One hundred years after Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, physicists are still stuck with perhaps the biggest incompatibility problem in the universe. The smoothly warped space-time landscape that Einstein described is like a painting by Salvador Dalí — seamless, unbroken, geometric. But the quantum particles that occupy this space are more like something from Georges Seurat: pointillist, discrete, described by probabilities. At their core, the two descriptions contradict each other. Yet a bold new strain of thinking suggests that quantum correlations between specks of impressionist paint actually create not just Dalí’s landscape, but the canvases that both sit on, as well as the three-dimensional space around them. And Einstein, as he so often does, sits right in the center of it all, still turning things upside-down from beyond the grave.

Like initials carved in a tree, ER = EPR, as the new idea is known, is a shorthand that joins two ideas proposed by Einstein in 1935. One involved the paradox implied by what he called “spooky action at a distance” between quantum particles (the EPR paradox, named for its authors, Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen). The other showed how two black holes could be connected through far reaches of space through “wormholes” (ER, for Einstein-Rosen bridges). At the time that Einstein put forth these ideas — and for most of the eight decades since — they were thought to be entirely unrelated.

But if ER = EPR is correct, the ideas aren’t disconnected — they’re two manifestations of the same thing. And this underlying connectedness would form the foundation of all space-time. Quantum entanglement — the action at a distance that so troubled Einstein — could be creating the “spatial connectivity” that “sews space together,” according to Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University and one of the idea’s main architects. Without these connections, all of space would “atomize,” according to Juan Maldacena, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who developed the idea together with Susskind. “In other words, the solid and reliable structure of space-time is due to the ghostly features of entanglement,” he said. What’s more, ER = EPR has the potential to address how gravity fits together with quantum mechanics.

Not everyone’s buying it, of course (nor should they; the idea is in “its infancy,” said Susskind). Joe Polchinski, a researcher at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose own stunning paradox about firewalls in the throats of black holes triggered the latest advances, is cautious, but intrigued. “I don’t know where it’s going,” he said, “but it’s a fun time right now.”

The Black Hole Wars

The road that led to ER = EPR is a Möbius strip of tangled twists and turns that folds back on itself, like a drawing by M.C. Escher.

A fair place to start might be quantum entanglement. If two quantum particles are entangled, they become, in effect, two parts of a single unit. What happens to one entangled particle happens to the other, no matter how far apart they are.

Maldacena sometimes uses a pair of gloves as an analogy: If you come upon the right-handed glove, you instantaneously know the other is left-handed. There’s nothing spooky about that. But in the quantum version, both gloves are actually left- and right-handed (and everything in between) up until the moment you observe them. Spookier still, the left-handed glove doesn’t become left until you observe the right-handed one — at which moment both instantly gain a definite handedness.

Entanglement played a key role in Stephen Hawking’s 1974 discovery that black holes could evaporate. This, too, involved entangled pairs of particles. Throughout space, short-lived “virtual” particles of matter and anti-matter continually pop into and out of existence. Hawking realized that if one particle fell into a black hole and the other escaped, the hole would emit radiation, glowing like a dying ember. Given enough time, the hole would evaporate into nothing, raising the question of what happened to the information content of the stuff that fell into it.

But the rules of quantum mechanics forbid the complete destruction of information. (Hopelessly scrambling information is another story, which is why documents can be burned and hard drives smashed. There’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents the information lost in a book’s smoke and ashes from being reconstructed, at least in principle.) So the question became: Would the information that originally went into the black hole just get scrambled? Or would it be truly lost? The arguments set off what Susskind called the “black hole wars,” which have generated enough stories to fill many books. (Susskind’s was subtitled “My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics.”)

Eventually Susskind — in a discovery that shocked even him — realized (with Gerard ’t Hooft) that all the information that fell down the hole was actually trapped on the black hole’s two-dimensional event horizon, the surface that marks the point of no return. The horizon encoded everything inside, like a hologram. It was as if the bits needed to re-create your house and everything in it could fit on the walls. The information wasn’t lost — it was scrambled and stored out of reach.

Susskind continued to work on the idea with Maldacena, whom Susskind calls “the master,” and others. Holography began to be used not just to understand black holes, but any region of space that can be described by its boundary. Over the past decade or so, the seemingly crazy idea that space is a kind of hologram has become rather humdrum, a tool of modern physics used in everything from cosmology to condensed matter. “One of the things that happen to scientific ideas is they often go from wild conjecture to reasonable conjecture to working tools,” Susskind said. “It’s gotten routine.”

Holography was concerned with what happens on boundaries, including black hole horizons. That left open the question of what goes on in the interiors, said Susskind, and answers to that “were all over the map.” After all, since no information could ever escape from inside a black hole’s horizon, the laws of physics prevented scientists from ever directly testing what was going on inside.

Then in 2012 Polchinski, along with Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf and James Sully, all of them at the time at Santa Barbara, came up with an insight so startling it basically said to physicists: Hold everything. We know nothing.

The so-called AMPS paper (after its authors’ initials) presented a doozy of an entanglement paradox — one so stark it implied that black holes might not, in effect, even have insides, for a “firewall” just inside the horizon would fry anyone or anything attempting to find out its secrets.

Scaling the Firewall

Here’s the heart of their argument: If a black hole’s event horizon is a smooth, seemingly ordinary place, as relativity predicts (the authors call this the “no drama” condition), the particles coming out of the black hole must be entangled with particles falling into the black hole. Yet for information not to be lost, the particles coming out of the black hole must also be entangled with particles that left long ago and are now scattered about in a fog of Hawking radiation. That’s one too many kinds of entanglements, the AMPS authors realized. One of them would have to go.

The reason is that maximum entanglements have to be monogamous, existing between just two particles. Two maximum entanglements at once — quantum polygamy — simply cannot happen, which suggests that the smooth, continuous space-time inside the throats of black holes can’t exist. A break in the entanglement at the horizon would imply a discontinuity in space, a pileup of energy: the “firewall.”