Back in 1973, American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler distilled the essence of general relativity into a single, elegant thought: space tells matter how to move, and matter tells space how to curve. For Einstein, gravity is geometry rather than a force; a massive object warps the fabric of spacetime like a bowling ball on a mattress, causing other objects to roll into the resulting dip. While the imagery is graceful, it contains a fatal flaw. When a star collapses into a black hole, the "dent" tears through the mattress, and Einstein’s equations break down. To resolve these extremes, physicists spent decades searching for a quantum theory of gravity that could construct spacetime from fundamental particles while still following Wheeler’s rules.
A breakthrough arrived in the late 1990s with the holographic principle. Juan Maldacena, Edward Witten, and others demonstrated that an entire three-dimensional universe could be encoded within interacting particles on its two-dimensional boundary—much like a flat holographic sticker creates the illusion of depth. It was later discovered that quantum entanglement acts as the connective tissue holding this geometry together. Severing the "threads" of entanglement between two regions causes the bridge between them—such as a wormhole—to thin and eventually vanish. This solved the first half of Wheeler’s puzzle: entanglement provides the stage for matter to move across. However, the second half remained elusive, as matter in these models failed to warp space; the bowling ball sat on the mattress without leaving a single mark.
Recently, the missing ingredient was finally identified. Several research groups, including one led by Charles Cao at Virginia Tech, discovered that a specific quantum property known as "magic" is responsible for spacetime's elasticity. This parameter measures a system's true quantum nature and indicates how difficult it is to simulate its state on a classical computer. The term was originally coined in 2004 by physicists Alexei Kitaev and Sergey Bravyi. According to their theory, "magic" stems from non-Clifford gates, the very components that give quantum computers their massive advantage over classical machines. Cao colorfully describes magic as "fabric softener" for the texture of space. As Caltech’s John Preskill, a collaborator on the new study, observed, things are simply too basic without magic—and quantum spacetime is far more complex.
Understanding gravity's role requires looking at quantum error-correcting codes, which protect fragile information in quantum computers by spreading it across multiple qubits. Roughly a decade ago, Daniel Harlow and others showed that holography follows this same internal logic. But older "stabilizer" codes strictly partitioned entanglement between space and matter, preventing them from influencing each other. The resulting space was perfect but entirely inert. The solution arrived in 2026 with a new generation of codes developed by Cao, Preskill, and their colleagues; these are saturated with non-Clifford gates and are thus "magical." This magic finally allows the entanglement of space and the entanglement of matter to interact, causing space to curve in response to mass. Cao remains cautious about the results, noting the code is still extremely general and does not yet account for our specific universe or the flow of time. "This gives us a precursor to gravity," he says, adding that they are currently at "step 0.5 out of 5."
Even at this early stage, a beautiful and unexpected picture is emerging. Two fundamental properties of quantum mechanics—entanglement and magic—correspond precisely to two primary traits of space: its shape and its flexibility. This suggests that space itself is one of the most "quantum" things imaginable. Furthermore, gravity appears to emerge from imperfections in the coding process: magic-free codes protect information perfectly and produce a gravity-free, inert space, whereas real gravity arises from the "leakage" or mixing of encoded data. To push the metaphor to its limit, the physicist Bartek Czech of Tsinghua University joked that this slight "sloppiness" in the code is the ultimate reason Newton’s apple fell to the ground.
