4 ms·

>> 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 pr

>> 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
    Exactly. The “cold fusion” debacle wasn’t their fault it was everyone around them, they were following a simple chain of research, incrementally developing their theories, following in the proud tradition of discovery after going “huh that’s odd” … and because it challenged established orthodoxy they got buried. We had a partial repeat of this with the whole faster than light neutrinos, with lots of partially informed commentary, but for the most part these researchers were lucky their situation was obviously instrumental error soon enough, had it continued to be a discrepancy much longer, I have no doubt the conversation would have devolved. We also have the Venus phosphene research work which gets a lot of pushback because it doesn’t fit so it much be a mistake, and it’s taken a lot of hard methodical work just to get the consensus to “this requires more research”. Then we have the complete debacle around the emdrive … which is simply summed up as, no it didn’t work, but it should not have taken years to prove that. When someone has a theory that doesn’t fit, based on some (albeit weak) experimental evidence, you don’t refute it by simply saying “your wrong because existing physics is correct”… you do it by proving your own theory about why the experiment shows the results, or by performing alternative experiments that eliminate more variables… what we got instead was a tiny community of true believers, an tiny community of open minded scientists trying to do good experimental scientific research and didn’t care if the end result was the device doesn’t work, because it was good scientific work to develop better metrology techniques to measure the effects that were claimed… and then all the other scientists falling for the circular reasoning fallacy. “It can’t work because physics says so”… as if that somehow negates the possibility that we might have found some new physics, by doing an experiment, finding conflicting results, and diligently performing experiments to understand what’s going on… which is deeply ironic to me as one of the favourite headlines in the particle physics world is a variation on “hints at new physics” … the physics community wants new physics… just not this new physics. (Once again, I do know it didn’t work, and never worked, I’m angry about how the physics community reacted to this) Essentially it seems like how shocking/surprising the new results are, the more push back they get, so publicity stunts or high visibility publication or press releases is correlated with the level of push back from the wider scientific community. Effectively the acceptance of the scientific community is like a non-Newtonian fluid.
    - 4y ago
littledemoguy12 4y ago
Thanks for the info!
bnralt 4y ago
> The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years. Who counts as the unknowing? The people who thought we were going to have hit the singularity by now spent a lot of time reading up on this stuff. They just came to some insane conclusions.
civilized 4y ago
A simple and effective heuristic: ignore the initial announcement of everything esoteric. Wait a year or five and see if anyone is still talking about it. We are informed about way too much "promising" half-baked results these days. Nobody urgently needs to know about the quantum wormhole. It's much ado about nothing, it's the grinding and squealing of the capitalist media attention sucking machine. Potential exceptions are things like ChatGPT that you can understand and even verify yourself.
beambot 4y ago
I feel like we are living in a StarTrek future... It's just unevenly distributed, and the advances aren't always in the places we expect.
nl 4y ago
This is a bad take - in some ways falling victim to exactly the kind of "over the top bombastic" thing it accuses media of. For one thing, Quanta and Nature are not mainstram media. They generally do a pretty decent job of science communication, which is important. (And it's worse pointing out that Ars Techica explained it properly) So what went wrong here? I don't know exactly, but Google's own post was a bad start: "Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer"[1] sure sounds like they "made a traversable wormhole with a quantum computer". So lets read the leading paragraph: Wormholes — wrinkles in the fabric of spacetime that connect two disparate locations — may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But whether or not they exist in reality, studying these hypothetical objects could be the key to making concrete the tantalizing link between information and matter that has bedeviled physicists for decades. Surprisingly, a quantum computer is an ideal platform to investigate this connection. The trick is to use a correspondence called AdS/CFT, which establishes an equivalence between a theory that describes gravity and spacetime (and wormholes) in a fictional world with a special geometry (AdS) to a quantum theory that does not contain gravity at all (CFT). In “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor”, published in Nature today, we report on a collaboration with researchers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab to simulate the CFT on the Google Sycamore processor. By studying this quantum theory on the processor, we are able to leverage the AdS/CFT correspondence to probe the dynamics of a quantum system equivalent to a wormhole in a model of gravity. The Google Sycamore processor is among the first to have the fidelity needed to carry out this experiment. No, nothing pointing out this was a simulation there either! So I think Google and the research team needs to take some responsibility here. Their writing at least invited the miscommunication. [1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/12/private-ads-prediction-with-dp-sgd.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/12/private-ads-prediction-wit...
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> For one thing, Quanta and Nature are not mainstram media That's not where I read about it.
  - nl 4y ago
    From the article: > See for example the New York Times and Quanta and Ars Technica and Nature And the Quanta[1] (which is usually great) was probably the worst of the lot. The Nature paper had a title that probably caused the whole mess. The NYT (ironically since it is the most mainstream of the lot) did a pretty good job. Let me quote the Quanta article: > Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space. > The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature. If specialist science communication sources like Quanta are getting this so badly wrong then I don't think it is at all reasonable to blame mainstream media which acts an an aggregator from specialist sources. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...

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
  Exactly. The “cold fusion” debacle wasn’t their fault it was everyone around them, they were following a simple chain of research, incrementally developing their theories, following in the proud tradition of discovery after going “huh that’s odd” … and because it challenged established orthodoxy they got buried. We had a partial repeat of this with the whole faster than light neutrinos, with lots of partially informed commentary, but for the most part these researchers were lucky their situation was obviously instrumental error soon enough, had it continued to be a discrepancy much longer, I have no doubt the conversation would have devolved. We also have the Venus phosphene research work which gets a lot of pushback because it doesn’t fit so it much be a mistake, and it’s taken a lot of hard methodical work just to get the consensus to “this requires more research”. Then we have the complete debacle around the emdrive … which is simply summed up as, no it didn’t work, but it should not have taken years to prove that. When someone has a theory that doesn’t fit, based on some (albeit weak) experimental evidence, you don’t refute it by simply saying “your wrong because existing physics is correct”… you do it by proving your own theory about why the experiment shows the results, or by performing alternative experiments that eliminate more variables… what we got instead was a tiny community of true believers, an tiny community of open minded scientists trying to do good experimental scientific research and didn’t care if the end result was the device doesn’t work, because it was good scientific work to develop better metrology techniques to measure the effects that were claimed… and then all the other scientists falling for the circular reasoning fallacy. “It can’t work because physics says so”… as if that somehow negates the possibility that we might have found some new physics, by doing an experiment, finding conflicting results, and diligently performing experiments to understand what’s going on… which is deeply ironic to me as one of the favourite headlines in the particle physics world is a variation on “hints at new physics” … the physics community wants new physics… just not this new physics. (Once again, I do know it didn’t work, and never worked, I’m angry about how the physics community reacted to this) Essentially it seems like how shocking/surprising the new results are, the more push back they get, so publicity stunts or high visibility publication or press releases is correlated with the level of push back from the wider scientific community. Effectively the acceptance of the scientific community is like a non-Newtonian fluid.
  - 4y ago

littledemoguy12 4y ago

Thanks for the info!

bnralt 4y ago

> The unknowing probably think we will be in some kind Star Trek future in a few years. Who counts as the unknowing? The people who thought we were going to have hit the singularity by now spent a lot of time reading up on this stuff. They just came to some insane conclusions.

civilized 4y ago

A simple and effective heuristic: ignore the initial announcement of everything esoteric. Wait a year or five and see if anyone is still talking about it. We are informed about way too much "promising" half-baked results these days. Nobody urgently needs to know about the quantum wormhole. It's much ado about nothing, it's the grinding and squealing of the capitalist media attention sucking machine. Potential exceptions are things like ChatGPT that you can understand and even verify yourself.

beambot 4y ago

I feel like we are living in a StarTrek future... It's just unevenly distributed, and the advances aren't always in the places we expect.

nl 4y ago

This is a bad take - in some ways falling victim to exactly the kind of "over the top bombastic" thing it accuses media of. For one thing, Quanta and Nature are not mainstram media. They generally do a pretty decent job of science communication, which is important. (And it's worse pointing out that Ars Techica explained it properly) So what went wrong here? I don't know exactly, but Google's own post was a bad start: "Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer"[1] sure sounds like they "made a traversable wormhole with a quantum computer". So lets read the leading paragraph: Wormholes — wrinkles in the fabric of spacetime that connect two disparate locations — may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But whether or not they exist in reality, studying these hypothetical objects could be the key to making concrete the tantalizing link between information and matter that has bedeviled physicists for decades. Surprisingly, a quantum computer is an ideal platform to investigate this connection. The trick is to use a correspondence called AdS/CFT, which establishes an equivalence between a theory that describes gravity and spacetime (and wormholes) in a fictional world with a special geometry (AdS) to a quantum theory that does not contain gravity at all (CFT). In “Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor”, published in Nature today, we report on a collaboration with researchers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT, and Fermilab to simulate the CFT on the Google Sycamore processor. By studying this quantum theory on the processor, we are able to leverage the AdS/CFT correspondence to probe the dynamics of a quantum system equivalent to a wormhole in a model of gravity. The Google Sycamore processor is among the first to have the fidelity needed to carry out this experiment. No, nothing pointing out this was a simulation there either! So I think Google and the research team needs to take some responsibility here. Their writing at least invited the miscommunication. [1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/12/private-ads-prediction-with-dp-sgd.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/12/private-ads-prediction-wit...

phkahler 4y ago
>> For one thing, Quanta and Nature are not mainstram media That's not where I read about it.
- nl 4y ago
  From the article: > See for example the New York Times and Quanta and Ars Technica and Nature And the Quanta[1] (which is usually great) was probably the worst of the lot. The Nature paper had a title that probably caused the whole mess. The NYT (ironically since it is the most mainstream of the lot) did a pretty good job. Let me quote the Quanta article: > Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space. > The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature. If specialist science communication sources like Quanta are getting this so badly wrong then I don't think it is at all reasonable to blame mainstream media which acts an an aggregator from specialist sources. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...