Berlin 2014

 In 1995, Shor followed his factoring algorithm with another stunner: proof

(opens a new tab) that “quantum error-correcting codes” exist. The computer scientists Dorit Aharonov(opens a new tab) and Michael Ben-Or(opens a new tab) (and other researchers working independently) proved(opens a new tab) a year later that these codes could theoretically push error rates close to zero. “This was the central discovery in the ’90s that convinced people that scalable quantum computing should be possible at all,” said Scott Aaronson

Fast forward

2014 — three young quantum gravity researchers came to an astonishing realization. They were working in physicists’ theoretical playground of choice: a toy universe called “anti-de Sitter space” that works like a hologram. The bendy fabric of space-time in the interior of the universe is a projection that emerges from entangled quantum particles living on its outer boundary. Ahmed Almheiri

(opens a new tab), Xi Dong(opens a new tab) and Daniel Harlow(opens a new tab) did calculations suggesting that this holographic “emergence” of space-time works just like a quantum error-correcting code. They conjectured(opens a new tab) in the Journal of High Energy Physics that space-time itself is a code — in anti-de Sitter (AdS) universes, at least.