The article talks about the AdS-CFT correspondence - the very pretty mathematical insight that sometimes you can take certain complicated "strong coupling" problems (say gravitational problems) in 3d and map them mathematically to simpler (weakly coupled) problems about variables that live on the 2d boundary of that 3d volume. I've mentioned this before as a trendy idea that's being applied to some condensed matter problems, though this is not without criticism.
Anyway, the article then says that there is deep high energy theory work going on looking at what happens if you mess with quantum entanglement of the degrees of freedom on that boundary. The claim appears to be that, in some abstract limit that I confess I don't understand, if you kill entanglement on the boundary, then spacetime itself "falls apart" in the 3d bulk. First question for my readers: Can anyone point to a genuinely readable discussion of this stuff (tensor networks, etc.) for the educated non-expert?
Then things really go off the deep end, with claims that entanglement between particles is equivalent to an Einstein-Rosen wormhole connecting the particles. Now, I'm prepared to believe that maybe there is some wild many-coordinate-transformations way of making the math describing entanglement look like the math describing some wormhole. However, the theorists quoted here say things that sound stronger than that, and that's completely crazy. I can create entangled photons in a lab with a low-power laser and a nonlinear crystal, and there is no way that this is physically equivalent to creating highly curved regions of spacetime and nontrivially altering the topology of spacetime. Can someone explain to me whether the theoretical claims are like the former (there is some formal mathematical similarity between entangled particles and wormholes) or the much more extreme statement?