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Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity
- not_a_bot_4sho 5mo agoStrictly from a linguistic perspective: what a terrible and dumb term ('magic') to try and introduce into physics. How does gravity work? Magic!
- Terr_ 5mo ago> a measure of quantumness known as “magic.” This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line... > They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task. When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces... Made Easy!" [0][1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTjPx4NIiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTjPx4NIiM [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpInOI4o2LY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpInOI4o2LY
- soco 5mo ago> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line... Your worries are a bit late, there's already a huge amount of new age conspiracy bull about quantum healing with wave function collapse, microtubule alignment and biophotons - quality all-you-can-eat word salad buffet.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoBlame Roger Penrose for the microtubule bullshit. Ironically, he's the opposite of new age, dude won a Nobel prize.
- an0malous 5mo agoMaybe, just maybe, an eminent physicist who won the Nobel Prize knows more than us. At the very least his ideas deserve consideration instead of ridicule and dismissal. Also as far as I know, Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason and resort to name calling, you’re not being rational you’re just being dogmatic and censoring ideas.
- bawolff 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
- an0malous 5mo agoAgain, if you disagree with Penrose’s idea, just explain your disagreement. It’s so ironic how you’ll call it bullshit and link to some pop culture skeptic idea with no scientific backing to try and undermine an idea in defense of “real science” > Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. https://paulgraham.com/say.html https://paulgraham.com/say.html
- bawolff 5mo agoI'm disagreeing with the notion that someone "who won the Nobel Prize knows more than us". History suggests otherwise. Surely you must appreciate the irony when your primary argument is an appeal to authority, while on the other hand you dismiss everyone who is unconvinced as "dogmatic". As for Penrose's specific ideas, i'm not familiar enough with them or the field to make an informed judgement. Hence i would defer to other experts in that field, who as far as i understand are unconvinced. However, the fact he previously won a nobel does not lead me to give him any more credence than i would anyone else. If anything its a negative signal. That said, if i was going to bite: > Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason The onus is on Penrose to show consciousness is non-computational. Preferably with some sort of experiment (or are we in the realm of pure philosophy here? Arguing how many angels are dancing on the pin). Science is about creating hypotheses and testing them. Admiteddly im not super well-read on this topic, but i don't think this theory has yielded testable predictions not explainable by other theories that have been verified.
- rockskon 5mo agoDon't underestimate the capacity for the problem to get significantly worse.
- echelon 5mo agoIs any of this experimentally testable in the real world? Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe? Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?
- stogot 5mo agoThese wild ideas eventually arrive in textbooks as if they were tested, proven with none of the nuance or contradictory evidence
- boutell 5mo agoDo they though? Are physics textbooks putting forward some version of string theory from the 1990s as proven fact?
- api 5mo agoAs far as I know it’s the latter and that’s a big problem for physics. A lot of stuff like string theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. require energies that would take a particle accelerator the diameter of the solar system or something nuts like that. Without tests it’s just pretty math that can be coaxed into agreeing with reality but that proves nothing. Physicists try to indirectly test all the time via cosmological observations but that is extremely hard and limited to what you can infer and how well you can eliminate other explanations or sources of error.
- boutell 5mo agoI believe there was a science fiction story all the way back in the early '80s describing a scenario where physics gets reclassified as a soft science or an art form because it is no longer feasible to prove anything.
- MeteorMarc 5mo agoSee the end of the article, after further research quantum gravity could be simulated on a quantum computer. The links between research on quantum computing and quantum gravity are fascinating anyway!
- SoftTalker 5mo agoI had assumed it was a play on the saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" but I didn't see that in the article.
- wasabi991011 5mo ago> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line... You're a little late here, "magic" is already a fairly well known term in quantum computing literature. There's "magic states" and protocols for "magic state distillation" and "magic state injection", there's "shallow magic depth circuits", etc.
- m-s-y 5mo ago> "magic" is already a fairly well known term in quantum computing literature which is fine, but the point is still valid. who looked at the state of science education in today's world and though that "magic" was a word that belonged anywhere near legitimate discourse? and more importantly WHY?
- plastic-enjoyer 5mo agoit's a cool word
- from_memory 5mo agoIt is a cool word. So are 'charm' and 'strange' for quarks. I don't see what the big deal is. People can differentiate between two meanings for the same word. Are pseudo-science inclined folks going to spin it some crazy way? Yeah, probably, but that happens pretty much anyway.
- taeric 5mo agoTo be fair, it isn't that different from why we have imaginary numbers. Or why the reals are calls reals. Which. Yeah, has been a pretty bad thing for people in understanding those. :(
- tim-projects 5mo agoI guess we can no longer use this phrase: "The best kind of science is magic, and the best kind of magic is science."
- msla 5mo ago> "The best kind of science is magic, and the best kind of magic is science." Who has ever used that phrase?
- sigmoid10 5mo ago>In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots ...ah yes holography again. Not to say that all these insights from it are completely worthless, but unless we actually find a holographic dual of our universe instead of AdS spaces (which are the opposite of our universe if anything), this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
- dwroberts 5mo ago> this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas. So sick of seeing phrases like this. Science is not business. It is not about producing results that you personally think are important. It is understanding the nature of the universe for the sake of it.
- echelon 5mo agoThere's a lot of ire for string theory. It's non-testable and wound up attracting lots of minds, funding, and resources. It hasn't seemingly led to any tangible results. Many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.
- tsimionescu 5mo agoScience and math are not the same thing, though. The concern is that physics, a science, has been sliding too much into math research - specifically talking about the foundations of particle physics. That is, the concern is that instead of studying the real world, theoretical physicists are spending more and more time studying mathematical constructs and their properties.
- zchrykng 5mo agoPlease enlighten us how purely theoretical mathematical constructs, that are impossible to test, help us understand anything about our universe.
- Erem 5mo ago
- tetrisgm 5mo agoI gotta say every aspect of this headline reads like bullshit. Unfortunately
- yxhuvud 5mo agoNot just the headline. Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?
- scotty79 5mo ago> Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously? Obviously. Because the fact that they use this word for something modernly scientific means that its meaning is as far from the commonfolk meaning of the word as possible. Magic doesn't mean anything sensible yet. So it's basically free real estate for something physical, especially something very foundational.
- wasabi991011 5mo agoWould you prefer "non-Cliffordness"? Does using words that are more of a mouthful make scientist more credible?
- izucken 5mo agoAbsolutely. "non-Cliffordness" by consturction already implies "Cliffordness", which by construction implies "Clifford" and then connects other related things. Magic doesn't do that exactly, but instead slips unnecessary connections. Clifford as a name relates to a matematician who was probably dead by the time anyway. It is considerably more neutral as a name and "free" of unrelated context. I am not knowledgeable about it, but I also wouldn't be suprised if Clifford works are also related to mathematical facilities in quantum theories where the name is invoked. When trying to understand the reality and then convey that understanding, "mouthfulness" seems like not a concern at all.
- jfengel 5mo agoQuanta usually has fairly good articles, but the headlines are often very bad.
- lioeters 5mo agoCharm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical. > The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness. Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend. At some point these physicists crossed over into a very specialized form of poetry, a game of language.
- dabiged 5mo agoDon't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation. Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
- yubblegum 5mo agoYou mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...
- amelius 5mo agoMaybe it is easier to get funding with catchy and/or mysterious names?
- wvbdmp 5mo agoMaybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. The potential confusion around Magic seems much greater, although when you consider the vastly more common opposite effect, where specific scientific terms become popular and quickly gain wholly different colloquial meanings, perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…
- hirako2000 5mo agoIn absolute, those are irrevocably pliable scientific facts.
- apothegm 5mo agoThat is an incredibly unfortunate term to use for the phenomenon.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- seanhunter 5mo agoI agree, although there is a long tradition of terrible naming in the sciences. One of the most boring and yet egregious examples imo is "Random Variable". So named because - they aren't random and - they aren't variables.[1] A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers. But you can see why the name "random variable" is confusing to people. [1] https://cyril9227.github.io/random-variables/ https://cyril9227.github.io/random-variables/ and elsewhere.
- IsTom 5mo ago> A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers. I don't think that this was the formalization that was used when the term was coined, given how late set and measure theory were formalized.
- ikrenji 5mo ago"your child has cancer because of a mutation in his sonic hedgehog gene"
- Aboutplants 5mo agoMathematicians shouldn’t be allowed to name anything, it’s beyond ridiculous
- krapp 5mo agoThat's exactly why mathematicians should name things.
- tempaccountabcd 5mo ago[dead]
- waltbosz 5mo agoI've always considered magnets to be the closest thing we have in real life to magic.
- greenbit 5mo agoCalling something 'magic' is like an admission that you have no clue about what is going on. Seems to me, they do have some clue, namely that instead of codes with perfect isolation, there might be some advantage to studying ones that allow some blending. The resulting spaces may (or may not) lead to a better description of reality, but doing science means to peel back that mystery. So to go and promote this under the term 'magic' is disingenuous.
- jfengel 5mo agoIt sounds as if it's in the same vein that gave us "strange" and "charm" and "color" (in the strong force sense). There was a whimsical time in particle naming. I'd say it ended when they rejected "truth" and "beauty" in favor of "top" and "bottom". We can do better than "magic".
- wasabi991011 5mo agoThey are not "promoting" the term magic. It is a well-known and commonly used term in quantum computing research. It is also pretty well understood as a concept (mathematically), even if it's not always easy to recognize in nature or easy to know when it needs to be used in algorithms.
- phs318u 5mo agoSo, when it comes to the quantum physics of dark matter, would this property be dark magic? I’m so sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
- greenbit 5mo agoGreek 'anameixi' loosely means a mixture or a blending. The special states could be called 'anameixic', the property could be called 'anameixicity'. Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.
- wasabi991011 5mo agoAre you suggesting "anameixi" to replace "magic"? But magic is related to non-Cliffordness, not mixing. Also, the term "magic" is pretty well used in quantum computing, it really doesn't need to be popularized. The concept is quite important already and would be talked about regardless of its name.
- jacknews 5mo agoIMHO, as an analogy, matter is not 'a bowling-ball on a mattress', but more like a scrunched-up section of table-cloth. Tiny knots or whirlpools of space-time/quantum fields, different particles are different topologies of knot, albeit the nature of space-time is unclear and it may well be a projection.
- terminalbraid 5mo agoAn ant traveling at constant speed on a "scrunched up section of a table cloth" will still take the same amount of time following the same path to get from A to B. Any material analogy requires some kind of stretching or compression.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago>"magic" Please no.
- nilkn 5mo ago"Einstein cast gravity not as a force but as the geometric bending of space and time. In a popular analogy, the fabric of space-time is like the flat expanse of a mattress, and a massive object like a star is like a bowling ball sitting on top. The weight of the bowling ball compresses the mattress, forming a dimple — matter tells space-time how to curve. In this analogy, a planet is like a smaller ball. If it rolls close enough to the bowling ball, its path will be altered by the dimple in the mattress — space-time tells matter how to move." This analogy is wrong in a way that even people who've studied physics often don't realize. On an everyday scale like the Earth orbiting the Sun, almost none of that gravitational interaction is from the bending of space. Far beyond 99% (actually, about 99.999999%) of it is from the bending of time.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoCould you be more specific? How does bending time cause the Earth to orbit the Sun?
- stuff4ben 5mo agoAnd also, how does one bend time?
- nilkn 5mo agoIt means clocks tick at different rates depending on where they are. Imagine spacetime as a field of local clocks. Far from the Sun, clocks tick faster. Near the Sun, clocks tick slower. A freely moving object tries to follow the straightest possible path through spacetime. But because the “time axis” changes from place to place, what counts as “straight ahead into the future” tilts slightly inward near the Sun. So the Earth’s path through spacetime curves toward the Sun. Earth’s spatial speed around the Sun is about 30 km/s. But through spacetime, its “timeward” motion is basically c, 300,000 km/s. So even a tiny tilt in the time direction creates a significant spatial acceleration. That is why the time-warping term dominates for slow massive bodies.
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- zkmon 5mo agoQuanta article are getting longer and longer. AI effect?
- anibal-sanchez 5mo agoThey can choose any word to name a new feature; and they choose "magic"... Next one, it'll be "dark magic".
- chaidhat 5mo agoIf you want to learn more about quantum mechanics starting from 1+1=2 please check out https://quantum.chaidhat.com https://quantum.chaidhat.com !
- adampunk 5mo agoWhole lotta bike shedding going on in this thread.
- pezezin 5mo agoThis whole thread is embarrassing to be honest. Lots of clueless people on a notoriously difficult field complaining that the experts on such field decided to use this or that word. As the old saying goes, better to stay silent and look like a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
- alfiedotwtf 5mo ago> while these locations can be constricted by these particles Anyone else get Game of Life vibes?
- Noaidi 5mo agoIf particles are "entangled", that means they are not separated. Correct? So why are we still looking at the universe as materialists? Gravity is the force created by a mesh of entanglements. Entanglement is not the "connective tissue". Entanglement is the whole universe. Only our minds disentangle the universe out of necessity. In other words, there are no particles, only waves. A planet is not a chunk of matter, it is a wave. a planet has no real boundary, that is a product of human consciousness.
- mavleop 5mo agoCan anyone else not stand quanta magazine? Everything posted here from there is the most woo-based, mis-represented, science mumbo jumbo. I didnt read the article cause this seems like a prime example of that so someone can correct me if I’m wrong
- wayeq 5mo ago> I didnt read the article cause this seems like a prime example of that so someone can correct me if I’m wrong if only there were some kind of magical universal summarizer you could use..
- mavleop 5mo agoWhy would i summarize an article i don't want to read to produce llm output that i don't want to read
- AmazingEveryDay 5mo agoI got nothing, but recall an old joke... "Magic is real, unless declared int!"
- stevenalowe 5mo agoWell, I read it, but none of it made any sense, so ok gravity is “magic”