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The headline is lying. "In 1973, the prominent physicists Stephen Hawking, John Bardeen and Brandon Carter asserted that extremal black holes can’t exist in th

The headline is lying. "In 1973, the prominent physicists Stephen Hawking, John Bardeen and Brandon Carter asserted that extremal black holes can’t exist in the real world — that there is simply no plausible way that they can form. " "The new work [...] demonstrates that there is nothing in our known laws of physics to prevent the formation of an extremal black hole." So they didn't prove him wrong at all. Hawking asserts that it's extremely implausible for these to form, and the mathematicians said "well according to our current models technically they could !" Shameful article. Is there a way to ask for a post to be removed ?

jona-f 2y ago
Imho you can outright ban quantamagazine articles while you're at it. It's hilarious that there is an intersection of tabloid press and theoretical physics, but it's also a massive waste of everyone's time.
- eigenket 2y ago
  Quanta articles are usually very good. I'm a scientist and I have been contacted by Quanta to fact-check their work before. They're very keen to make things as correct as possible. They also don't just write articles about theoretical physics, but about pretty much anything in science and math.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    They are usually terrible, with just enough sciencey-sounding content to hook non-specialists with buzzwords, and way too much unwarranted sensationalism. How many times was Einstein proven wrong this week? They emphasise factoids with a very shallow context. Their focus on things that were proven or disproven completely hides the actual scientific work and the whole scientific method. Their headlines are most of the time garbage. I have the same feeling about that website as I have about the Big Bang Theory: it’s too truthy not to be dangerous, and at the same time utterly wrong in all aspects that matter. Both prey on their audiences’ Dunning-Kruger tendencies.
    - eigenket 2y ago
      Thats a quite surprising view to me! Thats explicitly not what the Simons foundation set them up to do. I do agree that they are much shallower than the true scientific papers, but I would argue that that is pretty much necessary given their intended audience of non-experts. For people who want the true depth you can go and read the papers that Quanta bases their articles on, but for "normal" people I think most Quanta articles get pretty close to the optimal amount of depth you can give without completely losing the reader. I don't agree that they overly focus on things being proven or disproven - looking at their current front page, they have one article (this one) which uses those words. The article on the Hubble tension quite sensitively describes how the various measurements we have right now disagree, and I think shows quite nicely how the scientific work in progress is going. The article on tensors is (imo) fairly boring but certainly not overly sensationalist or buzzwordy. Basically without an example of an article that you think is really bad I don't really know what you're talking about, they're certainly not anywhere near to as bad as the big bang theory is (although I only ever watched one episode of that, so I can't talk about it properly).
- jll29 2y ago
  To call Quanta "tabloid", even in part, is an unjustified insult for a magazine that aspires, and mostly accomplishes, to bring cutting-edge research to a larger audience (perhaps not "the masses", but still). Personally, I cherish many articles from Quanta about areas outside my scientific expertise, and most other outlets for popular science writing are too superficial to cater for my background. I am grateful the Simons Foundation is a supporter of Quanta Mag. - both personally because I enjoy the articles but also because tomorrow's mathematicians or scientists may be motivated/inspired by their material.
  - jona-f 2y ago
    I do not believe in charity. This is another datum to add to the list. Don't care about no Simons Foundation. Just don't like the clickbait of quantamagazine. Never got anything out of any of their articles, would much prefer if the original papers got posted here. But I see people like their cheesy science news.
    - eigenket 2y ago
      I think posting the original papers here would generally not be useful. I am a scientist, specifically in quantum information theory and I can't read scientific papers in other fields without a significant amount of time and effort. If you show me a paper in cosmology or virology or number theory I'm generally not going to be able to follow it (unless I put in a decent amount of time studying the stuff it's based on). I think the same is true of almost everyone on this website (maybe we have a couple of polymaths around). Popular science like quanta performs a useful service in making stuff which would otherwise be somewhat inaccessible to me, much much less so.
      - jona-f 2y ago
        We're not complaining about making papers more accessible, but about the clickbait and the resulting misrepresentation.
        eigenket 2y ago
eigenket 2y ago
The headline is not lying. Bekenstein, Hawking, Bardeen and Carter asserted four laws of black-hole thermodynamics and proved three of them. The fourth is what the guys this article is about proved is wrong. The sentence with the word plausible is a bit deceptive, but the headline is fine.

jona-f 2y ago

Imho you can outright ban quantamagazine articles while you're at it. It's hilarious that there is an intersection of tabloid press and theoretical physics, but it's also a massive waste of everyone's time.

eigenket 2y ago
Quanta articles are usually very good. I'm a scientist and I have been contacted by Quanta to fact-check their work before. They're very keen to make things as correct as possible. They also don't just write articles about theoretical physics, but about pretty much anything in science and math.
- kergonath 2y ago
  They are usually terrible, with just enough sciencey-sounding content to hook non-specialists with buzzwords, and way too much unwarranted sensationalism. How many times was Einstein proven wrong this week? They emphasise factoids with a very shallow context. Their focus on things that were proven or disproven completely hides the actual scientific work and the whole scientific method. Their headlines are most of the time garbage. I have the same feeling about that website as I have about the Big Bang Theory: it’s too truthy not to be dangerous, and at the same time utterly wrong in all aspects that matter. Both prey on their audiences’ Dunning-Kruger tendencies.
  - eigenket 2y ago
    Thats a quite surprising view to me! Thats explicitly not what the Simons foundation set them up to do. I do agree that they are much shallower than the true scientific papers, but I would argue that that is pretty much necessary given their intended audience of non-experts. For people who want the true depth you can go and read the papers that Quanta bases their articles on, but for "normal" people I think most Quanta articles get pretty close to the optimal amount of depth you can give without completely losing the reader. I don't agree that they overly focus on things being proven or disproven - looking at their current front page, they have one article (this one) which uses those words. The article on the Hubble tension quite sensitively describes how the various measurements we have right now disagree, and I think shows quite nicely how the scientific work in progress is going. The article on tensors is (imo) fairly boring but certainly not overly sensationalist or buzzwordy. Basically without an example of an article that you think is really bad I don't really know what you're talking about, they're certainly not anywhere near to as bad as the big bang theory is (although I only ever watched one episode of that, so I can't talk about it properly).
jll29 2y ago
To call Quanta "tabloid", even in part, is an unjustified insult for a magazine that aspires, and mostly accomplishes, to bring cutting-edge research to a larger audience (perhaps not "the masses", but still). Personally, I cherish many articles from Quanta about areas outside my scientific expertise, and most other outlets for popular science writing are too superficial to cater for my background. I am grateful the Simons Foundation is a supporter of Quanta Mag. - both personally because I enjoy the articles but also because tomorrow's mathematicians or scientists may be motivated/inspired by their material.
- jona-f 2y ago
  I do not believe in charity. This is another datum to add to the list. Don't care about no Simons Foundation. Just don't like the clickbait of quantamagazine. Never got anything out of any of their articles, would much prefer if the original papers got posted here. But I see people like their cheesy science news.
  - eigenket 2y ago
    I think posting the original papers here would generally not be useful. I am a scientist, specifically in quantum information theory and I can't read scientific papers in other fields without a significant amount of time and effort. If you show me a paper in cosmology or virology or number theory I'm generally not going to be able to follow it (unless I put in a decent amount of time studying the stuff it's based on). I think the same is true of almost everyone on this website (maybe we have a couple of polymaths around). Popular science like quanta performs a useful service in making stuff which would otherwise be somewhat inaccessible to me, much much less so.
    - jona-f 2y ago
      We're not complaining about making papers more accessible, but about the clickbait and the resulting misrepresentation.
      - eigenket 2y ago

eigenket 2y ago

The headline is not lying. Bekenstein, Hawking, Bardeen and Carter asserted four laws of black-hole thermodynamics and proved three of them. The fourth is what the guys this article is about proved is wrong. The sentence with the word plausible is a bit deceptive, but the headline is fine.