One of science’s great challenges is to reconcile the two theories that form the foundation of modern physics. These are quantum field theory, which governs the universe on the smallest scale, and general relativity, which governs the universe on the largest scale. Together these theories accurately describe phenomena over a forty order of magnitude range.
The question that befuddles researchers is: what happens where these theories overlap? In other words, how does gravity behave on a quantum scale? The answer — the nature of quantum gravity--eludes them because it is so subtle and its effect so small, that there is little prospect of observing it with current sensors.
But there is another way to play with quantum gravity: to simulate it on a quantum computer. Now physicists have begun efforts to perform such a simulation and, even though they have yet to simulate quantum gravity itself, they say that the process has revealed a new phenomenon: a way of transmitting classical information perfectly from a chaotic quantum system.
