![]() To find out, we would need a theory for the quantum properties of space, which – despite 80+ years of search – we still don’t have. While large wormholes can’t exist in our universe because they would close immediately, what wormholes would do in the quantum realm, no one really knows. We also know that Einstein’s theory of gravity contains wormholes that are shortcuts between places which appear far away. Entanglement doesn’t allow non-local transfer of information, but it tells us that the familiar locality of balls rolling down inclined planes isn’t all there is to say. This “entanglement,” as it’s called, is what gives quantum computers their edge. First, we know that quantum effects can create strong non-local connections between particles. My colleagues in physics are speculating about this for several reasons. The universe would only seemingly be large, an illusion born out of our limited perception. This way, two places we think are at opposite ends of the universe might be very close to each other. But they would still connect space with itself. These non-local connections would have to be very small tough, too small for us, or even elementary particles to go through – otherwise we’d have noticed already. It could be that space itself has many more connections than we observe, non-local ones, not unlike portals: You go in one end and are instantaneously teleported to a different place. If it doesn’t, then that could have profound consequences. We’re not sure that locality remains valid in the subatomic realm. It’s not only that we don’t understand why the universe respects locality. And it’s among those we understand the least. In physics, we call this “locality.” It’s one of the most basic properties of nature. They fed the computer program hours of videos and it learned, among other things, that objects don’t spontaneously disappear, they always continuously move from one place to nearby places. Researchers at the Google-owned company DeepMind recently taught physics to an artificial intelligence. But what if the universe isn’t as big as it seems? Everything is connected For most physicists, this is the end of the story. This means if the universe is thinking, it isn’t thinking very much. And the capacity of the universe to connect with itself decreases with its expansion, so it’ll go downhill from hereon. If we leave the long-range connections entirely aside, that’s about as much as our brain does in 3 minutes. This means that, optimistically, the universe might have managed about 1000 exchanges between its nearest neurons since the Big Bang. And sending a single signal to our nearest neuron, the galaxy cluster M81, would take about 11 million years at least. This means if one side of the hypothetical universe-brain wanted to at least take note of its other side, that would take 90 billion years even at the speed of light. The universe, in contrast, is presently some 90 billion light years in diameter, and – as Albert Einstein taught us – nothing travels faster than the speed of light. #Time out sports zipBut the brain is small and it takes only fractions of seconds for signals to zip around in it. The signals in our brain travel at about 100 meters per second, a million times slower than the speed of light. Most of these signals (80%) are short-distance, going only about 1 millimeter, but about 20% are long-distance, connecting different parts of the brain. Neurons in the human brain send about 5-50 signals per second. Another important difference is that it takes a long time for signals to cross the universe. ![]()
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