Of all the laws of physics, this is arguably one of the strangest — scientists have discovered that the forces controlling the behaviour of a black hole’s event horizon are also at play in superfluid helium, an extraordinary liquid that flows without friction.
This entanglement area law has now been observed at both the vast scale of black holes and the atomic scale of cold helium, and could be the key to finally establishing the long sought-after quantum theory of gravity — the solution to one of the deepest problems in theoretical physics today.
The fact that an entanglement area law can apply to both black holes and helium “is weird,” says one of the team, physicist Adrian Del Maestro from the University of Vermont, “and it points to a deeper understanding of reality.”
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