Ode to ER=EPR

Lyrics

[Intro]Stanford. June, 2013.Three in the afternoon on a Tuesday.The blinds cut the California light into bars on the floor.It smells like old chalk from a different proof,and the sharp chemical tang of a fresh dry-erase marker.[Verse 1]Two papers, born a few months apart.Physical Review, 1935.The first one, a paradox. A spooky connection at a distance.Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, arguing with the quantum world.The second, a geometry. A bridge, a fold in the fabric.Einstein and Rosen, building a shortcut no one could take.Two different kinds of impossible,sleeping side-by-side in the archive for seventy-eight years.[Chorus]And then Leonard Susskind stands at the board.Juan Maldacena watches, and he nods.And the equation lands, small and quiet as dust.ER equals EPR.The spooky link is a wormhole.The entanglement is the geometry.The secret that holds you togetheris the shortest path through spacetime.[Verse 2]The postdocs are quiet, holding their breath.Watching two ghosts from 1935,finally introduced in a sun-drenched room.One particle here, one at the edge of the galaxy.Their shared secret isn't a message sent faster than light.It is the shape of the space between them.It is the tunnel they are.[Chorus]ER equals EPR.The spooky link is a wormhole.The entanglement is the geometry.The secret that holds you togetheris the shortest path through spacetime.[Bridge]And you, spinning up, you don't know you're a bridge's mouth.You just feel his state, spinning down, instantly.And he doesn't know he's the other side of a tunnel.He just knows you are his un-erasable twin.Across the cold dark, a connection that isn't a journey.The universe doesn't build roads for things that were never apart.It just ties a knot once, at the beginning of time.[Outro]The marker clicks shut. A sound like a lock turning.The dust motes dance in the light.The conjecture waits.arXiv:1306.0533.Cool horizons.A quiet room in June, and the map of space is redrawn.