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Comment by lioeters | Hacker News Reader

Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical.

> The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness. Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend.

At some point these physicists crossed over into a very specialized form of poetry, a game of language.

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You can just call it second stabilizer Rényi entropy or non-stabilizerness if you find "magic" strange and prose is more your flavor than poetry.

Strange quarks[1] are not magic. :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark

Actually "non-stabilizerness" does describe it better than "magic".

> In quantum information theory, magic is a property that quantifies the computational resources needed to describe quantum states beyond stabilizer states.

> In 2024–2025, quantum magic was detected in top quark pairs produced at the Large Hadron Collider; it is the first observation of this property in fundamental particle collisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(quantum_information)

And "second stabilizer Rényi entropy" is even better, it's exactly the kind of technical term I'd prefer, that describes what it means.

> One measure of quantum magic is the stabilizer Rényi entropy of order α such that..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9nyi_entropy#Stabilizer_...

Is it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)

> The thaum is the basic unit of magic. The thaum is made up of so called resons, which are themselves made up of at least five flavours including up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.

400 billion dollars and a portal to hell later scientists discover evidence of the elusive spearmint.

Time crystals, AFAIK, are actually descriptive: they're crystals in the sense that they produce regularities through occupying the lowest energy state - they just do that in time, not just space.

So is Holographic principle in physics. Describing 3 representing 3 dimensional object in 2 dimensional surface is what holography is.

Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.

Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.

You mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...

Maybe it is easier to get funding with catchy and/or mysterious names?

Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. The potential confusion around Magic seems much greater, although when you consider the vastly more common opposite effect, where specific scientific terms become popular and quickly gain wholly different colloquial meanings, perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…

Should call the next big physics thing doubtscumbagium...

> Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop.

What is "overextended" imho is an actual understanding of what these phenomena really are. Previously, we had some sense of what we meant by e.g. field or atom or electron, quantum, ...

So yea, if we don't know enough about the thing we're naming, we might as well pull random strings out of a hat and in that case "pop, snap, crackle, strange, charm, fifi, doodoo, woof, & meow" (note these latter 4 are my contributions to advancements of human understanding btw /g) are good enough!

Color charge and the strange and charm quarks are not post-quantum theoretical physics, are they?

There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.

That stuff is after Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. When I mentioned quantum mechanics, these are the physicists I had in mind.

Meanwhile, on HN: "Don't use yarn, use bun it's written in zig!"

Most of the crazy names come from before "quantum" was co-opted by a lot of BS. I don't blame those physicists for naming things that way because the coopting was inevitable. However, we are now decades into that process, and it is inconceivable that the authors choosing the name "magic" are unaware of it. Which means they are doing it with knowledge beforehand, and they should know this is a bad idea.

It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time.

And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?

I can sort of appreciate these shenanigans as short-lived common room humor, but I find it obnoxious to put it in the official terminology.

It's bad enough all the corporations trying to steal perfectly active words for their brand names or products.

It's older than that. Atoms have neither orbitals, nor shells. Neither describes a probability field at various energy levels surrounding the nucleus.

Analogies aid understanding, even if on an abstract level.

Ghosts are also a thing in quantum field theory

And slavery, unfortunately. (Slave variables, slave bosons, etc.)

As all programmers know: naming things (abstracting ideas for human interpretation) is hard.

we had "god particle" too …

To be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».

Is that really where the name came from? I remember being struck by how dumb that was and thought “a journalist must have come up with that”.

I've heard that story and it doesn't ring true to me. It's not that aggravating to find. Try measuring a neutrino mass, which is still an open problem and looks as if it will remain so for a very long time.

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