (Physicists soon realized that even if wormholes exist, they are unlikely to allow anything like the interstellar travel that features in science fiction.) Because the latest teleportation experiment used an exotic toy universe, it didn't simulate anything resembling the kind of wormhole that could conceivably exist in our Universe, as suggested by Einstein and Rosen. The theory tested on the Google processor "only has a very tangential relationship to any possible theories of quantum gravity in our Universe", says Peter Shor, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.