But... but it's not a wormhole. Not in the usual sense of the word anyway. When I think of a wormhole, I think of a "hole" through spacetime that transfers something from point A to point B by entirely bypassing all the space in between; this is not that at all. It's more like a cloaking device. The magnetic field still travels the whole distance in exactly the same way that it would, it's just not visible to an outside observer. Still super awesome, I just wish they wouldn't use the word "wormhole".

I wish it could become standard operating procedure around here to place quotes around scientifically linkbaiting terms like "wormhole" in article titles, lest they be mistaken for fact.

Also, to save everyone the trouble of getting their hopes up in the future:

- It's not a wormhole. It's never a wormhole.

- Quantum teleportation and quantum entanglement don't mean what you (probably) think they do, and neither allows for faster than light communication anyway. No, not even then.

- It doesn't really make things invisible, it just makes a narrow part of the electromagnetic spectrum difficult to detect under experimental conditions, and that part probably doesn't include visible light.

- It can't really read your thoughts.

- It's (probably) not really artificial intelligence.

- It's not antigravity. It's never antigravity.

- It's not a warp drive. It's never a warp drive.

- They almost certainly didn't get cold fusion working this time.

- All solutions to the Fermi paradox are handwaving nonsense until proven otherwise.

If I read it right, the magnetic field does not "disperse" through the channel; it's as strong at the exit as at the entrance.

It's not a shortcut in the speed-of-light sense, but it does appear to change the topology of space from the field's perspective.

It is disingenuous to call it a wormhole. It would be more accurate to call it a shielded conductor of magnetic field lines.

This is no more a wormhole for magnetism than a coaxial cable is a wormhole for RF signals.

Well, minus that whole wire thing.

When this was reported there the other week (through some summary article), it was unclear to me. I was looking, because my first thought was that if it's actually skipping that space, and if it's instantaneous, isn't that FTL communication? You could encode information in magnetic fluctuations.

Indeed. The light speed limit is only valid when moving through space. If you bypass it, nothing actually stops it from having FTL (Faster Than Light) communications/travel.

To understand wormholes or portals from the Valve game, you can think of our 3D universe as a 2D sheet of paper. You cannot move along the sheet of paper faster than light; however, if you bend the piece of paper, you can make it so that two different points on the sheet touch.

A wormhole is just this pair of points, and finding a way to switch between the two connected pieces of paper. Since those two points are actually in the same location, traveling from one to another should be instantaneous.

It is a hole through space, not through time. Am i right?

From the abstract of the Nature article linked by @comboy below (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep12488):

> the magnetic field from a source at one end of the wormhole appears at the other end as an isolated magnetic monopolar field, creating the illusion of a magnetic field propagating through a tunnel outside the 3D space.

Seems that there's no actual tunneling, just the illusion of tunneling.

The article is in the journal Scientific Reports, not Nature. Nature Publishing Group is the publisher of that journal.

Also, note that Scientific Reports has no requirements for a paper to be super-novel/cool/hot topic, in contrast to the actual Nature journal. Anything which is decent science will get published in SRep; it's NPG's version of PLOS One.

It seems Nature's strategy is working here, since many news outlets and the general public don't seem to be aware of the difference.

Relativity actually tells us what real "holes in space" do. I'm not kidding. And the answer is that they explode as they collapse, releasing massive amounts of energy as the vacuum is disturbed, because any macroscopic spatial distortion is massively, massively energetic, in the sense where all my uses of the word "massive" is not actually metaphorical. Explosions equivalent to rather enormous amounts of mass, as energy.

No, there's no hole through space here.

How would you do a calculation on that (energy from collapsing hole through spacetime)? I've googled to get somewhere but I can't find anything useful.

When taking General Relativity I did that calculation as part of the take-home exam. It's mostly a matter of calculating the curvature tensor of a wormhole and finding that it is freaky, so the energy-momentum tensor that would satisfy the Einstein equation would need to include negative energy and/or momentum (the Einstein equation basically says curvature tensor = energy tensor(1)). Then exactly how the thing would unravel is a matter of computation, but unravel it would.

Or one could presumably find a form of matter that has negative energy density and start building wormholes.

1) The energy tensor has energy as the time diagonal value, and momentum as the space diagonal values.

Protip: googling for the energy required to create such a wormhole is a better solution. That lands you on this BBC story[1] where they've interviewed well-known physicists, and state that

"As a very rough approximation, you would need the energy the sun produces over 100 million years to make a wormhole about the size of a grapefruit."

[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140326-will-we-ever-travel...

So approximately the energy equivalent of the mass of 2 earths.

Seems doable.

Ianahep, but maybe work backwards from gravity vs spacetime equations? I'm assuming gravity is the exchange mechanism that drives this, so if you needed x gravitational field to produce y displacement, then given y displacement you have some energy equivalent of x in mass?

A starting point is "stress-energy tensor" as a keyword to search.

Depends what you mean by a "hole through space"? Yes, its a physical passageway that itself consumes space, like a physical tunnel you would drive your car though. The magnetic field is traveling through space, through a shielded device that also takes up space.

Think of this like Fiber Optics, they are "wormholes" for light, or Electronic wires, they are "wormholes" for electricity. The wormhole is just a metaphor for the illusion.

It would have been insane to open up Hacker News and read "Cloaking device has been invented"...what are we, Romulans?

If you have trouble understanding what "magnetic wormhole" means / what researchers actually did, this figure from the original paper explains it pretty well:

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep12488/figures/1

Note red lines showing magnetic field, how they get cloaked by spherical device, starting on right side, then they re-appear on the left side.

This is the figure they use to show "wormhole", but it's just the figure above with erased spherical cloaking device (which must be physically present, field is still there, just the device hides it):

https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...

And this is how it looks in real life:

http://www.uab.cat/Imatge/758/790/cucweb.jpg

Still very cool, but now you can see it's basically just some sort of shielding of magnetic field that creates distortion of the field on the other end, nothing is getting teleported.

Which is why we didn't just discover FTL communication. The term "wormhole" is a fairly loaded term for the layman. One of those rider concepts is instantaneous.

I am not sure I agree. For the layman, wormholes come in a couple of popular forms, and the most common is the one with a weird energy tunnel thing between the entrance and the exit. The version where the entrance is the exit, such as in the game portal, seems to be much less popularly considered.

Fair enough. It may be more accurate to say one of the rider concepts is they allow FTL.

I guess, is just that to think that FTL matters and ties up with causality means to grok relativity, and causality issues may be a result of a layman physics views of wormholes, but it generally isn't really a part of it.

I think you are making a category error by saying that wormhole is too loaded a term for the layman in this instance. Non-technical people are generally better at dealing with ignoring the details of a metaphor anyway.

Why weren't those excellent pictures in the article? This looks like it should just be called "superconductor for magnetic fields" or "superpermeator"?

Maybe a better description is that this object is "space-shifting" a magnetic field to its opposite end, or playing telephone with magnetic waves.

as @kenbellows said ... it is not a wormhole.

It is an illusion of a wormhole. It is not creating a real path in the space-time. It is a magnetic phenomenon that makes it look as if two points got connected and a magical tunnel was established. Pretty cool experiment, though.

Authors suggest that this illusionary wormhole could also be used to making smaller MRI machines and patients don't have to go through the claustrophobic experience of current machines. Super Awesome .. Giant machine in one room and the patient is sitting on a couch in the other room, and being scanned.

Oooh wait - what if police investigation rooms get designed this way, such that as they ask you questions and from the other room, they are actually scanning your brain for changes in the signal pattern ?? - Crazy idea. Aight, I am re-pivoting as of now. Scanning as a Service...lol

Former cognitive neuroscientist here. In all seriousness, if this technology were dropped in today, it would be hard to use surreptitiously; you still need to immobilize the head to get a good fMRI signal at current speeds.

Also, interpreting a brain scan to determine lying is way beyond our actual abilities (though sadly, there are Indian courts and companies doing just that, despite the warnings of the neuroscience community).

Also, IIRC from "lying experts", there is no such thing as an objective lie. If you have no anxiety about the lie (I think I was reading about Lance Armstrong on this), or you don't think you're lying, you can easily pass a polygraph test.

You can habituate your brain to follow certain patterns even if you do know you're lying. I suspect there will never be a "magic lie detector" with any reliability for people who understand what is happening or take preventative measures.

I heard similar and figured it was a signal to noise problem. In that it was impossible to reliably eliminate false positives (the anxiety of someone normal being polygraphed) while still detecting trained liars (who minimize their anxiety while still lying).

Still better than being inside those incredibly loud machines. I expected a "spinning" noise of some kind, not the jackhammer concerto.

Also, I had no idea courts in India were using that as a detection method; that's insane. I hope to god they don't use it as absolute evidence...

You know that our security services and, more disturbingly, our prosecutors' offices still use the polygraph, right?

Yeah, the polygraph is no better. Homeland Security approached my old prof about building a field lie detector using just a computer and RTs. As part of their visit, they talked about their lie detection abilities, their motion-sensitive chairs, specially-built rooms, and super-investigators. I just rolled my eyes.

ya but when polygraphed .. you are aware that you are getting polygraphed. but secretly scanned from an adjacent room... that my friend is in the realm of science fiction...lol

My point was more that before condemning the Indians, we should remove the log from our own eye.

It's getting there. Polygraphs are still useful to measure ~~psychological~~ neurological response, so we might not see them disappear. I could certainly still find it convincing if corroborated with a psych expert who understands how to read it (and when NOT to draw a conclusion). The idea of discerning a lie with any reliability with a machine and no access to any direct evidence is absurd, though.

sounds like a modern version of the floating = witch test

Sure, and untraceable communications - you put a wire on a spy and they're radio-ing everything home with nothing to indicate it. Battleships get their orders and there's not even a chance of interception, let alone decryption. Do these illusory tunnels bypass things like Faraday cages? What about a ton of mass?

There's a lot of military and consumer applications here, and a ton of potential privacy benefits (an unseen wifi network, who knows -- the list goes on). If you want to get rich off this, brain scanning is not the first market to pursue.

It sounds like you need a physical device between both ends. So you couldn't have untraceable radio-like communication. You would just follow the path of spheres like a wire.

But yeah, if you could teleport a magnetic field across long distances with nothing in between you would get both communication and, probably more interestingly, power transfer (induction charging). Depending on the properties of whatever hypothetical device accomplishes this.

You just made my brain explode. Thank you for enlightening me.

Brain explosions are a definite possible side effect.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but a lay-person's understanding might go like this:

It's like a fiber optic cable, except that instead of light, it transmits a magnetic field, and instead of being a cable, it's a metal ball.

Jesus, this was the biggest letdown from a click bait title to TFA ever.

I don't know, I would have been pretty psyched to click on "Researchers create monopole magnet (kind of.)" Obviously not as useful as wormholes, but it's up there from a "that's physically possible?!!!???111?!" perspective.

"Scientists have created StarGate"

clicks link

"Scientists have developed an incredibly expensive new magic trick"

:/

Possibly. But any clickbait surrounding hoverboards still gets me. :-(

More detailed description: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep12488

I didn't quite get the idea:

> "This consists of a tunnel that transfers the magnetic field from one point to the other while keeping it undetectable – invisible – all the way".

I guess that means generating a magnetic field on A, which can be detected on C, without being detected on an intermediate point B?

> "This technology could, for example, increase patients' comfort by distancing them from the detectors when having MRI scans in hospital, or allow MRI images of different parts of the body to be obtained simultaneously."

So that means placing the detectors away from the patient and making them receive the magnetic field through one of these "wormholes"?

I wondered about the MRI application too. Presumably you couldn't use this for the main bore magnet or gradient coils, so it'd have to be just the detectors. But could you run this "wormhole" thing through a hole in the bore?

I've read over this and I can't figure out if they really did create a magnetic monopole from the end of the sphere, or if that field is still coupled with the other side and it's only monopolar in some virtual or mathematical sense?

I'm kind of suspecting it is the latter, as a magnetic monopole discovery would overshadow their magnetic tunnel/wormhole work, and it's definitely not the focus of the report.

I wonder if they would have similar clicks for calling it a 'magnetic flux conduit' or 'magnetic field hose'. I expect using meta-materials for magnetic shielding will be a bigger deal as really strong magnetic fields are needed for things like fusion reactors, but for now its just an interesting validation that you can cloak a magnetic field using meta materials.

Well, the 'hose' came out 2 years ago: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514201/physicists-build...

Am I correct in saying that this got a "wormhole" label just because the "hose" is shielded??

While magnets and their field are often pictured like this http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/barmag.jpg in reality the field is everywhere like this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Magnet08... so what the "wormhole" does is, it shields the field from the bar magnet inside the sphere, so only the field from the ends of the bar is projected outside, like this https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/201...

The word 'wormhole' suggests to me that there would be no loss of field strength or signal strength, irregardless of the distance in three-dimensional space. A device that could tunnel its magnetic field between, say, Tokyo and New York, with no energy loss -- that's my idea of a wormhole.

This is a horrible and intentionally misleading article. They intentionally dupe the reader to imply it's a real wormhole.

    The overall EFFECT (emphasis mine) is that of a magnetic
    field that appears to travel from one point to another 
    through a dimension that lies outside the conventional 
    three dimensions

If anything in the article were like what it was implying this would be world-shattering news. It's entirely lackluster news by comparison. The author should be ashamed for generating this tabloid.

Since they did not create a wormhole: Doesn’t this submission’s title go against the guidelines?

> […] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

This is what happens when engineers try to be both physicists and marketers. This has nothing to do with an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. They've created a magnetic monopole in space through some cool engineering but don't seem to have any theoretical understanding of why it occurs.

If this really was a wormhole, the MRI machine might suck the patients brain into a different point in spacetime and possibly a different universe.

Some schematics of it would be really helpful.

From what I got the magnetic field from point A is felt at point B even without being able to be measured between those 2 points.

Is that it?

Basically. They put the magnetic source in an shielded sphere, and then somehow moved the field outside of the sphere.

Does the "wormhole" only exist inside the sphere?

I wonder if this could be used for undetectable point-to-point communication?

That is EXACTLY what I'm thinking. I read a few weeks back about how superconductors allow the free-flow of electricity without any loss of power, couple that with this shielding and you could (in theory) create a completely secure form of communication (during transit, not necessarily secure at the endpoints).

If the effect at the interface point of two spheres leaks similarly little field one could imagine a chain of these invisibility conducting huge magnetic fields with no loss or external effects along its path.

A new kind of lossless transmission line, perhaps? That would be a big deal if so. Such a line would also be immune to the effects of space weather, since the field along the tunnel does not interact with any exterior field.

Isn't that exactly what a shielded coax cable does?

Is it possible to have one of these "wormholes" with one entrance and two exits?

Two girls, one wormhole?

quick. stop. look.

its some sensationalism!!!!

could you get a faster then light signal through this magnetic wormhole?

Disclaimer: I am not a physicist.

I really doubt it. People are fairly convinced that faster-than-light communication can't happen -- and if it can, it's going to take a bigger change than this.

If wormholes are theoretically possible and allow for some sort of FTL communication by joining two points in space, then I thought perhaps the same goes for magnetic wormholes.

problem is it's not really a wormhole, so no FTL yet

> faster then light signal

afaik, causality is still a strong axiom, so no.

> causality is still a strong axiom

The "causality axiom" is a nice (or trivial) statement in philosophy. But as far as we know, there's no such axiom in any mathematical theory proved to match physical reality, and nothing so clear cut in modern theoretical physics at all afaik...

Also, physics isn't that much built on axioms, in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaUlqXRPMmY (Summarizing Feynman: you still get from time to time cases where you can prove something from "axioms", but then you also find it to still hold in contexts where the axioms don't apply, or even to not work in others where they do apply... and the latter is the case where you have to remake your theory to match reality)

But my main point is that considering something impossible simply because our puny ape brains can't fathom them is preposterous!

Causality is needed as an axiom because if it does not hold, then it means that the result of an experiment could be depend of something happening in the future. That means that we could not have reproducible experiment anymore for instance.

And that would be extremely _surprising_, but there's nothing preventing the universe from being surprising to us.

(We'd still have reproducible experiments and so forth in every context that didn't involve whatever extremely weird circumstances would produce causality violations -- and the circumstances would certainly have to be extremely weird.)

Real world experiments aren't 100% perfectly reproducible already, and this would be a very marginal worsening.

  Scientists in the Department of Physics at the 
  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have designed 
  and created in the laboratory the first experimental 
  wormhole that can connect two regions of space 
  magnetically.

  > magnetically

Come on.

I don't understand what you're objecting to.

Perhaps you're implying that they're leading you on with implications of something really impressive and then the last word lets you down? But 'magnetic' is the first word in the title, so that doesn't make any sense.

The transfer of unseen magnetic force, across space, in this manner, does not constitute a "worm hole", and is clearly a "force field" instead, which is slightly less exciting.

If we were reading an X-men comic book, and Magneto's abilities were conflated as "worm holes", everyone would cry foul.

I object to the misuse of a well-known science fiction term as click-bate.