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Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

> Holography implies that you can do that — reconstruct every fold, vessel, and neuron in three dimensions — without actually looking inside. Simply photographing the surface of the brain somehow suffices.

Gah I am not a fan of pop-sci simplifications like this for the sake of a soundbite. The author goes onto explain how no, a picture is not enough, you need to actually measure the distortion of spacetime at the surface. Somebody is going to walk away thinking this stuff is possible, that maybe psychics really can detect something wrong with them.

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This was the low point for me:

> Consider a video game sun passing behind a video game tree. The sun pixels touch the tree pixels directly, yet the tree does not burst into flames. This is because the sun pixels are independent of the tree pixels.

With apologies to Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such an explanation.

lol yikes. Some of the other illustrations quoted seemed OK esp if you already have a layman's understanding of the major concepts... but this just seems.... bad.

I know what you mean and I think you're right, but I take it as the cost of doing business when trying to turn frontier physics into layperson analogies. You're not going to use an analogy to successfully complete a calculation of black hole entropy, you're going to use it to convey the high level intuition that "stuff on inside = stuff on boundary".

Because if we litigate the imperfections of analogies all day long, then you're going to react to videos titled "black holes described at five levels of difficulty" by saying the first four levels were all wrong, which may in a sense be technically true but not in the spirit of the exercise.

It's okay as long as they call it out, but the author doesn't and instead states it like a fact. They could have easily caveated it with "but a magical camera that can see magnetic and gravitational fields" or something. The analogy is fine, but it's not presented as one, so it's not clear how far the analogy actually goes. So the takeaway is "wow technically it's possible!"

It is Quanta, the home of sensationalist oversimplifcations. What did you expect, solid science?

Yes, the rest of the article is pretty good.

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