'The bad news is, we're not describing the theory of everything. 'So in a way, there's bad news and good news in our paper,' he said.

What's more, these statements are precise and experimentally provable, unlike previous suggestions for ways to test string theory, Duff says. When he looked into it, the mathematical formulation of three entangled qubits turned out to be exactly the same as the description of a certain class of black holes. 'As I listened to his talk, I realized the kind of math he was using to describe qubit entanglement was very similar to mathematics I had been using some years before to describe black holes in string theory,' Duff said. When two qubits are entangled, changing one's state influences the state of the other, even when they're physically far apart. Two or more qubits can sometimes be intimately connected in a quantum state called entanglement. Qubits form the backbone of quantum information theory, which could lead to things like ultrafast computers and absolutely secure communication. But although string theorists can't test the big idea, they can use this vision of the world to describe natural phenomena like black holes.įour years ago, while listening to a talk at a conference in Tasmania, Duff realized the mathematical description string theorists use for black holes was identical to the mathematical description of certain quantum systems, called quantum bits or qubits. Unfortunately, there's no way to know if this picture is real.

Physics strings theory