It was a cryptic email that Juan Maldacena pinged across the US to fellow physicist Leonard Susskind back in 2013. At its heart lay a single equation: "ER = EPR". The message clicked with its recipient. "I instantly knew what he was getting at," says Susskind. "We both got quite excited." Excited, because that one equation promises to forge a connection between two very different bits of physics first investigated by Albert Einstein almost 80 years ago. Excited, because it could help resolve paradoxes swirling around those most befuddling of cosmic objects, black holes, and perhaps provide a route to a unified theory of physics. Excited, because it might even answer one of the most fundamental questions of all: what is reality made of? The origins of the story lie precisely a century ago. In November 1915, Einstein presented the final form of his revolutionary theory of gravity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The general theory of relativity overturned notions of gravity that stretched back as far as Isaac Newton's day. It said that everything that happens in the cosmos at large - be it an apple falling from a tree on Earth or the distant whirling of a cluster of galaxies - happens because stuff follows invisible contortions in space and time that are caused by the presence of other stuff. Gravity follows from the geometry of a warped space-time.
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机译：2013年，胡安·马尔达塞纳（Juan Maldacena）向美国物理学家伦纳德·萨斯金德（Leonard Susskind）发出了一封密密麻麻的电子邮件。它的核心是一个等式：“ ER = EPR”。邮件及其收件人单击了。萨斯金德说：“我立即知道他在干什么。” “我们俩都很兴奋。”很激动，因为一个方程式有望在两个完全不同的物理学位之间建立联系，这是近80年前由爱因斯坦（Albert Einstein）首次研究的。很激动，因为它可以帮助解决围绕宇宙物体最迷惑的悖论，黑洞，并可能为统一物理学理论提供一条途径。很激动，因为它甚至可能回答所有最基本的问题之一：现实是由什么构成的？这个故事的起源恰好是一个世纪以前。 1915年11月，爱因斯坦向柏林的普鲁士科学院介绍了他的引力理论的最终形式。广义相对论推翻了可以追溯到艾萨克·牛顿时代的重力概念。它说，发生在整个宇宙中的一切，无论是苹果从地球上的一棵树上掉下来，还是远处的星系团旋转，都发生了，因为东西跟随着由其他物质的存在而引起的时空无形的扭曲。东西。重力来自扭曲时空的几何形状。
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