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Comment by sirclueless | Hacker News Reader

To someone who doesn't actually know many of the terms here, it sounds like they didn't accomplish much. They defined a stronger form of locality called "bi-locality" and found a way to violate it.

The structure of the argument is, "We stood up a strawman and knocked it down," which sounds pretty weak. Is bi-locality an inherently interesting property? Does all classical computation follow it? I don't know enough to know if I care, but press releases tend to oversell so my default stance has to be "No, I don't really care."

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>The structure of the argument is, "We stood up a strawman and knocked it down," which sounds pretty weak.

Weaker than "I don't understand what the paper says, only read a high level layman summary, not sure even what what the experiment was for, but I'm gonna piss on it anyway"?

Even assuming what you already describe, the ability to show bi-locality as a new lower bound above which locality constraints apply, is very interesting, and nothing like a strawman.

It would only be a strawman if they claimed they violated locality in general.

It's amazing how so many people on the internet feel so confident in their own intellectual abilities that they can read something that they don't understand and dismiss it as if it's non-important.

That's funny, I read his comment as I don't understand this, it sounds lame, can someone please explain the import for me as I trust this source wouldn't be pushing lame crap.

That is, he was giving credit as respect to the researchers.

A lot of science news is sensationalist nonsense spun out of university press departments and that the most overhyped stuff also tends to get the most coverage. I think it's actually fair to look at something you may or may not understand fully and if your gut feeling says "this doesn't seem important", discount its importance significantly. In this case, OP was even explicitly asking whether or not someone more knowledgable agreed with their asssessment.

> Weaker than "I don't understand what the paper says, only read a high level layman summary, not sure even what what the experiment was for, but I'm gonna piss on it anyway"?

Come on. Parent was saying what it looked like to a layman, and then asking for someone to address that and ask what was actually going on. No need to "piss on [him]".

Well, the parent also wrote "it sounds like they didn't accomplish much" and that the structure of their argument is a strawman -- without qualifications.

The way I read it, the qualifications were implicit through the questions he followed up with; and the whole point of the 'strawman' was that he wanted help to get a better understanding than the obviously wrong impression he got from his 'layman' reading of the article.

That isn't the structure of the argument at all. If you don't understand the terms, how did you manage to conclude it was a strawman?

They took an prediction of existing theory that violates a weaker form of locality (i.e. demonstrated stronger non-locality), and realized it experimentally. They also didn't invent bilocality in any case.

Your take makes it sound like "we had this awesome idea! but we tested it and we were wrong." I have no idea if you're correct, but that is indeed how science should work.

I think the actual argument is the converse: "We had this awesome idea! We tested it and we were right!" (In this context "violations" are the desired experimental result.)

It rests on whether bi-locality is an empirically interesting property. And as it turns out there are some well-cited theoretical physics papers on the interest in this property for quantum networks [1], so it is likely that I am not the right audience for this press release, and a physicist might find this significantly more interesting.

[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=bilocality+bell%27s+ine...

Nah, locality is expected to be violated. Bell test experiments have proven this for like forever, and rather recently a very accurate test with very few loopholes was conducted too.

They used a new kind of locality and proved it was broken too. Interesting, but not groundbreaking.

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