This is a very cool and important result. Here's a rough analogy to what's happening. You take two drums, and you hit one of them. Then you wait for a while. Af

This is a very cool and important result. Here's a rough analogy to what's happening. You take two drums, and you hit one of them. Then you wait for a while. After waiting, you hook up a special kind of wire between the drums, and then quickly unhook it. Then, you wait the same amount of time again. And bizarrely, you hear the original sound coming from the other drum! How did this happen? It seems like no wire would be capable of moving the excitation from one to the other in a clean way. But if the system is set up correctly, it's because your "drums" obey identical mathematics to a pretty interesting gravity setup. Each drum individually represents a region of space, and the two spaces are initially unconnected. The wire is a way of establishing a traversable wormhole between them. These wormholes are very unstable, so to actually send something through it is a delicate affair. But with the right kind of entanglement, you can send the excitation through, to emerge on the other side after a propagation delay. (Nothing is happening "faster than the speed of light", though, even in the gravity setup. It takes time to pass through the wormhole. It's tricky to show there's no problems with causality, but the "wire" is already messing with the ordinary story about causality, so it does all work out.) This is a lovely example of how string theory, via AdS/CFT, can produce fascinating insights into the nature of spacetime. It's an extremely nontrivial bit of stringy math that leads to this connection between quantum mechanics and gravity. Of course, if one's prior is "string theory can never be useful for anything", it makes sense to downplay the importance of the result. I think that's a shame--AdS/CFT is an extraordinarily fascinating and powerful tool. (I didn't know this result was coming out today, but I did talk excitedly about the possibility of this experiment earlier this week on this very website! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33735328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33735328 )