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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 r

by _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
lamontcg 4y ago
From https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/wormholes-quantum-computers/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/wormholes-quantum-co...: > There are no lessons to be learned about quantum gravity here. There are no lessons to be learned about traversable wormholes or whether they exist within our Universe. There are not even any lessons to be learned about the uniqueness or capabilities of quantum computers, as everything that was done on the quantum computer can be done and had previously (without errors!) been done on a classical computer. The best that one can take away is that the researchers, after performing elaborate calculations of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model through classical means, were able to perform an analogous calculation on a quantum computer that actually returned signal, not simply quantum noise They simulated a toy space-time model, which had been previously simulated on a classical computer, on a quantum computer. That's really it. The toy model has wormholes. That does not inform us as to if the real universe has wormholes. The novel thing is really how they used ML to boil down the mathematical model into something that could run on a quantum computer. Yapping about how they "created wormholes in a lab" is 100% a publicity stunt. They could have written instead that they simulated wormholes in a lab, which would have been more honest and they should have pointed out that anyone can simulate a wormhole on their desktop computer as well.
- sampo 4y ago
  > They simulated a toy space-time model And not even. A toy model in a space-time that is wildly different from our real space. Their space is AdS, i.e. negative curvature, vs. our dS space with positive curvature. Their toy space has a toy model of gravity, that is way different from our real gravity. And their space is 1-dimensional. And they didn't even simulate that. They used the AdS/CFT conjecture to tell them, that they don't need to simulate the toy model in the toy space, but they can simulate a lower-dimensional holographic image of the toy space. A 0-d hologram of a 1-d space. Whatever that is. And not even that. But I stop here.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    "A toy model wrapped in a conjecture inside an enigma."
  - 4y ago
oh_my_goodness 4y ago
There was no wormhole. Claims that there was a wormhole are totally incorrect and need to be dismissed.
tsimionescu 4y ago
There is nothing fundamentally different between running a classical simulation on a classical computer and running a quantum simulation on a quantum computer - both are just a simulation. So claiming that this quantum simulation of a SYK model of a wormhole is in some way actually related to a wormhole is exactly like claiming that the circuits of a supercomputer used for simulating rainfall patterns are getting wet. Not to mention, the model being used is a toy model of a type of space-time that is not at all like our own spacetime - it's not even a simulation of a physical model, it's just a mathematical model that we already know doesn't describe the physical world.

by _yb2s 4y ago

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

lamontcg 4y ago

From https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/wormholes-quantum-computers/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/wormholes-quantum-co...: > There are no lessons to be learned about quantum gravity here. There are no lessons to be learned about traversable wormholes or whether they exist within our Universe. There are not even any lessons to be learned about the uniqueness or capabilities of quantum computers, as everything that was done on the quantum computer can be done and had previously (without errors!) been done on a classical computer. The best that one can take away is that the researchers, after performing elaborate calculations of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model through classical means, were able to perform an analogous calculation on a quantum computer that actually returned signal, not simply quantum noise They simulated a toy space-time model, which had been previously simulated on a classical computer, on a quantum computer. That's really it. The toy model has wormholes. That does not inform us as to if the real universe has wormholes. The novel thing is really how they used ML to boil down the mathematical model into something that could run on a quantum computer. Yapping about how they "created wormholes in a lab" is 100% a publicity stunt. They could have written instead that they simulated wormholes in a lab, which would have been more honest and they should have pointed out that anyone can simulate a wormhole on their desktop computer as well.

sampo 4y ago
> They simulated a toy space-time model And not even. A toy model in a space-time that is wildly different from our real space. Their space is AdS, i.e. negative curvature, vs. our dS space with positive curvature. Their toy space has a toy model of gravity, that is way different from our real gravity. And their space is 1-dimensional. And they didn't even simulate that. They used the AdS/CFT conjecture to tell them, that they don't need to simulate the toy model in the toy space, but they can simulate a lower-dimensional holographic image of the toy space. A 0-d hologram of a 1-d space. Whatever that is. And not even that. But I stop here.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  "A toy model wrapped in a conjecture inside an enigma."
- 4y ago

oh_my_goodness 4y ago

There was no wormhole. Claims that there was a wormhole are totally incorrect and need to be dismissed.

tsimionescu 4y ago

There is nothing fundamentally different between running a classical simulation on a classical computer and running a quantum simulation on a quantum computer - both are just a simulation. So claiming that this quantum simulation of a SYK model of a wormhole is in some way actually related to a wormhole is exactly like claiming that the circuits of a supercomputer used for simulating rainfall patterns are getting wet. Not to mention, the model being used is a toy model of a type of space-time that is not at all like our own spacetime - it's not even a simulation of a physical model, it's just a mathematical model that we already know doesn't describe the physical world.