16 ms·

Publicity Stunt Fallout

286 points by jjgreen 4y ago

PaulHoule 4y ago
It's got about as much scientific validity as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFp09nS5sM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFp09nS5sM
- peteradio 4y ago
  Yea leave Sliders out of this Paul.
- carabiner 4y ago
  Paul.
trynewideas 4y ago
If you lack context, see Peter Woit's previous blog post: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209 And Ars: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-make-a-real-wormhole-what-they-did-was-still-pretty-cool/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-...
dkural 4y ago
String Theory, "It from (Qu)bit", etc. have been putting out a large amount of B.S. for many years now, and the hype itself became so common that, to compete with other B.S. the hype has now become over-the-top blatant nonsense. Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc. We need to make science actively painful (cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity, make sure no one wants to date them etc.) so it only attracts people in it for the right reasons :)
- karencarits 4y ago
  > Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc. And the administration loves them for it! And they will happily book expensive influencers and self-made media personalities to arrange workshops and courses in how to present your research in the simplest and most emotional ways - to maximize engagement and outreach. It's almost funny to see the disbelief in researchers' eyes when the extroverted influencer brings them the microphone and asks: ignore for a moment the specifics of your research, what are the three qualities that makes YOU unique and special?
- constantcrying 4y ago
  One commenter on that article points out that there is a symbiotic relation between scientists, the press and the public. All of them desire spectacular results and there is little incentive to ever play down a paper. The result is that scientists "polish" their results when communicating to the press, who again make sure that it "sounds good". In the end the public usually gets the truth only in so far as "could" means "there is a low but nonzero chance of this ever working, but only if there are massive engineering efforts and many more breakthroughs and economic and resource incentives line up right". Putting scientists into the media game, instead of isolating them was a grave mistake. It even creates competition for gtants, based on how "flashy" the results are.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    In the realm of technology, scientists are the idea guys. Lots of good ideas out there. But you need entrepreneurs and engineers and capital in order to see if it is something that will be useful to the public. It may takes years of work, PhDs, and lots of research costs to get the findings (idea), but in the end ideas themselves are cheap.
- tppiotrowski 4y ago
  Long gone is the age of self-funded aristocrat scientists who experimented to satisfy their curiosity. Curious if there's any renowned independent scientists producing research at home and sharing directly online (bypassing universities and journals)
  - zmachinaz 4y ago
    Might go back to this model over time. Guess it is no secret that academia is in strong decline. Lot of excellent people just don't bother anymore to enter that circus. They might do their own independent research after they succeeded financially.
    - boringg 4y ago
      Too expensive to get access to what is needed for independent research.
      - birdman3131 4y ago
        It is possible to do surprising amounts on a shoestring budget. Ive seen cheap (Sub $1k) electron microscopes go up for sale. As well as a ton of other lab equipment.
      - zmachinaz 4y ago
        Do you think research equipment was cheap during the time of "aristocrat scientists" ? The point being here "after they succeeded financially".
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Isn't all the science that is possible to do "at home" already done?
    - gus_massa 4y ago
      Most of it, but there are some corners. For example, high temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986 [1]. The process is not so complicated, and can be done at home. Well, at least in a very good personal lab, for example see this video by Applied Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU I think the original team made like 100 samples using different metals and different oxygen proportion. Discovering the first one requires some brute force that needs a small team, and is too much for a single person. Anyway, it doesn't look too far away from something a single person can discover. [1] That's 36 year ago. I'm feeling old...
- disentanglement 4y ago
  > cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity I can't even begin to describe how overjoyed I am to finally have found a fellow campaigner for implementing the glorious techniques of Maoist China in dealing with free thought.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    There is a big difference between free thought and making false claims, scientific or otherwise.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      There’s no difference when the person with the gun is deciding what’s true.
      - mistermann 4y ago
        A gun can override the difference, but the difference itself remains.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Case #1,209,096 of how when Americans do (or propose doing) something, it's somehow China's fault.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Considering string theory's historical origins come from solving real physics problems this strikes me as rude and aggressive. No comment on the quantum computing, don't know anything about it.
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  String theory as it currently exists is very different to how it started. The original use case was actually as a precursor to the current model for partons: QCD. (Side note: there is still another theory in QCD research that is used, called the Lund string model, but it is not related to string theory and should not be compared. I just bring it up for completeness) This is not to say that I disagree with being more critical of science initiatives, but that heavy-handed approaches like jail and social punishment are not the silver bullet you may think they are. Theories get repurposed very frequently between departments and the relationship between a line of enquiry and the results it may produce is not always linear. Really, science communication (especially from news outlets) itself should be defunded, as it misrepresents the topics discussed. In its place, (structured, public) science EDUCATION should be funded.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
Discussion here about the claim of the wormhole https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764
echelon 4y ago
These researchers are trying really hard to start a Quantum Winter. It's already looking pretty grim, but lying about results is a sure way to accelerate the decrease in funding for their departments and bring about professional repercussions.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  "Quantum" is losing its magic. The researchers in the field really over-promised, and so far they have delivered almost nothing to show for it on general-purpose computing problems. 15 was factored some time ago, and the record number that has been factored with Shor's algorithm as of 2022 is 21. Personally, I think D-wave and the other attempted Ising machines took the right approach: use quantum computing to solve problems that are essentially reducing to energy minimization of a system.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Exponential curves look really boring, until they aren't.
    - mdorazio 4y ago
      Can you show us this exponential curve?
      - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
        dekhn 4y ago
        that's just a sigmoid where you haven't reached the upper asymptote yet
        4y ago
zmachinaz 4y ago
At its start, the quanta magazine was a good read. But, it degraded very quickly after they started to use it mainly to put scientists from under-represented groups into the spot light. Nowadays not worth any attention.
paganel 4y ago
This bit form Sabine Hossenfelder's comment is something that I've personally also started to think about lately: > It’s easy enough to address the problem: Give every scientist a basic education on the sociology and philosophy of science, and social and cognitive biases. Granted, I'm not a scientist, but even from the very far outside (i.e. the position from where I'm writing this comment) one can see that that knowledge about the "sociology and philosophy of science" seems to be lacking in today's scientific community.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  At least zetetic courses are already available in some universities as one of the options undergraduates can pick...
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  A relative has just graduated with a PhD in philosophy of science and has zero job prospects, so he is leaving academia. Nobody wants to know this stuff. He’s a good teacher if anyone does know a place trying to teach it, though.
clnq 4y ago
I'd be joyed if there was any meaningful fallout. Magical thinking in science only benefits click-deprived blogs (which some people call mainstream news outlets, despite "news" implying journalistic integrity). But where is this fallout? All I see is tempered pushback from the scientific community. It seems to me like the publicity stunt worked for the most part.
anigbrowl 4y ago
This is what happens when calling bullshit is shushed as incivility. It's not a new problem by any means, but just as a diet of fast food is correlated with diabetes and dementia, a culture of hype correlates with mediocrity and mendacity.
- debacle 4y ago
  - bawolff 4y ago
    I don't think that's true. Just yelling "bullshit" certainly is, and hn has a bit of a positivity bias, nonetheless, comments that say something is BS and explain why are usually reasonably well recieved.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      In my experience "are usually reasonably well received" is heavily influenced by the topic of discussion.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > hn has a bit of a positivity bias Interestingly, it also has a bit of negativity bias. This means that any story, however anodine or ground-breaking, will have: - a group of people using some motivated reasoning to show how obviously terrible the thing is and how clever they are; - a group of people arguing that the thing is the best since warm water and is going to solve everything (if only reality would behave). This makes a lot of discussions simultaneously very interesting and utterly depressing.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Problem is that due to the bullshit asymmetry principle, explaining why takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing the bullshit in the first place. If you unconditionally accept bullshit but require an explanation in order to reject it, then you're going to wind up believing a lot of bullshit.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tom-thistime 4y ago
We sure missed the point here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828602
dang 4y ago
The submitted URL was https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13229 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13229, but it's mostly quoting from Aaronson's post, so I've changed the URL to the latter. Interested readers might want to read both, though (including the comemnts).
- Spare_account 4y ago
  >Interesting readers Does HN have those?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Like everything else, depends on your interests I suppose.
  - dang 4y ago
    Oh. No I don't suppose so. Fixed now :)
    - Spare_account 4y ago
      >Fixed now Flexing your unlimited comment edit privileges I see ;)
      - dang 4y ago
        I'm afraid so. But if anyone else wants their comment edited after the edit window has expired, they can always ask us to do it for them (hn@ycombinator.com is the best way). As a compulsive self-editor, I'd rather not have any timeout on edits for anybody, but unfortunately that would leave threads open to really bad forms of abuse.
        Agentlien 4y ago
        As much as I love going back and editing things, I think this is a good solution. On Reddit it's even a recurring game to challenge people to ask questions and then edit them to make the answer look bad. I'm not convinced this argument holds for the time window limiting deletion of comments.
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: The Wormhole Publicity Stunt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33851295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33851295 - Dec 2022 (2 comments) Physicists Simulate a Simplified Wormhole on Google’s Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841537 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Physicists Create ‘The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809648 - Nov 2022 (2 comments) Physicists Create ‘The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809498 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Scientists build 'baby' wormhole as sci-fi moves closer to fact - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809268 - Nov 2022 (4 comments) Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 - Nov 2022 (20 comments) This Week's Hype - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807169 - Nov 2022 (24 comments) Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803257 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Physicists have purportedly created a wormhole using a quantum computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 - Nov 2022 (29 comments) Note that word purportedly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809173.
danbmil99 4y ago
So sad -- this mindset seems to me like "Q-Anon for smart people". As if Q was a meme (mind virus) that originally only infected people with a low IQ, but then mutated to become a high-IQ variant...
- danbmil99 4y ago
pmayrgundter 4y ago
Uhh, this is cool: "If you had two entangled quantum computers, one on Earth and the other in the Andromeda galaxy, and if they were both simulating [the wormhole], and if Alice on Earth and Bob in Andromeda both uploaded their own brains into their respective quantum simulations, then it seems possible that the simulated Alice and Bob could have the experience of jumping into a wormhole and meeting each other in the middle. ... if true, I suppose some would treat it as grounds for regarding a quantum simulation of SYK as “more real” or “more wormholey” than a classical simulation."
- lisper 4y ago
  I think you may have missed the point. Aaronson is being ironic here. Uploading your brain into a quantum simulation is ridiculously far beyond the realm of plausibility. He's not suggesting this as an actual scenario, he's saying "This wormhole claim requires so much suspension of disbelief that you have to be profoundly ignorant of how quantum computers actually work in order to lend it any credence at all."
  - pmayrgundter 4y ago
    No, got all that. I was surprised he (they) still held out the possibility
_yb2s 4y ago
It seems unfair to dismiss this as a publicity stunt or fraud, or to say this is no closer to a real wormhole than a drawing. It's fundamentally impossible to really describe what is happening here to the general public without tons of quantum mechanics background. Any summary of research like this is inherently a subjective description of why scientists feel it's important, rather than a coherent description of what actually occurred. However, the quantum process they are describing really did physically occur on the quantum processor, which I feel is really different than a simulated quantum experiment on a regular cpu. It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been predicted theoretically. Is it possible that experimental physicists are just insulted by the way this is presented, because it's presented as an experimental milestone, but, because of the use of a quantum processor, they didn't really have to build anything... it's just math and code?
- pdonis 4y ago
  > the quantum process they are describing really did physically occur on the quantum processor Yes. But... > It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been predicted theoretically. No, it demonstrates that the system they set up has properties that some people have hypothesized are related to wormhole physics. Those hypotheses are still pure speculation. This experiment does not provide any evidence for them.
- AmericanOP 4y ago
  The level of anti-science vitriol here is really astounding. Thanks to this experiment I got to learn about ER=EPR which is just fascinating even if totally theoretical.
  - andreareina 4y ago
    Not anti-science. Anti-bullshit. The announcement is a gross misrepresentation of the work actually produced. At least when companies cheat on benchmarks they're actually running the benchmark and not bypassing it. Usually. P.S. congratulations on being one of today's ten thousand
snowwrestler 4y ago
We deal with similar fallout here every time climate change comes up for discussion and someone trots out the claim that scientists in the 70s were worried about global cooling. A few interesting papers got wildly over-covered and, well, here we are 50 years later. Ultimately I think this is not a solvable problem because people want to believe. If a story seems to confirm or support a belief that is exciting or emotionally charged, it can stick in the heads of some people and really affect them. Information we take in is not just stored for later retrieval, it is interlinked with what we already think. If you have lots of other physics in your head, a weird physics story has a chance to get linked with that and kept in its proper context. If you don’t have much physics, a weird physics story might get linked elsewhere: to religious views, political ideology, science fiction stories, etc.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Depends how that claim is trotted out, isn't it ? Weren't we in a cooling period in the decades up to the 80s (?) ? Aren't we overdue for the end of this interglacial (give or take a few thousand years) ? Now the issue seems to be that while the end of this interglacial would be unpleasant, with Canada / Great Britain / Scandinavia / Siberia becoming uninhabitable because covered in glaciers, at least we would be in "known" territory, since Homo roughly dates back to the beginning of our Ice Age, and has already lived through half a hundred glacials/interglacials (and several of them for Sapiens), we're at the risk of "overshooting" towards the end of our Ice Age, which would be a much more normal climate for the Earth, but also barely even known by Austrolapithecus (~first "human"), where we risk to only have the poles left habitable (for land mammals in general?), which would also be particularly unpleasant due to their months-long days and nights ?
littledemoguy12 4y ago
I like quantum computers.
lxe 4y ago
"Physicists are creating wormholes and putting them in microchips" has the same energy to it as "AI art is stealing people's intellectual property"
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  Does it? They seem completely different. AI art theft seems to follow straightforwardly from existing intellectual property law and precedent. There's literal artist signatures being spat out by these generative models. They're obviously learning to mimic copyrighted works.
  - lxe 4y ago
    Yup same energy and confidence too!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
phkahler 4y ago
>> something went terribly wrong—something that risks damaging trust in the scientific process itself. And I think it’s worth reflecting on what we can do to prevent it from happening again. IMHO it's waaay too late. This kind of over the top bombastic shit happens at least once a week in mainstream media. The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years. Then there's me who just shrugs that someone's duping the public yet again. The solution is to just stop going public. You know they better prove that quantum computers are actually "better" than classical ones because every Turing machine can be simulated starting from 15 gliders in Life - a recent result that I found fascinating but didn't go mainstream. Why? Because people proving things in Life understand its a niche thing and don't have egos the size of Andromeda.
- jahewson 4y ago
  > Why? Because people proving things in Life understand its a niche thing and don't have egos the size of Andromeda. Well, there’s that guy with the bombastic claim that it constitutes “a new kind of science”.
- 1024core 4y ago
  > This kind of over the top bombastic shit happens at least once a week in mainstream media. I'm reminded of the Fleischman-Pons experiment.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    Except in their case... They reported excess heat in a cell containing 4 elements. They couldn't explain it chemically and said "must be nuclear". The arrogant physics community said "it can't be physics, it's chemistry" without offering an explanation or reaction with those 4 elements. And now LENR is still a thing, as is theoretical research on nuclear reactions in a lattice and other related stuff. I'm still a bit of a believer, largely because of the arrogance displayed by physicists at the time.
    - techdragon 4y ago
cloudking 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ssivark 4y ago
  That’s a sad and vapid summary of the post. PSA: Please stop flooding every thread with ChatGPT nonsense.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    pandoras box is open, I think we should just be happy when chatgpt being the source is disclosed
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- aaron695 4y ago
  It's too long so I mashed my keyboard for you. Modified ej jdibxieueudjkxbxnxjeb dnfiebrjdj fjfkjej idnbe jdjjejiejeje jdkejdjirjr. Rrrrkosjdjej jjdbdj ifjjd jdjfjrjrjn.
sampo 4y ago
Matt Strassler is writing a series, explaining the background and physics theories behind this... this thing, whatever it is. https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/05/physicists-discover-string-theory-and-extra-dimensions-in-a-laboratory/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/05/physicists-discover... https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/06/how-do-you-make-a-baby-cartoon-wormhole-in-a-lab/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/06/how-do-you-make-a-b...
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
Here is the summary from AI for people short on time The article is discussing the recent announcement of a holographic wormhole on a microchip and the author's response to it. The author explains that they initially assumed that no one actually believed the announcement, but after hearing a talk by a medieval historian about the historic significance of the achievement, the author realized that some people do believe it. The author goes on to discuss the potential damage that can be done to trust in the scientific process when news about scientific experiments is misrepresented in the media. The author also discusses a recent preprint that refutes the claim that Google's Sycamore quantum processor achieved quantum supremacy.
auggierose 4y ago
Sorry, am not really smarter about all of this after reading the blog post. Maybe I just don't know enough quantum physics? Maybe science communication itself has a problem? How can I check this information without investing 10 years of my life?
- tom-thistime 4y ago
  It says there wasn't really any wormhole. Instead there was something intended to simulate some ideas about wormholes. It's as if someone claimed he had a car and said he'd pick me up for a date ... but it turned out he actually had no car, only iRacing.
  - auggierose 4y ago
    Yeah, but afterwards he mentions that colleagues of his actually think that something special here might have happened after all, because of quantum, and he admits that therefore he is not QUITE sure himself about it. So in the end, the conclusion is that it probably is just a simulation, but maybe it is more? Does that not counter the entire thrust of the blog post?
    - tom-thistime 4y ago
      I reread it, and I still see 100% denial that there was any wormhole. Can you quote something else?
athrowaway12 4y ago
Interesting clarification Aaronson makes here: Will Says: Comment #9 December 2nd, 2022 at 7:26 pm Hi Scott, I think I must be missing something in your argument. If “A foofs B” has a dual description “C blebs D”, and we establish that A does indeed foof B, would you agree that it is equally true to say that C blebs D? If so, wouldn’t it be correct to say that this experiment has created a wormhole? It’s not a wormhole in our regular universe’s spacetime, but perhaps it’s a wormhole in some… where (? not exactly clear on this). And from this, perhaps it follows why an equally-precise simulation on the classical computer wouldn’t create a wormhole in the same way? (This part seems dubious to me–I want to say that A foofing B is different from a simulation of A foofing B–after all, no matter how well you simulate a hurricane, nobody gets wet. But I’m wondering if this instinct is in conflict with my early claim that “A foofs B” is equally true as “C blebs D”. Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”) Scott Says: Comment #21 December 3rd, 2022 at 9:12 am Will #9: > Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.” Yup! So Aaronson's position seems like, even if a system is "real", it doesn't mean its holographic dual is "real". I get that it's in his interest to steer QC as far away from this voodoo AdS/CFT stuff as possible, but his statement feels weird somehow. I agree it always makes sense to shut up and calculate, but as a lay person the holography stuff seems more significant than a classical simulation or a philosophical thought experiment, in that there are certain objects like black holes where the promising way to look at them is from the holographic viewpoint.
- athrowaway12 4y ago
  >[Scott #111] I would never object to anyone speculating about such fun things! The one part that I do object to, is people passing over the metaphysical enormity of what needs to be presupposed in such a discussion, as if it didn’t even require comment >[Scott #119] Where I agree with you is this: I think that, for the vast majority of entangled states one cares about in physics, a dual description in terms of wormholes simply isn’t useful, even in those cases where it meaningfully exists (which is far from all of them). Seems like at a high level this is indeed his position iiuc.
dekhn 4y ago
I'm glad to see more people are recognizing that while GOogle built a nice quantum computer, their attempts to sell it in the literature have been extremely overoptimistic about its actual capabilities. In a way that's good because every time they announce an advance over classical systems, some clever folks figure out a way to keep the classical system competitive.

286 points by jjgreen 4y ago

It's got about as much scientific validity as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFp09nS5sM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFp09nS5sM

peteradio 4y ago
Yea leave Sliders out of this Paul.
carabiner 4y ago
Paul.

trynewideas 4y ago

If you lack context, see Peter Woit's previous blog post: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209 And Ars: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-make-a-real-wormhole-what-they-did-was-still-pretty-cool/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-...

dkural 4y ago

String Theory, "It from (Qu)bit", etc. have been putting out a large amount of B.S. for many years now, and the hype itself became so common that, to compete with other B.S. the hype has now become over-the-top blatant nonsense. Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc. We need to make science actively painful (cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity, make sure no one wants to date them etc.) so it only attracts people in it for the right reasons :)

karencarits 4y ago
> Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc. And the administration loves them for it! And they will happily book expensive influencers and self-made media personalities to arrange workshops and courses in how to present your research in the simplest and most emotional ways - to maximize engagement and outreach. It's almost funny to see the disbelief in researchers' eyes when the extroverted influencer brings them the microphone and asks: ignore for a moment the specifics of your research, what are the three qualities that makes YOU unique and special?
constantcrying 4y ago
One commenter on that article points out that there is a symbiotic relation between scientists, the press and the public. All of them desire spectacular results and there is little incentive to ever play down a paper. The result is that scientists "polish" their results when communicating to the press, who again make sure that it "sounds good". In the end the public usually gets the truth only in so far as "could" means "there is a low but nonzero chance of this ever working, but only if there are massive engineering efforts and many more breakthroughs and economic and resource incentives line up right". Putting scientists into the media game, instead of isolating them was a grave mistake. It even creates competition for gtants, based on how "flashy" the results are.
- sroussey 4y ago
  In the realm of technology, scientists are the idea guys. Lots of good ideas out there. But you need entrepreneurs and engineers and capital in order to see if it is something that will be useful to the public. It may takes years of work, PhDs, and lots of research costs to get the findings (idea), but in the end ideas themselves are cheap.
tppiotrowski 4y ago
Long gone is the age of self-funded aristocrat scientists who experimented to satisfy their curiosity. Curious if there's any renowned independent scientists producing research at home and sharing directly online (bypassing universities and journals)
- zmachinaz 4y ago
  Might go back to this model over time. Guess it is no secret that academia is in strong decline. Lot of excellent people just don't bother anymore to enter that circus. They might do their own independent research after they succeeded financially.
  - boringg 4y ago
    Too expensive to get access to what is needed for independent research.
    - birdman3131 4y ago
      It is possible to do surprising amounts on a shoestring budget. Ive seen cheap (Sub $1k) electron microscopes go up for sale. As well as a ton of other lab equipment.
    - zmachinaz 4y ago
      Do you think research equipment was cheap during the time of "aristocrat scientists" ? The point being here "after they succeeded financially".
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Isn't all the science that is possible to do "at home" already done?
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    Most of it, but there are some corners. For example, high temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986 [1]. The process is not so complicated, and can be done at home. Well, at least in a very good personal lab, for example see this video by Applied Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU I think the original team made like 100 samples using different metals and different oxygen proportion. Discovering the first one requires some brute force that needs a small team, and is too much for a single person. Anyway, it doesn't look too far away from something a single person can discover. [1] That's 36 year ago. I'm feeling old...
disentanglement 4y ago
> cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity I can't even begin to describe how overjoyed I am to finally have found a fellow campaigner for implementing the glorious techniques of Maoist China in dealing with free thought.
- mistermann 4y ago
  There is a big difference between free thought and making false claims, scientific or otherwise.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    There’s no difference when the person with the gun is deciding what’s true.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      A gun can override the difference, but the difference itself remains.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Case #1,209,096 of how when Americans do (or propose doing) something, it's somehow China's fault.
mhh__ 4y ago
Considering string theory's historical origins come from solving real physics problems this strikes me as rude and aggressive. No comment on the quantum computing, don't know anything about it.
plaguepilled 4y ago
String theory as it currently exists is very different to how it started. The original use case was actually as a precursor to the current model for partons: QCD. (Side note: there is still another theory in QCD research that is used, called the Lund string model, but it is not related to string theory and should not be compared. I just bring it up for completeness) This is not to say that I disagree with being more critical of science initiatives, but that heavy-handed approaches like jail and social punishment are not the silver bullet you may think they are. Theories get repurposed very frequently between departments and the relationship between a line of enquiry and the results it may produce is not always linear. Really, science communication (especially from news outlets) itself should be defunded, as it misrepresents the topics discussed. In its place, (structured, public) science EDUCATION should be funded.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

Discussion here about the claim of the wormhole https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764

echelon 4y ago

These researchers are trying really hard to start a Quantum Winter. It's already looking pretty grim, but lying about results is a sure way to accelerate the decrease in funding for their departments and bring about professional repercussions.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
"Quantum" is losing its magic. The researchers in the field really over-promised, and so far they have delivered almost nothing to show for it on general-purpose computing problems. 15 was factored some time ago, and the record number that has been factored with Shor's algorithm as of 2022 is 21. Personally, I think D-wave and the other attempted Ising machines took the right approach: use quantum computing to solve problems that are essentially reducing to energy minimization of a system.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Exponential curves look really boring, until they aren't.
  - mdorazio 4y ago
    Can you show us this exponential curve?
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
      - dekhn 4y ago
        that's just a sigmoid where you haven't reached the upper asymptote yet
        4y ago

zmachinaz 4y ago

At its start, the quanta magazine was a good read. But, it degraded very quickly after they started to use it mainly to put scientists from under-represented groups into the spot light. Nowadays not worth any attention.

paganel 4y ago

This bit form Sabine Hossenfelder's comment is something that I've personally also started to think about lately: > It’s easy enough to address the problem: Give every scientist a basic education on the sociology and philosophy of science, and social and cognitive biases. Granted, I'm not a scientist, but even from the very far outside (i.e. the position from where I'm writing this comment) one can see that that knowledge about the "sociology and philosophy of science" seems to be lacking in today's scientific community.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
At least zetetic courses are already available in some universities as one of the options undergraduates can pick...
lazyasciiart 4y ago
A relative has just graduated with a PhD in philosophy of science and has zero job prospects, so he is leaving academia. Nobody wants to know this stuff. He’s a good teacher if anyone does know a place trying to teach it, though.

clnq 4y ago

I'd be joyed if there was any meaningful fallout. Magical thinking in science only benefits click-deprived blogs (which some people call mainstream news outlets, despite "news" implying journalistic integrity). But where is this fallout? All I see is tempered pushback from the scientific community. It seems to me like the publicity stunt worked for the most part.

anigbrowl 4y ago

This is what happens when calling bullshit is shushed as incivility. It's not a new problem by any means, but just as a diet of fast food is correlated with diabetes and dementia, a culture of hype correlates with mediocrity and mendacity.

debacle 4y ago
- bawolff 4y ago
  I don't think that's true. Just yelling "bullshit" certainly is, and hn has a bit of a positivity bias, nonetheless, comments that say something is BS and explain why are usually reasonably well recieved.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    In my experience "are usually reasonably well received" is heavily influenced by the topic of discussion.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > hn has a bit of a positivity bias Interestingly, it also has a bit of negativity bias. This means that any story, however anodine or ground-breaking, will have: - a group of people using some motivated reasoning to show how obviously terrible the thing is and how clever they are; - a group of people arguing that the thing is the best since warm water and is going to solve everything (if only reality would behave). This makes a lot of discussions simultaneously very interesting and utterly depressing.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Problem is that due to the bullshit asymmetry principle, explaining why takes orders of magnitude more effort than producing the bullshit in the first place. If you unconditionally accept bullshit but require an explanation in order to reject it, then you're going to wind up believing a lot of bullshit.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tom-thistime 4y ago

We sure missed the point here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828602

dang 4y ago

The submitted URL was https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13229 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13229, but it's mostly quoting from Aaronson's post, so I've changed the URL to the latter. Interested readers might want to read both, though (including the comemnts).

Spare_account 4y ago
>Interesting readers Does HN have those?
- dylan604 4y ago
  Like everything else, depends on your interests I suppose.
- dang 4y ago
  Oh. No I don't suppose so. Fixed now :)
  - Spare_account 4y ago
    >Fixed now Flexing your unlimited comment edit privileges I see ;)
    - dang 4y ago
      I'm afraid so. But if anyone else wants their comment edited after the edit window has expired, they can always ask us to do it for them (hn@ycombinator.com is the best way). As a compulsive self-editor, I'd rather not have any timeout on edits for anybody, but unfortunately that would leave threads open to really bad forms of abuse.
      - Agentlien 4y ago
        As much as I love going back and editing things, I think this is a good solution. On Reddit it's even a recurring game to challenge people to ask questions and then edit them to make the answer look bad. I'm not convinced this argument holds for the time window limiting deletion of comments.

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: The Wormhole Publicity Stunt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33851295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33851295 - Dec 2022 (2 comments) Physicists Simulate a Simplified Wormhole on Google’s Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841537 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) Physicists Create ‘The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809648 - Nov 2022 (2 comments) Physicists Create ‘The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809498 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Scientists build 'baby' wormhole as sci-fi moves closer to fact - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809268 - Nov 2022 (4 comments) Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 - Nov 2022 (20 comments) This Week's Hype - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807169 - Nov 2022 (24 comments) Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803257 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Physicists have purportedly created a wormhole using a quantum computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 - Nov 2022 (29 comments) Note that word purportedly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809173.

danbmil99 4y ago

So sad -- this mindset seems to me like "Q-Anon for smart people". As if Q was a meme (mind virus) that originally only infected people with a low IQ, but then mutated to become a high-IQ variant...

danbmil99 4y ago

pmayrgundter 4y ago

Uhh, this is cool: "If you had two entangled quantum computers, one on Earth and the other in the Andromeda galaxy, and if they were both simulating [the wormhole], and if Alice on Earth and Bob in Andromeda both uploaded their own brains into their respective quantum simulations, then it seems possible that the simulated Alice and Bob could have the experience of jumping into a wormhole and meeting each other in the middle. ... if true, I suppose some would treat it as grounds for regarding a quantum simulation of SYK as “more real” or “more wormholey” than a classical simulation."

lisper 4y ago
I think you may have missed the point. Aaronson is being ironic here. Uploading your brain into a quantum simulation is ridiculously far beyond the realm of plausibility. He's not suggesting this as an actual scenario, he's saying "This wormhole claim requires so much suspension of disbelief that you have to be profoundly ignorant of how quantum computers actually work in order to lend it any credence at all."
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  No, got all that. I was surprised he (they) still held out the possibility

_yb2s 4y ago

It seems unfair to dismiss this as a publicity stunt or fraud, or to say this is no closer to a real wormhole than a drawing. It's fundamentally impossible to really describe what is happening here to the general public without tons of quantum mechanics background. Any summary of research like this is inherently a subjective description of why scientists feel it's important, rather than a coherent description of what actually occurred. However, the quantum process they are describing really did physically occur on the quantum processor, which I feel is really different than a simulated quantum experiment on a regular cpu. It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been predicted theoretically. Is it possible that experimental physicists are just insulted by the way this is presented, because it's presented as an experimental milestone, but, because of the use of a quantum processor, they didn't really have to build anything... it's just math and code?

pdonis 4y ago
> the quantum process they are describing really did physically occur on the quantum processor Yes. But... > It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been predicted theoretically. No, it demonstrates that the system they set up has properties that some people have hypothesized are related to wormhole physics. Those hypotheses are still pure speculation. This experiment does not provide any evidence for them.
AmericanOP 4y ago
The level of anti-science vitriol here is really astounding. Thanks to this experiment I got to learn about ER=EPR which is just fascinating even if totally theoretical.
- andreareina 4y ago
  Not anti-science. Anti-bullshit. The announcement is a gross misrepresentation of the work actually produced. At least when companies cheat on benchmarks they're actually running the benchmark and not bypassing it. Usually. P.S. congratulations on being one of today's ten thousand

snowwrestler 4y ago

We deal with similar fallout here every time climate change comes up for discussion and someone trots out the claim that scientists in the 70s were worried about global cooling. A few interesting papers got wildly over-covered and, well, here we are 50 years later. Ultimately I think this is not a solvable problem because people want to believe. If a story seems to confirm or support a belief that is exciting or emotionally charged, it can stick in the heads of some people and really affect them. Information we take in is not just stored for later retrieval, it is interlinked with what we already think. If you have lots of other physics in your head, a weird physics story has a chance to get linked with that and kept in its proper context. If you don’t have much physics, a weird physics story might get linked elsewhere: to religious views, political ideology, science fiction stories, etc.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Depends how that claim is trotted out, isn't it ? Weren't we in a cooling period in the decades up to the 80s (?) ? Aren't we overdue for the end of this interglacial (give or take a few thousand years) ? Now the issue seems to be that while the end of this interglacial would be unpleasant, with Canada / Great Britain / Scandinavia / Siberia becoming uninhabitable because covered in glaciers, at least we would be in "known" territory, since Homo roughly dates back to the beginning of our Ice Age, and has already lived through half a hundred glacials/interglacials (and several of them for Sapiens), we're at the risk of "overshooting" towards the end of our Ice Age, which would be a much more normal climate for the Earth, but also barely even known by Austrolapithecus (~first "human"), where we risk to only have the poles left habitable (for land mammals in general?), which would also be particularly unpleasant due to their months-long days and nights ?

littledemoguy12 4y ago

I like quantum computers.

lxe 4y ago

"Physicists are creating wormholes and putting them in microchips" has the same energy to it as "AI art is stealing people's intellectual property"

thundergolfer 4y ago
Does it? They seem completely different. AI art theft seems to follow straightforwardly from existing intellectual property law and precedent. There's literal artist signatures being spat out by these generative models. They're obviously learning to mimic copyrighted works.
- lxe 4y ago
  Yup same energy and confidence too!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

phkahler 4y ago

>> something went terribly wrong—something that risks damaging trust in the scientific process itself. And I think it’s worth reflecting on what we can do to prevent it from happening again. IMHO it's waaay too late. This kind of over the top bombastic shit happens at least once a week in mainstream media. The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years. Then there's me who just shrugs that someone's duping the public yet again. The solution is to just stop going public. You know they better prove that quantum computers are actually "better" than classical ones because every Turing machine can be simulated starting from 15 gliders in Life - a recent result that I found fascinating but didn't go mainstream. Why? Because people proving things in Life understand its a niche thing and don't have egos the size of Andromeda.

jahewson 4y ago
> Why? Because people proving things in Life understand its a niche thing and don't have egos the size of Andromeda. Well, there’s that guy with the bombastic claim that it constitutes “a new kind of science”.
1024core 4y ago
> This kind of over the top bombastic shit happens at least once a week in mainstream media. I'm reminded of the Fleischman-Pons experiment.
- phkahler 4y ago
  Except in their case... They reported excess heat in a cell containing 4 elements. They couldn't explain it chemically and said "must be nuclear". The arrogant physics community said "it can't be physics, it's chemistry" without offering an explanation or reaction with those 4 elements. And now LENR is still a thing, as is theoretical research on nuclear reactions in a lattice and other related stuff. I'm still a bit of a believer, largely because of the arrogance displayed by physicists at the time.
  - techdragon 4y ago

cloudking 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ssivark 4y ago
That’s a sad and vapid summary of the post. PSA: Please stop flooding every thread with ChatGPT nonsense.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  pandoras box is open, I think we should just be happy when chatgpt being the source is disclosed
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
aaron695 4y ago
It's too long so I mashed my keyboard for you. Modified ej jdibxieueudjkxbxnxjeb dnfiebrjdj fjfkjej idnbe jdjjejiejeje jdkejdjirjr. Rrrrkosjdjej jjdbdj ifjjd jdjfjrjrjn.

sampo 4y ago

Matt Strassler is writing a series, explaining the background and physics theories behind this... this thing, whatever it is. https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/05/physicists-discover-string-theory-and-extra-dimensions-in-a-laboratory/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/05/physicists-discover... https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/06/how-do-you-make-a-baby-cartoon-wormhole-in-a-lab/ https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/12/06/how-do-you-make-a-b...

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

Here is the summary from AI for people short on time The article is discussing the recent announcement of a holographic wormhole on a microchip and the author's response to it. The author explains that they initially assumed that no one actually believed the announcement, but after hearing a talk by a medieval historian about the historic significance of the achievement, the author realized that some people do believe it. The author goes on to discuss the potential damage that can be done to trust in the scientific process when news about scientific experiments is misrepresented in the media. The author also discusses a recent preprint that refutes the claim that Google's Sycamore quantum processor achieved quantum supremacy.

auggierose 4y ago

Sorry, am not really smarter about all of this after reading the blog post. Maybe I just don't know enough quantum physics? Maybe science communication itself has a problem? How can I check this information without investing 10 years of my life?

tom-thistime 4y ago
It says there wasn't really any wormhole. Instead there was something intended to simulate some ideas about wormholes. It's as if someone claimed he had a car and said he'd pick me up for a date ... but it turned out he actually had no car, only iRacing.
- auggierose 4y ago
  Yeah, but afterwards he mentions that colleagues of his actually think that something special here might have happened after all, because of quantum, and he admits that therefore he is not QUITE sure himself about it. So in the end, the conclusion is that it probably is just a simulation, but maybe it is more? Does that not counter the entire thrust of the blog post?
  - tom-thistime 4y ago
    I reread it, and I still see 100% denial that there was any wormhole. Can you quote something else?

athrowaway12 4y ago

Interesting clarification Aaronson makes here: Will Says: Comment #9 December 2nd, 2022 at 7:26 pm Hi Scott, I think I must be missing something in your argument. If “A foofs B” has a dual description “C blebs D”, and we establish that A does indeed foof B, would you agree that it is equally true to say that C blebs D? If so, wouldn’t it be correct to say that this experiment has created a wormhole? It’s not a wormhole in our regular universe’s spacetime, but perhaps it’s a wormhole in some… where (? not exactly clear on this). And from this, perhaps it follows why an equally-precise simulation on the classical computer wouldn’t create a wormhole in the same way? (This part seems dubious to me–I want to say that A foofing B is different from a simulation of A foofing B–after all, no matter how well you simulate a hurricane, nobody gets wet. But I’m wondering if this instinct is in conflict with my early claim that “A foofs B” is equally true as “C blebs D”. Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”) Scott Says: Comment #21 December 3rd, 2022 at 9:12 am Will #9: > Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.” Yup! So Aaronson's position seems like, even if a system is "real", it doesn't mean its holographic dual is "real". I get that it's in his interest to steer QC as far away from this voodoo AdS/CFT stuff as possible, but his statement feels weird somehow. I agree it always makes sense to shut up and calculate, but as a lay person the holography stuff seems more significant than a classical simulation or a philosophical thought experiment, in that there are certain objects like black holes where the promising way to look at them is from the holographic viewpoint.

athrowaway12 4y ago
>[Scott #111] I would never object to anyone speculating about such fun things! The one part that I do object to, is people passing over the metaphysical enormity of what needs to be presupposed in such a discussion, as if it didn’t even require comment >[Scott #119] Where I agree with you is this: I think that, for the vast majority of entangled states one cares about in physics, a dual description in terms of wormholes simply isn’t useful, even in those cases where it meaningfully exists (which is far from all of them). Seems like at a high level this is indeed his position iiuc.

dekhn 4y ago

I'm glad to see more people are recognizing that while GOogle built a nice quantum computer, their attempts to sell it in the literature have been extremely overoptimistic about its actual capabilities. In a way that's good because every time they announce an advance over classical systems, some clever folks figure out a way to keep the classical system competitive.