The Death of Quanta Magazine
mateusaraujo.info
mateusaraujo.info
> "No, scientists haven’t created a wormhole using a quantum computer. They haven’t even simulated one. They simulated some aspects of wormhole dynamics under the crucial assumption that the holographic correspondence of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model holds."
Quanta publishes great, detailed articles - but it's ultimately a general readership magazine, not an academic journal. I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.
But that's the problem. Most people don't understand the underlying science, so they rely on science journalism to distill and explicate complex topics without simplifying and distorting to the point they lose any relationship with the truth. In this case, the writer has failed in their task; they've written a load of nonsense that actively undermines a reader's ability to comprehend the topic—in short, it's bullshit.
But is the distinction between calculation and experiment really specialist knowledge?
More important, however, is that the OP's blog post (as I sense it), is actually mimicking hyperbolic attitude of the article it's complaining about. I suspect that Quanta is not "dead" to the author.
Is this his way of b-slapping the editors?
May be not but just the same it's an overly-prevalent trend nowadays. For instance, New Scientist is notorious for hyping up stories that amount to little more than our current/general understanding of them—and or the Mag's cover stories or articles' headings are often outright misleading. New Scientist didn't do this decades ago (well, certainly not to the same extent).
Then there's the perennial problem of the sweeping statement without references or further explanation: new phenomena, complex processes etc. are just stated as if it was taken for granted that everyone already understands them in the way we understand, say, what a gram is. This is damn annoying as understanding the article hinges on actually understanding these skipped-over points.
It's not only New Scientist but others too including Quanta that engage in the practice but New Sc. is a past master at it. It seems to me the main reason for this is that the many journalists who engage in the practice don't actually understand the matter themselves and this is why they skip over such explanations (and or they're rewriting stories from press releases without first fully researching them, etc.).
Moreover, either editors are asleep at the wheel for allowing the practice and or they're under commercial pressures to print such crap—profit being more important than science news.
The particular details aren't important; the problem is "model of X" is not the same as "X". In this case the model happens to be using a quantum computer, and X happens to be (some specific variety of) wormhole.
A couple of analogies:
Writing `new Particle { mass = 0; charge = 0; spin = 2; }` on a computer does not mean gravitons have been discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton
The UK cannot avoid an economic recession by pouring water into MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
I have been generally impressed with quanta, as they usually try very hard (far more than most of their genre) to actually report accurately. Scientific reporting is hard, the knowledge gaps between reporter, scientists and audience are usually very large and explaining an extremely difficult concept to non-expert audience is very challenging. But this is no excuse to publish outright nonsense and to be honest publishing outright nonsense was not what I was expecting from quanta.
Specifically, he claims a simulation was presented as an experiment.
There’s a difference between a lack of depth and a fabrication.
> relevant specialist knowledge
It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something and actually creating it are different things.
> “death” of the magazine
The above notwithstanding, yes, one execrable article cannot kill a publication.
I also think that there is a difference between modelling something, and sparsifying the model calculations so far that what you have left is 164 steps of 2-bit logic gate operations to a 9-bit register.
Author explains the “death” in the fifth sentence of the opening paragraph.
Perhaps surprisingly, NYTimes did better this time: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-...
They quote Scott Aaronson:
“The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
The net result of all this ad-driven virality madness is the degradation of trust in obscure but important societal contracts: 1) that academics at the cutting edge of human knowledge can self-regulate through peer-review not only the integrity of a piece of work (not an obvious issue in this case) but can also place its importance and relevance against the entire body of prior knowledge and 2) that journalists disseminating scientific / technical information can act as a check and balance to remedy any deficiencies in 1) instead of amplifying and aggravating them
It feels like we have entered a downward spiral of ever more shrill claims competing for attention in world crushed by low-quality information overload.
And, for what it's worth, I do not share your pessimistic outlook. I think a lot of excellent science and science reporting is taking place every day.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-...
I read it in its entirety to see if there was any justification for its write up. As with all tabloid journalism, the caveats are at the end where you find out the "bridge principle" from QC-to-Wormhole requires assumptions that are non-physical.
Everyone is well aware that non-physical assumptions to the equations of physics can produce arbitrary magical effects (eg., perpetual motion, etc.).
The whole structure of the article was something I'd expect from "tabloid science" and I expect Quanta will get a lot of push back from it; and hopefully not do it again.
I'm not sure if they've become more clickbaity or less discriminating, or if it's just me moving on. I'm guessing from the article - however ranty - it's not my imagination.
Original title (dec 1.): "Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" [1]
Current title (dec 2.): "Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" [2]
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221201021130/https://www.quant...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221202022713/https://www.quant...
If we are allowed to base our opinion of a publication on one article, should I declare that Mateus Araújo's blog is dead to me?
Personally, I think it comes from a deep lack within a lot of humans now: they are scared of the future and bored of the present. They want to go to Mars or live out their sci-fi dreams, because they do not have any meaning right now. I won't speculate on the reasons for this, because I'm sure there are many, but the end result is that they are desperate for crazy sounding physics discoveries, because it placates their desire for extreme technological progression. Technology and science have become almost like a God, something people don't understand but that they have faith that it will elevate humanity to a point beyond its current, seemingly stale, state. Of course, where there is a desire for that, media companies will try to fulfil it.
Because the only way to accurately talk about quantum physics is to show the math and only talk about that. The famous "shut up and calculate".
You can't have it both ways, you either accept gross misrepresentations in the popular science press, or you just don't have popular science press.
“Quantum teleportation achieved!”
Hmm, looks like a unitary operator was applied to a tensor product state.
“Virtual particles pop in and out of existence!”
Hmm, looks like a mathematical technique to perturbatively approximate a very large unitary operator.
“Time crystals!!!”
Cool, the unitary operator has some symmetries.
“The cat is dead and alive!”
So the state the unitary operator acts upon can be represented as a mathematically convenient linear combination of two other states. Great?
And AdS/CFT is genuinely fascinating. It’s a type of theoretical construct that’s quite unique in the history of physics. So it’s very hard to talk about it in English sometimes! That’s partly what happened in this Quanta article. AdS/CFT asserts an equality between two very different systems (here, the quantum system is identified with the wormhole) in an extremely complex and nonlinear way. Does this mean that the quantum system is a wormhole? It’s a harder question than it appears on the surface.
A tangle in the interior of a cylinder loses information when viewed on the boundary because you lose a dimension (ie, the shadow cast by string around a light bulb as you see it on the lamp shade). You then have to allocate probabilities to pseudoknot resolutions (ie, guesses about crossings). So you end up with something that looks like continuous geometry on the inside and quantized statistics about interactions on the boundary.
Entanglement looks like taking two filaments in a plasma globe and moving one in a circle around the other. Their ribbons are now tangled. (As a 2+1-D analog.)
Another way of saying it is that the two descriptions are different representations of the same object. There is no projection or information lost in switching between descriptions.
You are correct and I misspoke:
You don’t lose the information, it becomes non-local on the surface — and so if you’re building a model of the interior from a local sampling of the surface, you get a statistical model built on pseudoknots (again, like a shadow from a lamp).
The thread-lamp model isn’t arbitrary; ultimately, we’re looking for some kind of tangle model that rescues geons. So we’re going to need something that looks like continuous tangles on the inside and Feynman diagrams on the outside.
Funny how this is true for basically all of science and yet so many popsci authors get away with it, because the vast majority of the audience will not be experts in the field. If you want the true story you'll always have to read the original paper (though sometimes even Nature lets bs slip through) and absolutely ignore the common media articles about it. Complaining that articles for the masses are not adequate recitations of real research is like complaining that water is wet. It's kind of the whole deal. This stuff is supposed to sound intriguing and generate clicks, not push the research itself ahead or inform real experts.
IMHO Quanta is far from the most respectable source of science news, since their articles tend to be very sensationalist, but in this case Quanta is not to blame, as the article it was published in Nature, but publications in big magazines are becoming more and more political, and less about real science.
These physicists assume a universe with nothing in it, then populate it with physicists and quantum computers and wormholes.
This is like claiming to have the most beatiful differential equations that explain perfectly the weather on earth. You say "ok, let's test these beautiful equations." But it turns out that the equations so beautiful to look at have no perfect solutions. So you need to make absurdly symmetrical assumptions to arrive at a usable solution, like assuming no atmosphere. Then, with no atmosphere your equations explains the earth's atmosphere perfectly well. With beautiful mathematical gimmicks, of course. With an assumption of a universe with nothing in it your equations explain everything in that universe with nothing in it.
Physics is neo-scholasticism powered by the marketing skills of the practitioners. This episode about wormholes proves the corruption of academic physics.
Physics is about models. Some are useful. AdS/CFT is useful. I know this because I spent the time to study it in grad school, rather than dismiss it out of hand.
The positive side effect is that I am reading scientific articles more often since I'm doing this.
Seems like it went much more clickbait than the original article. Nobody reading QM would take that headline literally.
Talk about an overreaction.
This is exactly how I interpreted that part of the video [1], and it makes me feel sad because Quanta is the only kinda pop-science magazine I enjoy reading.
As a lay parson, when it comes to quantum mechanics I have to use my own set of heuristics to identify quackery: this Quanta's video checks almost all my indicators of low quality quantum woo - I don't like to say this about someone's else work but just the aesthetics reminds me to pseudo-scientific documentaries.
If advertising is your business model, then you can make more money with click-baitization. Here's looking at you WAPO and NYT.
If, with good reason, we cannot trust the supposed sources of good information, even HN, then our ability to build common understandings and actions is destroyed. Why, it is almost like our political system would be destroyed.
If you want to destroy an ant colony, the simplest method is just to prevent interfere with the mechanisms they use to collaborate. Single ants, even mobs of ants cannot survive. Of course we are not ants and we can survive even when our systems of collaboration are destroyed.
(fixed phrasing in edit)
See also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/
Though, it seems in this case some scientists who pushed the narrative were dishonest too.
I'll be honest. I found it very hard to read beyond this line. I powered through though.
Here's the tldr: It's a rant about details in one specific article.
But this blog post literally says "The death of Quanta Magazine", and in the same breath talks about "journalistic standards".