5 ms·
Charm, 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-
by lioeters 5mo ago
Charm, 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…
- izucken 5mo agoShould call the next big physics thing doubtscumbagium...
- yubblegum 5mo ago> Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. What is "overextended" imho is an actual understanding of what these phenomena really are. Previously, we had some sense of what we meant by e.g. field or atom or electron, quantum, ... So yea, if we don't know enough about the thing we're naming, we might as well pull random strings out of a hat and in that case "pop, snap, crackle, strange, charm, fifi, doodoo, woof, & meow" (note these latter 4 are my contributions to advancements of human understanding btw /g) are good enough!
- tsimionescu 5mo agoColor charge and the strange and charm quarks are not post-quantum theoretical physics, are they? There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.
- yubblegum 5mo agoThat stuff is after Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. When I mentioned quantum mechanics, these are the physicists I had in mind.
- mfaulk 5mo agoMeanwhile, on HN: "Don't use yarn, use bun it's written in zig!"
- jerf 5mo agoMost of the crazy names come from before "quantum" was co-opted by a lot of BS. I don't blame those physicists for naming things that way because the coopting was inevitable. However, we are now decades into that process, and it is inconceivable that the authors choosing the name "magic" are unaware of it. Which means they are doing it with knowledge beforehand, and they should know this is a bad idea. It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time. And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?
- etiam 5mo agoI can sort of appreciate these shenanigans as short-lived common room humor, but I find it obnoxious to put it in the official terminology. It's bad enough all the corporations trying to steal perfectly active words for their brand names or products.
- mr_mitm 5mo agoGhosts are also a thing in quantum field theory
- setopt 5mo agoAnd slavery, unfortunately. (Slave variables, slave bosons, etc.)
- tuyiown 5mo agowe had "god particle" too …
- setopt 5mo agoTo be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».
- phs318u 5mo agoIs that really where the name came from? I remember being struck by how dumb that was and thought “a journalist must have come up with that”.
- jfengel 5mo agoI've heard that story and it doesn't ring true to me. It's not that aggravating to find. Try measuring a neutrino mass, which is still an open problem and looks as if it will remain so for a very long time.
- themgt 5mo agoYou can just call it second stabilizer Rényi entropy or non-stabilizerness if you find "magic" strange and prose is more your flavor than poetry.
- b3lvedere 5mo agoStrange quarks[1] are not magic. :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark
- lioeters 5mo agoActually "non-stabilizerness" does describe it better than "magic". > In quantum information theory, magic is a property that quantifies the computational resources needed to describe quantum states beyond stabilizer states. > In 2024–2025, quantum magic was detected in top quark pairs produced at the Large Hadron Collider; it is the first observation of this property in fundamental particle collisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(quantum_information) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(quantum_information) And "second stabilizer Rényi entropy" is even better, it's exactly the kind of technical term I'd prefer, that describes what it means. > One measure of quantum magic is the stabilizer Rényi entropy of order α such that.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9nyi_entropy#Stabilizer_R%C3%A9nyi_entropy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9nyi_entropy#Stabilizer_...
- lloeki 5mo agoIs it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)
- lioeters 5mo ago> The thaum is the basic unit of magic. The thaum is made up of so called resons, which are themselves made up of at least five flavours including up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.
- krapp 5mo ago400 billion dollars and a portal to hell later scientists discover evidence of the elusive spearmint.
- Tade0 5mo agoTime crystals, AFAIK, are actually descriptive: they're crystals in the sense that they produce regularities through occupying the lowest energy state - they just do that in time, not just space.
- u1hcw9nx 5mo agoSo is Holographic principle in physics. Describing 3 representing 3 dimensional object in 2 dimensional surface is what holography is.
- jfyi 5mo agoIt's older than that. Atoms have neither orbitals, nor shells. Neither describes a probability field at various energy levels surrounding the nucleus. Analogies aid understanding, even if on an abstract level.
- wmeredith 5mo agoAs all programmers know: naming things (abstracting ideas for human interpretation) is hard.