Hacker News Reader

Comment by radioactivist | Hacker News Reader

Whoever decided to make up the non-existent term "topoconductor" for the purposes of this article deserves to feel shame and embarassment (I say this as a condensed matter physicist).

View on HN

I skimmed through the paper but nowhere did I find a demonstration of a Majorana qubit or a zero mode. The achievement was that they demonstrated a single-shot measurement. That's nice, but where's the qubit? what did I miss?

If you read the referee reports of the Nature paper (they are published alongside it) you'll see some referees echoing similar points.

Reading the PR release that accompanies a scientific paper is a negative information activity. Anything meaningful that can actually be supported by the science done is already in the paper and if you can understand the paper, it will be self evident how you should feel about it.

Any sentence in the press release that isn't VERBATIM in the paper should be viewed as marketing, and unsupported by the science, and there is zero incentive NOT to lie in the PR, especially since the ones writing it are rarely even knowledgeable in the subject matter.

Come for the made-up jargon, stay for the horrific PR abuse of the English language like "Unlocking quantum’s promise"

Do you think this is partly every company now trying to get in on grifting? Just pumping stock with "we're going to mars, we'll have AGI, cold fusion is almost here" kind of stuff?

Genuinely curious: in what ways is that not a good term? Is it because its not a new thing, just marketing? Or is it conflating with some other physics things?

The ideas that underpin their device have been around for some time and aren't called by that name in the literature -- it appears to be entirely a branding exercise. A clear signal to me they don't seriously think it is a good name is that don't use the name outside this article (it appears nowhere in their Nature paper or anywhere else for that matter).

So what is it called then

It's a topological superconductor.

But that's not a good branding name. Would you argue that a mini fridge should only be marketed as a miniature refrigerator? It's a mouthful. Why does the name that's used for branding need to show up in Nature?

Another condmat physicist wondering how this work got so hyped up. Single shot parity measurements are not new.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com