https://4gravitons.com/2022/12/09/simulated-wormholes-for-my-real-friends-real-wormholes-for-my-simulated-friends/ 4 gravitons The trials and tribulations of four gravitons and a physicist Menu Skip to content * Home * Who Am I? * Handy Handbooks + Careers o How do I get where you are? o You get paid to learn. How bad can it be? o Four Gravitons and a...Postdoc? + Useful Pages o What's so hard about Quantum Field Theory anyway? o Nature Abhors a Constant o A Wild Infinity Appears! Or, Renormalization + N=4 super Yang-Mills Theory o A Theorist's Theory o Yang-Mills: Plays Well With Itself o Supersymmetry, to the Rescue! o N=4: Maximal Particles for Maximal Fun + The (2, 0) Theory o The (2, 0) Theory: Where does it come from? o The (2, 0) Theory: What does it mean? o The (2, 0) Theory: What is it, though? + N=8 supergravity o What's A Graviton? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Quantum Gravity o (Super)gravity: Meet the Gravitino o N=8: That's a Whole Lot of Symmetry * Archives * Contact * Twitter * Tumblr * Poll! [cropped-headerimage1] Simulated Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Simulated Friends 4 Replies Maybe you've recently seen a headline like this: [quantacurrentheadline] Actually, I'm more worried that you saw that headline before it was edited, when it looked like this: [quantapreviousheadline] If you've seen either headline, and haven't read anything else about it, then please at least read this: Physicists have not created an actual wormhole. They have simulated a wormhole on a quantum computer. If you're willing to read more, then read the rest of this post. There's a more subtle story going on here, both about physics and about how we communicate it. And for the experts, hold on, because when I say the wormhole was a simulation I'm not making the same argument everyone else is. The headlines at the top of this post come from an article in Quanta Magazine. Quanta is a web-based magazine covering many fields of science. They're read by the general public, but they aim for a higher standard than many science journalists, with stricter fact-checking and a goal of covering more challenging and obscure topics. Scientists in turn have tended to be quite happy with them: often, they cover things we feel are important but that the ordinary media isn't able to cover. (I even wrote something for them recently .) Last week, Quanta published an article about an experiment with Google's Sycamore quantum computer. By arranging the quantum bits (qubits) in a particular way, they were able to observe behaviors one would expect out of a wormhole, a kind of tunnel linking different points in space and time. They published it with the second headline above, claiming that physicists had created a wormhole with a quantum computer and explaining how, using a theoretical picture called holography. This pissed off a lot of physicists. After push-back, Quanta's twitter account published this statement, and they added the word "Holographic" to the title. Why were physicists pissed off? It wasn't because the Quanta article was wrong, per se. As far as I'm aware, all the technical claims they made are correct. Instead, it was about two things. One was the title, and the implication that physicists "really made a wormhole". The other was the tone, the excited "breaking news" framing complete with a video comparing the experiment with the discovery of the Higgs boson. I'll discuss each in turn: The Title Did physicists really create a wormhole, or did they simulate one? And why would that be at all confusing? The story rests on a concept from the study of quantum gravity, called holography. Holography is the idea that in quantum gravity, certain gravitational systems like black holes are fully determined by what happens on a "boundary" of the system, like the event horizon of a black hole. It's supposed to be a hologram in analogy to 3d images encoded in 2d surfaces, rather than like the hard-light constructions of science fiction. The best-studied version of holography is something called AdS/CFT duality. AdS/CFT duality is a relationship between two different theories. One of them is a CFT, or "conformal field theory", a type of particle physics theory with no gravity and no mass. (The first example of the duality used my favorite toy theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills.) The other one is a version of string theory in an AdS, or anti-de Sitter space, a version of space-time curved so that objects shrink as they move outward, approaching a boundary. (In the first example, this space-time had five dimensions curled up in a sphere and the rest in the anti-de Sitter shape.) These two theories are conjectured to be "dual". That means that, for anything that happens in one theory, you can give an alternate description using the other theory. We say the two theories "capture the same physics", even though they appear very different: they have different numbers of dimensions of space, and only one has gravity in it. Many physicists would claim that if two theories are dual, then they are both "equally real". Even if one description is more familiar to us, both descriptions are equally valid. Many philosophers are skeptical, but honestly I think the physicists are right about this one. Philosophers try to figure out which things are real or not real, to make a list of real things and explain everything else as made up of those in some way. I think that whole project is misguided , that it's clarifying how we happen to talk rather than the nature of reality. In my mind, dualities are some of the clearest evidence that this project doesn't make any sense: two descriptions can look very different, but in a quite meaningful sense be totally indistinguishable. That's the sense in which Quanta and Google and the string theorists they're collaborating with claim that physicists have created a wormhole. They haven't created a wormhole in our own space-time, one that, were it bigger and more stable, we could travel through. It isn't progress towards some future where we actually travel the galaxy with wormholes. Rather, they created some quantum system, and that system's dual description is a wormhole. That's a crucial point to remember: even if they created a wormhole, it isn't a wormhole for you. If that were the end of the story, this post would still be full of warnings, but the title would be a bit different. It was going to be "Dual Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Dual Friends". But there's a list of caveats. Most of them arguably don't matter, but the last was what got me to change the word "dual" to "simulated". 1. The real world is not described by N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. N =4 super Yang-Mills theory was never intended to describe the real world. And while the real world may well be described by string theory, those strings are not curled up around a five-dimensional sphere with the remaining dimensions in anti-de Sitter space. We can't create either theory in a lab either. 2. The Standard Model probably has a quantum gravity dual too, see this cute post by Matt Strassler. But they still wouldn't have been able to use that to make a holographic wormhole in a lab. 3. Instead, they used a version of AdS/CFT with fewer dimensions. It relates a weird form of gravity in one space and one time dimension (called JT gravity), to a weird quantum mechanics theory called SYK, with an infinite number of quantum particles or qubits. This duality is a bit more conjectural than the original one, but still reasonably well-established. 4. Quantum computers don't have an infinite number of qubits, so they had to use a version with a finite number: seven, to be specific. They trimmed the model down so that it would still show the wormhole-dual behavior they wanted. At this point, you might say that they're definitely just simulating the SYK theory, using a small number of qubits to simulate the infinite number. But I think they could argue that this system, too, has a quantum gravity dual. The dual would have to be even weirder than JT gravity, and even more conjectural, but the signs of wormhole-like behavior they observed (mostly through simulations on an ordinary computer, which is still better at this kind of thing than a quantum computer) could be seen as evidence that this limited theory has its own gravity partner, with its own "real dual" wormhole. 5. But those seven qubits don't just have the interactions they were programmed to have, the ones with the dual. They are physical objects in the real world, so they interact with all of the forces of the real world. That includes, though very weakly, the force of gravity. And that's where I think things break, and you have to call the experiment a simulation. You can argue, if you really want to, that the seven-qubit SYK theory has its own gravity dual, with its own wormhole. There are people who expect duality to be broad enough to include things like that. But you can't argue that the seven-qubit SYK theory, plus gravity, has its own gravity dual. Theories that already have gravity are not supposed to have gravity duals. If you pushed hard enough on any of the string theorists on that team, I'm pretty sure they'd admit that. That is what decisively makes the experiment a simulation. It approximately behaves like a system with a dual wormhole, because you can approximately ignore gravity. But if you're making some kind of philosophical claim, that you "really made a wormhole", then "approximately" doesn't cut it: if you don't exactly have a system with a dual, then you don't "really" have a dual wormhole: you've just simulated one. If it weren't for that caveat, then I would be happy to say that the physicists really created a wormhole. It would annoy some philosophers, but that's a bonus. But even if that were true, I wouldn't say that in the title of the article. The Title, Again These days, people get news in two main ways. Sometimes, people read full news articles. Reading that Quanta article is a good way to understand the background of the experiment, what was done and why people care about it. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think anything said there was wrong, and they cover essentially all of the caveats you'd care about (except for that last one ). Sometimes, though, people just see headlines. They get forwarded on social media, observed at a glance passed between friends. If you're popular enough, then many more people will see your headline than will actually read the article. For many people, their whole understanding of certain scientific fields is formed by these glancing impressions. Because of that, if you're popular and news-y enough, you have to be especially careful with what you put in your headlines, especially when it implies a cool science fiction story. People will almost inevitably see them out of context, and it will impact their view of where science is headed. In this case, the headline may have given many people the impression that we're actually making progress towards travel via wormholes. Some of my readers might think this is ridiculous, that no-one would believe something like that. But as a kid, I did. I remember reading popular articles about wormholes, describing how you'd need energy moving in a circle, and other articles about optical physicists finding ways to bend light and make it stand still. Putting two and two together, I assumed these ideas would one day merge, allowing us to travel to distant galaxies faster than light. If I had seen Quanta's headline at that age, I would have taken it as confirmation. I would have believed we were well on the way to making wormholes, step by step. Even the New York Times headline, "the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine", wouldn't have fazed me. (I'm not sure even the extra word "holographic" would have. People don't know what "holographic" means in this context, and while some of them would assume it meant "fake", others would think about the many works of science fiction, like Star Trek, where holograms can interact physically with human beings.) Quanta has a high-brow audience, many of whom wouldn't make this mistake. Nevertheless, I think Quanta is popular enough, and respectable enough, that they should have done better here. At minimum, they could have used the word "simulated". Even if they go on to argue in the article that the wormhole is real, and not just a simulation, the word in the title does no real harm. It would be a lie, but a beneficial "lie to children", the basic stock-in-trade of science communication. I think they could have defended it to the string theorists they interviewed on those grounds. The Tone Honestly, I don't think people would have been nearly so pissed off were it not for the tone of the article. There are a lot of physics bloggers who view themselves as serious-minded people, opposed to hype and publicity stunts. They view the research program aimed at simulating quantum gravity on a quantum computer as just an attempt to link a dying and un-rigorous research topic to an over-hyped and over-funded one, pompous storytelling aimed at promoting the careers of people who are already extremely successful. These people tend to view Quanta favorably, because it covers serious-minded topics in a thorough way. And so many of them likely felt betrayed, seeing this Quanta article as a massive failure of that serious-minded-ness, falling for or even endorsing the hypiest of hype. To those people, I'd like to politely suggest you get over yourselves. Quanta's goal is to cover things accurately, to represent all the facts in a way people can understand. But "how exciting something is" is not a fact. Excitement is subjective. Just because most of the things Quanta finds exciting you also find exciting, does not mean that Quanta will find the things you find unexciting unexciting. Quanta is not on "your side" in some war against your personal notion of unexciting science, and you should never have expected it to be. In fact, Quanta tends to find things exciting, in general. They were more excited than I was about the amplituhedron, and I'm an amplitudeologist. Part of what makes them consistently excited about the serious-minded things you appreciate them for is that they listen to scientists and get excited about the things they're excited about. That is going to include, inevitably, things those scientists are excited about for what you think are dumb groupthinky hype reasons. I think the way Quanta titled the piece was unfortunate, and probably did real damage. I think the philosophical claim behind the title is wrong, though for subtle and weird enough reasons that I don't really fault anybody for ignoring them. But I don't think the tone they took was a failure of journalistic integrity or research or anything like that. It was a matter of taste. It's not my taste, it's probably not yours, but we shouldn't have expected Quanta to share our tastes in absolutely everything. That's just not how taste works. Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Reddit * Tumblr * Like this: Like Loading... Related This entry was posted in Science Communication and tagged academia, black hole, gravity, press, PublicPerception, quantum computing, quantum gravity, quantum mechanics, science communication, string theory, theoretical physics on December 9, 2022 by 4gravitons. Post navigation - This Week at Quanta Magazine 4 thoughts on "Simulated Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Simulated Friends" 1. Pingback: Publicity Stunt Fallout | Not Even Wrong 2. [4a621]karlshak December 9, 2022 at 5:51 pm " They view the research program aimed at simulating quantum gravity on a quantum computer as just an attempt to link a dying and un-rigorous research topic to an over-hyped and over-funded one, pompous storytelling aimed at promoting the careers of people who are already extremely successful." I shouldn't assume that this "They" refers to anyone in particular now should I... ? :-). But I agree that the anti-hype seems at least as overblown as the hype (maybe there's a hype conjugation symmetry at play ?) LikeLike Reply | 3. [df7c2]JKMSMKJ December 9, 2022 at 10:45 pm Enjoyed the tone section of your analysis. It is quite a hard life lesson to not feel personally hurt when someone/something stops agreeing with one's personal views/opinions even momentarily! LikeLike Reply | 4. [3af09]Dimitris Papadimitriou December 10, 2022 at 9:27 am People are excited ( or annoyed) by different things, that's for sure, and that's true for almost any human activity ( arts, music, sports ...) not only our subject. But the point here is that a serious science magazine adopts a blatantly populist approach that realizes once again the very old strategy that says: " Say whatever you want, no matter how outrageous or even ridiculous, and you can be certain that you'll find a big audience for that". This advertising tactic is not new; it has been practiced many times in various cases in the past with sometimes seriously damaging results. See, for example, the comments section of that already infamous video, the enthusiastic reaction of the vast majority of viewers. Sooner or later, they will find out that no actual spacetime wormhole was "created". Their previous enthusiasm will be inverted to something else: Scoff, mistrust, rejection of science news as "fake" all over the place... How much nonsense can be be accepted by "the public" without consequences? LikeLike Reply | Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here... [ ] Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: * * * * Gravatar Email (required) (Address never made public) [ ] Name (required) [ ] Website [ ] WordPress.com Logo You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change ) Twitter picture You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change ) Facebook photo You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change ) Cancel Connecting to %s [ ] Notify me of new comments via email. [ ] Notify me of new posts via email. [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] [d594ef5a8262c1cf6bceeecc7b366b98] I am a theoretical physicist at the Niels Bohr International Academy at the University of Copenhagen, with an interest in explaining physics (and physicists) to a general audience. I study scattering amplitudes in N=4 super Yang-Mills, but I'm also interested in N=8 supergravity, and I'd love to find out whether the four-graviton amplitude diverges. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address: [ ] Follow Top Posts & Pages * Simulated Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Simulated Friends * Who Am I? * The Metaphysics of Card Games * How do I get where you are? * The Way You Think Everything Is Connected Isn't the Way Everything Is Connected Categories Categories[Select Category ] Blogroll * Of Particular Significance * The Reference Frame * Not Even Wrong * Backreaction * Preposterous Universe * Quantum Frontiers * Shtetl-Optimized * scattering-amplitudes.com Tag Cloud * academia * amplitudes * astronomy * astrophysics * black hole * cosmology * DoingScience * grad school * gravity * Higgs * LHC * LIGO * mathematics * particle physics * philosophy of science * physics * press * PublicPerception * quantum field theory * quantum gravity * quantum mechanics * relativity * science communication * string theory * theoretical physics Blog at WordPress.com. * Follow Following + [wpcom-] 4 gravitons Join 576 other followers [ ] Sign me up + Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now. * + [wpcom-] 4 gravitons + Customize + Follow Following + Sign up + Log in + Copy shortlink + Report this content + View post in Reader + Manage subscriptions + Collapse this bar Loading Comments... Write a Comment... [ ] Email (Required) [ ] Name (Required) [ ] Website [ ] [Post Comment] %d bloggers like this: [b]