10 Reasons Why Physicists Are Starting To Doubt The Universe Is Real

The universe is not what you think it is. It may not be real in any sense you'd recognize. Not a simulation, something far stranger. Physicists are looking at their own equations and finding that space-time, matter, quantum mechanics, and the laws of physics themselves may be approximations of something that has no name yet. Here are 10 reasons they can't sleep. Number 10, the ER equals sign EPR conjecture. Wormholes and entanglement are the same thing. In 2013, two physicists published a four-page paper that may be the most unsettling thing ever written. Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind, two of the most decorated theorists alive, proposed that quantum entanglement and wormholes are not just similar, they are the same thing. Described by different mathematics, ER refers to the Einstein-Rosen bridge, a wormhole, a tunnel connecting two regions of space-time that are separated by billions of light-years. EPR refers to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, the famous description of entanglement, two particles correlated across any distance instantly. The conjecture, every pair of entangled particles is connected by a microscopic wormhole threading through space-time. Those correlations that appear to fire instantaneously across the universe, they are not transmitted at all. They exist because space-time itself is connected between the particles. Here is the implication. If ER equals EPR, the structure of space, the geometry of the universe, the fabric in which everything exists, is built from quantum entanglement. Space is not a stage. Space is what entanglement looks like when you zoom out. Empty space is not empty. It is a network of microscopic wormholes connecting every particle that has ever interacted. You are sitting inside a geometric structure made of quantum connections. Space is entanglement made visible. That conjecture has accumulated over a decade of theoretical support. It has not been disproved. And if it is correct, the word empty does not mean what you think it means. Number nine, the firewall paradox. Either relativity or quantum mechanics is wrong.