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 ar

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...